RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/critical-race-theory-is-dangerous-heres-how-to-fight-it

Don’t just use the same censorship tools its proponents do. Fight back with the law.

A new orthodoxy has taken over our educational institutions with frightening speed. People who likely never heard the phrase “critical race theory” (CRT) before this summer are now getting emails from their children’s schools about “Decentering Whiteness at Home.” They are discovering that their children’s elementary-school teacher has read them “a book about whiteness” that teaches them how much “color matters” and encourages them to confront “the painful truth” about their “own family” — i.e., that they are being raised by racists. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This is a dangerous and divisive ideology, one that assigns moral value to people on the basis of their skin color. It is inconceivable that anyone could look back at human history and not see that singling out a particular racial or ethnic group as the cause of all societal problems can quickly lead us to a very bad place.

It is understandable, therefore, that the ascendancy of CRT in our educational institutions is deeply frightening to so many people. People feel like their children are being indoctrinated. In many cases, they are right. This ideology is not simply being presented as one way of looking at the world. It is being taught as the Truth with a capital ‘T,’ and you will be cast into outer darkness or punished for questioning it. Just ask David Flynn, the father of two children in the Dedham, Mass., public schools who was fired from his position as head football coach there after raising concerns about changes to his seventh-grade daughter’s history curriculum. (Flynn is now suing the school district.)

https://www.city-journal.org/american-campus-as-a-factory

Universities were already in big trouble when 2020 rolled around. The combination of skyrocketing tuition (up more than double the rate of inflation since 1980) and an increasingly inferior education had made college a hard sell for many American families, and demographic trends looked likely to put further pressure on declining enrollments. But that was all B.C.—Before Covid-19, which is shaping up to be a potentially lethal event for the American academy.

When the virus emptied campuses in mid-March of 2020, schools had to refund payments for spring room and board and forgo income from sports, while still paying coaches. Small colleges lost millions in revenues, and big universities lost hundreds of millions. Professors scrambled to adapt to an online medium that was unsuited to teaching and learning across a range of disciplines, from performance arts to laboratory science. Students found themselves back in their parents’ homes, staring at classes on Zoom, from which, they quickly discovered, it was easy to hide (just turn off the video). Administrators who had sold their universities more as “high-touch” summer camps with “wraparound student services” than as academically rigorous institutions suddenly realized that the market for their product had all but disappeared. According to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, nationwide freshman enrollment is down a whopping 16.1 percent this academic year, while overall undergraduate enrollment is down 4 percent. Industry-wide program eliminations, layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts are well under way.

What will college education look like A.D.—Après le Déluge? University administrators are generally not inclined to let a crisis go to waste, and the coronavirus is no exception. Since April 2019, I’ve been writing and speaking about the academic destruction of the University of Tulsa, where I taught from 1988 to 2020. It has become clear to me and my colleagues that what is in store for higher education as a whole is visible in microcosm in the sorry fate of our institution. If you cherish liberal education—if you believe that American colleges and universities must aspire to form free citizens, broad-minded individuals capable of independent judgment and action—you may wish to stop reading now. My tale, as Hamlet’s ghost says, will harrow up thy soul.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/so-there-was-a-law-professor-at-georgetown

A law professor at Georgetown Law School, Sandra Sellers, has been fired because she is racist. She revealed her racism in a Zoom conversation with her colleague David Batson who nodded along to what she said. Batson is now on leave.

Racism is everywhere, it’s our job to stamp it out, and Sellers’ racism was smoked out. She’s out. Social justice has been done.

Sandra Sellers is a racist because she said this:

“I hate to say this. I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You know. Get some really good ones but they’re also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.” 

Sellers said this in a rather unfiltered manner. The term “Blacks” is hardly a slur but is unideal, for example. She didn’t know anyone was listening.

However, the idea that what she said was racist, and the idea casually aired among Georgetown’s black law students that she isa racist, illustrates an extremely vague usage.

It’s a common one, also, and bears some examination. We are taught not to do this, to assume that if black people and their “allies” call something racist then it just is. Part of this is the idea that impact trumps intent. It doesn’t matter what you (didn’t) mean – what matters is how it felt to me.

But what are the reasons here for the impact felt? If racism is such a defining factor of our society, might we not at least share a certain clarity on what racism is?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/03/12/georgetown-law-professor-fired-for-saying-black-students-underperform-in-her-class-n1432003

A Georgetown University law professor was fired and another placed on administrative leave when a Zoom conversation between the two went viral.

The private conversation between Professor Sandra Sellers and Professor David Batson came to light and set off a firestorm, with thousands of students signing petitions demanding “action” from the school.

School dean Bill Treanor said he was “appalled” and that the statements made by the two professors were “reprehensible.”So what did Sellers and Batson say that set off this ruckus?

NBCNews:

“I hate to say this — I end up having this, you know, angst every semester — that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks. Happens almost every semester,” Sellers says.

“Mmm hmm,” Batson says and nods.

“And it’s like, oh, come on,” Sellers continues. “Get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/be-less-white-law-school-edition/

The “co-deans” of Case Western Reserve University School of Law recently emailed the student body to exult in the fact that their school ranked 144th out of 200 law schools for “whiteness.” That is, Case Western Law School is “less white” than 143 other law schools in the country. The school proudly notes that “we have the ‘least white’ student body of all of the other law schools in Ohio,” except one.

The whiteness ranking is issued by Vernellia Randall, professor emerita of the University of Dayton School of Law. Professor Randall ranks schools by how much “excess whiteness” they have. She explains in her email to the co-deans (which they included in their email to the student body):

Excess Whiteness is the degree to which a law school is more white than the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) Applicant Pools and state population. Thus, excess whiteness was determined by subtracting the school’s total whiteness from the percent of whites in the various application pool. The results were then summed. Of the 200 law schools in this report, 21 Schools (10%) had no excess whiteness,  153 schools (76.5%) had more whites in their first-year class than was in the National LSAC application pool. One hundred twenty-four schools (62%) had more whites in their first-year class than the state applicant pool.  One hundred nineteen schools (59.5%)  had more whites in their first-year class than was in the regional pool. One hundred and thirty-nine schools (69.5%)  had more whites in their first-year class than was in the state population.

Note that irrelevancies such as GPAs and LSAT scores don’t enter into the analysis. Race is the only salient factor.

Lest there be any doubt that this is just an academic data point, Professor Randall explains:

The Whiter the law school, the less the school is preparing the legal community for serving the United States of America’s diverse racial population.

Apparently, white lawyers can’t adequately represent “diverse” clients. If so, can “diverse” lawyers adequately represent white clients?

Some thought we’d achieved peak academic absurdity when math was declared racist. Not even close.

For those interested in how law schools are failing America by enrolling “excess” white students,  the research is available here.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/race-bottom-language-standards-richard-l-cravatts/

When the prescient George Orwell observed that “There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language” he may not have been anticipating what is taking place with educators who have allowed their obsession with racial justice to influence how they maintain standards in their teaching methods and pedagogy.

Last July, for example, as the country was embroiled in race-motivated riots and social unrest over the death of George Floyd and others, The Conference on College Composition and Communication (an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English) released a set of demands to achieve what they termed “Black Linguistic Justice.” The document had the curious name “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” but the message was clear: that the purported violence against Black people by police on the streets of America reflected the same alleged racist situation in schools. “As language and literacy researchers and educators,” the demand document read, “we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.”

Not content to have a single standard by which the English language is taught, these social justice charlatans demanded, first, that “teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm . . . .” Why is that? Because standard English, something that should be and is color blind, in the minds of these activist educators “reflects White Mainstream English!,” presumably a situation that is untenable. Black students should not have to choose between Black linguistics and standard English usage, they contend, something they refer to as “code-switching,” because “this is linguistically violent to the humanity and spirit of Black Language speakers.” Instead of having all students learn one standard of English usage, these activists wish Black students to think of conforming to standards as something that is inherently racist, and the educators demand that Black students be constantly reminded of their victim status, that “we must teach Black students about anti-Black linguistic racism and white linguistic supremacy!”

The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.

But the situation of late has become too egregious for emails or complaining on conference calls. So one recent weekend, on a leafy street in West Los Angeles, they gathered in person and invited me to join.

In a backyard behind a four-bedroom home, ten people sat in a circle of plastic Adirondack chairs, eating bags of Skinny Pop. These are the rebels: well-off Los Angeles parents who send their children to Harvard-Westlake, the most prestigious private school in the city.

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/failure-city-public-schools-lost-generation-jonathan-turley

Tiffany France is understandably upset. She is a mother of three who works three jobs to support her family.

Her 17-year-old son failed 22 classes in Baltimore and was late or absent 272 days over his first three years of high school. 

As recently reported, France’s son almost graduated near the top half of his class at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts after failing every class but three in four years. He has a 0.13 GPA. She thought her son would be graduating from the school in June.

According to Fox45 News “only one teacher requested a parent conference, which France says never happened.”

France ultimately had to pull her 17-year-old son out of the school and enroll him in an accelerated program to allow him to graduate from high school in 2023.

Her story is tragically all-too-familiar. The coronavirus pandemic led to the closure of an already failing public school system, as evident with France’s children.

We have a lost generation of kids who have neither the education nor the trained skills to succeed in society.

As teachers’ unions fight to keep schools closed, the true cost is being felt by students who are racking up failing grades, dropping out of virtual classes, increasing drug use, and, in rising numbers, committing suicide. 

Watching this happen to the public schools has been particularly hard for some of us who are ardent supporters of public education.