RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/elite-schools-are-the-most-problematic-on-speech/

Northwestern University is in the midst of significant protests and violence surrounding the “NU Community Not Cops” movement, which intends to march every day until the school abolishes its university police. University president Morton Schapiro has condemned the violent student activity, which has disrupted businesses and local neighborhoods, defaced property, and violated laws and university standards. Students have “moved well past legitimate forms of free speech,” Schapiro says, rightly.

This is no isolated incident, however. Disruptions and violent incidents often appear to be more common at elite schools – not just Northwestern but others such as USC, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and Claremont McKenna College, to name a few.

Thanks to the new 2020 College Free Speech Rankings from RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and research firm College Pulse, empirical evidence confirms this suspicion. The rankings are based on the largest study of student attitudes about speech to date, sampling some 20,000 students. It turns out that students enrolled in the country’s most elite schools are appreciably more willing to shut down speech and expression with which they disagree than the overwhelming majority of college students at non-elite schools.

These tendencies appear to have some correlation with general political views. Almost three-quarters (71%) of those students in the most prestigious universities (the top ten schools, based on U.S. News rankings) identify as liberal, with only 15% calling themselves conservative. The numbers look notably different as school ranking levels decline.

At schools ranked between 50 and 99 on the U.S. News scale, 51% of students are liberal, compared to 26% conservative. Conservative students are much harder to find at Harvard, in other words, than at the University of Minnesota. Forcomparison, 28% of Americans in general presently identify as conservative.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/students-call-on-harvard-to-ban-trump-officials-from-speaking-holding-positions-on-campus/

Harvard University students are calling on the university to ban Trump officials from giving talks or holding positions on campus over concern “about the impact of the actions of this administration on fundamental democratic institutions.”

In an open letter circulating online for signatures, students write to President Lawrence Bacow and Harvard University deans and leadership that they are hoping to get ahead of the tradition of “Harvard [becoming] a temporary home for officials from the outgoing administration.”

“We write to you now, in advance of the conclusion of the Trump administration, extremely concerned about the impact of the actions of this administration on fundamental democratic institutions,” the letter reads. “Most notably, in actively undermining faith in the electoral process and in refusing to concede the 2020 election, the Trump administration has trampled norms of free and fair elections and peaceful transfer of power that have defined our republic for over two centuries. These norms are crucial to the global well-being of democratic institutions.”

It continues: “A complete disregard for the truth is a defining feature of many decisions made by this administration. That alone should be enough to draw a line.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/indoctrinating-students-hate-whiteness-richard-l-cravatts/

Since the unfortunate deaths of George Floyd and a number of other black individuals in interaction with law enforcement, campuses across the country have been roiled by paroxysms of self-righteous indignation over race, white police racism and purported attendant brutality, and the alleged existence of endemic racism in society and its major institutions—including, specifically, universities.

In fact, there is so little actual racism on American campuses that race-obsessed grievance activists have had to invent new, previously unseen sources of racism. Thus, suddenly campus buildings named for benefactors from hundreds of years ago are denounced because the donors had owned slaves. Whole campuses are considered illegal and purloined because they supposedly sit on lands previously inhabited by indigenous peoples. Statues of campus notables with a shady past have to be moved, torn down, or shattered. At Princeton, as one notable example, the public mea culpa over the supposed prevalence of racism on its campus by President Christopher L. Eisgruber was so public that it actually resulted in a surprising investigation for possible violations of federal antidiscrimination law (under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) against the university by the Department of Education.

Identifying anti-black racism was the first step in elevating and asserting that racism existed in a systemic, endemic, and institutional way. But was what was also important was to not only elevate blacks by recognizing their longstanding oppression, but then by making whites feel guilty about their so-called white privilege and their intended or unintended roles in continuing racism against blacks.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/orchestrating-hatred-sjps-toxic-campus-campaign-richard-l-cravatts/

In September, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights reached a settlement with New York University for the school’s apparent discrimination against its Jewish students, based on a student’s complaint that “the university discriminated against students of Jewish descent, on the basis of their national origin, by failing to respond appropriately to incidents that created a hostile environment for Jewish students at the university.”

When President Trump signed a 2019 executive order that instructed government agencies to be guided by “the non-legally binding working definition of anti-Semitism adopted on May 6, 2016, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA),” it empowered the Education Department to use Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to withhold funding from any schools that allow discrimination on campuses based on “race, color, or national origin.” And Trump’s executive order expanded the language of Title VI so that Jews, recognized as having a distinct national origin or ethnicity, now enjoy protection as a group.

The IHRA definition, which includes “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews,” is also critical to Title VI enforcement because it includes the notion that denying the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in their historic homeland, Israel—in other words, anti-Zionism—manifests itself as a contemporary form of anti-Semitism. On campuses where anti-Israel activists regularly excoriate the Jewish state, deem it illegal, wish for its destruction, malign its supporters and slander them as Zionists, racists, and perpetrators of an apartheid regime in the name of Zionism, it is obvious that campus anti-Semites have frequently been able to mask their actual anti-Semitism with what they claim is merely “criticism of Israel.” In fact, Adela Cojab Moadeb, the student who filed the NYU complaint, confirmed that “[m]uch of the discrimination we faced, if not all, was propagated by anti-Zionists on campus.”

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a similar Department of Education complaint was just filed on behalf of the school’s Jewish students who have endured “an unrelenting campaign of antisemitic harassment,” a situation caused by the administration’s failure to provide “a discrimination-free academic setting” despite having been put on notice of the “developing hostile environment.”

https://lawliberty.org/one-cheer-for-president-morty-schapiro/

Morton Schapiro, President of Northwestern University, where I work, is getting widespread praise from outside the university for a statement rebuking violent and bullying demonstrators, including students. The demonstrators were calling for an end to the Northwestern University Police. In the process, they vandalized one of the main entrances of the university as well as stores in Evanston, thus ironically showing why police, both in the university and town, are necessary.

Schapiro’s statement was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal. It was held up as a model for other university presidents by arbiters of national discourse like David Brooks. Frederick M. Hess hailed Schapiro in National Review, running his encomium under the title, “Northwestern President Offers a Tutorial in Campus Leadership.”

The statement was indeed for the most part a very sound one. Schapiro called for those who broke the law to be held accountable: “An essential aspect of education is the discernment of actions and consequences. If you, as a member of the Northwestern community, violate rules and laws, I am making it abundantly clear that you will be held accountable.” 

He also called out the tactics of protestors who surrounded his home in the early morning hours calling him “piggy” and shouting expletives at him. While these protestors may not have been violating any laws (although there may be rules against loud noise in residential areas at that hour), they are violating the norms of a university, which contemplate that its denizens will engage in rational discourse, not abuse. This kind of behavior undermines the whole ethos of a university. It is not debate but intimidation. As Schapiro said:

If you haven’t yet gotten my point, I am disgusted by those who chose to disgrace this University in such a fashion. I especially condemn the effect of their actions on our friends, neighbors and other members of our community who are trying to sustain viable businesses, raise families, study and do research, while facing a global pandemic and the injustices of the world without losing their sense of humanity.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/college-board-to-end-partnership-with-chinese-regime-amid-concerns-of-foreign-influence_3565537.html

The College Board, a nonprofit organization that administers AP and SAT exams, said it will end its partnership with a Chinese government agency at the end of the year amid growing concern about the Chinese regime’s influence in the U.S. education system.

The decision follows an Oct. 26 letter from seven Republican senators to College Board CEO David Coleman asking him to explain the group’s financial relationship with Hanban, an office under Beijing’s ministry of education that’s responsible for overseeing Confucius Institutes around the world.

Confucius Institutes have been criticized for spreading Chinese propaganda and suppressing topics critical of the regime under the cover of a language and culture program.

The senators also asked whether the Chinese regime has influenced test development and guest teacher programs in the United States.

In its response, the College Board said it has received an annual grant from Hanban since 2006 to “support the teaching and learning of Chinese language and culture in U.S. schools,” but won’t continue that relationship with Hanban after their agreement expires at the end of this year.

“2020 is the final year in which the College Board will receive or pursue any grant funding from Hanban,” College Board Senior Vice President Elissa Kim wrote on Oct. 30.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-establishes-1776-commission/

This afternoon President Trump signed an “Executive Order Establishing the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.” The order marks an important step in Trump’s efforts to foster patriotic education.

The text is longer and more substantive than typical presidential EOs. It offers sharp criticisms of current educational trends, a definition and explanation of patriotic education, as well as a vision for how to realize it. Following Trump’s remarks at the White House Conference on American History, the president was criticized by some on the left both for favoring a simplistic view of patriotism and for trying to force a curriculum on schools in violation of local control. This EO refutes both criticisms.

Trump’s EO does offer strong criticisms of “polemics grounded in poor scholarship” that vilify “our Founders and our founding.” The president evidently has Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project in mind. “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” the EO continues. The order rakes this approach over the coals for a time, then says, “Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woke-universities-lead-america-to-a-primitive-state-11604359918?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

In this election season it’s almost impossible to find pro-Trump bumper stickers or signs anywhere in my town. The reason is not lack of support but fear of vandalism, or worse: People nationwide have been physically assaulted and even threatened with loss of their livelihoods for no other reason than that they plan to vote as one half of the country does, and political goals are now commonly pursued by violent means. With this our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development—a time when disputes were settled by force instead of rules, and before the First Amendment guaranteed the right to speak freely on the social and political issues of the day.

That’s bad enough in itself, but worse yet is that this social regression began on college campuses, of all places, before spreading to the national culture. On one-party campuses, radical-left faculty have established a political orthodoxy that student mobs enforce, and the political culture of the nation is poisoned as those students take home with them their professors’ habit of seeing opinions that differ from theirs as an evil not to be tolerated.

The left-wing political orthodoxy is also taking the place of traditional civics. Recent graduates know much less about U.S. government than older Americans do. In 2018 the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation gave a sample of Americans a test based on the exam for U.S. citizenship. Only 19% of people under 45 passed, while 74% of those over 65 did, meaning even elderly people who learned the material more than 40 years ago can summon it from memory better than recent grads. Similar studies have found a regression in knowledge of U.S. history. Today’s universities are presiding over a nationwide reversion to civic illiteracy. That’s a disaster for the country, but it suits campus radicals. A well-informed citizenry would hardly wish to be governed by people whose ideological kin have reduced so many countries to economic and political deserts.