RUTHFULLY YOURS

Parental rights are under fire once again, this time at a Sacramento-area charter school. A kindergarten teacher at Rocklin Academy Gateway recently staged a “transition ceremony” for a gender-dysphoric student in her class, introducing him to other students as a boy before he changed into a dress and announced his new, female name.

Students were instructed to use that new name going forward. The teacher also gave a lesson about transgenderism to the entire class, using two books not included in the school’s curriculum — I Am Jazz and Red: A Crayon’s Story, both children’s books meant to affirm the idea that transgender identities should be accepted as reality.

And it didn’t stop there — Fox News reports that a first-grader at Rocklin Academy was subsequently sent to the principal’s office for “misgendering” a different classmate, calling him by his given name because she didn’t know that he now identifies as a girl. According to Karen England of Capitol Resource Institute, the school investigated to determine whether the student had bullied her classmate.

The kindergarten teacher did not notify parents of the lesson and ceremony in advance; they found out only after their children came home and told them. Many of the students reported being “deeply emotionally bothered and traumatized,” according to Jonathan Keller of California Family Council, a group that has been counseling the families about their rights.

In response to backlash from parents, the school principal sent a letter calling the books “age appropriate” and arguing that the school’s non-discrimination policy “protects all students, including on the basis of gender, gender identity, and gender expression.”

But this isn’t a question of whether the books were “age appropriate” or whether the school should “protect” its students. The question is whether parents have the right to reserve discussion of sensitive topics about sexuality with their own children to the time and the manner they believe is best for their children and their family.

This Rocklin Academy teacher blatantly ignored those parental rights, effectively proclaiming that she knows better and that her own judgment takes precedence over that of parents. Even aside from the substance of this issue, schools should never assert their judgment over that of parents or keep parents in the dark about what their children are being taught.

Especially with regard to a topic as complicated as gender dysphoria, schools must remember that parents are the primary educators of their children and, at the very least, have the right to know about class discussions in advance so they can decide to keep their children home if they believe that’s best.

A newsletter distributed at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs says veterans shouldn’t be in college:

The newsletter reads as follows:

“A four-year, traditional university is supposed to be a place of learning, of understanding, of safety and security. However, there is an element among us who may be frustrating those goals: Veterans.

UCCS is known for its number of veterans who are full and part-time students. But these veterans of much of the school prides themselves on may be hurting the university.

First off, many veterans openly mock the ideas of diversity and safe spaces for vulnerable members of society. This is directly in contradiction to the mission of UCCS. Many veterans utter the mantra that they, “do not see color”. But the problem lies in their socialization into the military culture that is that of a white supremacist organization. They have been permanently tainted, and are no long fit for a four-year university.

Second, many students are frightened by the presence of veterans in their classrooms. Veterans usually have an overwhelming presence in the classroom, which can distract other students. This is usually true for vulnerable individual such as LGBTQQI2SAA, who have been known to be the butt of insensitive jokes made by veterans.

Finally, veterans usually are associated with extremists right-wing groups such as the tea party and the NRA. In order to provide a safe place for all students, extremist right-wing groups must be suppressed on campus. This would include their followers: veterans.

That is not to say that veterans should not be allowed an education. Veterans should be allowed to attend trade schools, or maybe even community college. But, in order to protect our academic institutions we must ban veterans from four-year universities.”

Oh, there is so much awful here.

Yes, veterans mock safe spaces. Especially the current batch of veterans who spent time being shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re not sympathetic to the idea that people might need a place to hide for fear of being looked at wrong.

Veterans aren’t mocking diversity in and of itself: after all, the military integrated prior to the rest of the nation, and it’s one of the most diverse bodies in the country. What veterans mock is the idea that diversity matters more than anything else. Something we all learn in the military is that competence matters more than skin color. Everything does. Just treat people as individuals.

We’ve seen fires and riots in recent years, but it’s unlikely that tensions on America’s college campuses have yet reached their peak. As students return to campus for the 2017-2018 academic year, be prepared for more chaos that will crowd out learning.

There will be more canceled lectures, more censorship, more protests, more vandalism, and more violence.

For conservatives disillusioned by the increasingly incomprehensible and toxic brand of leftism rising in academia, it’s dangerous to simply dismiss this behavior as the sad inchoate spasms of immature youth. This is a serious movement grounded in a clear and dangerous philosophy.

The anti-liberal mindset of today’s campus liberals has precipitated the rewriting of our political vernacular, the effects of which have already rippled into newsrooms, corporations, and political offices.

Why are conservative student organizations routinely referred to as “hate groups” and bastions of “white supremacy?” Why, on campuses, is it “racist” to wear sombreros on Cinco de Mayo or host Egypt-themed fraternity parties?

Why, for that matter, did fired Google engineer James Damore’s anodyne memorandum on ideological diversity constitute an act of “violence” against women? Furthermore, why is Google sending weekly emails to employees raising awareness of “microaggressions”?

These are the effects of rampant political correctness, yes. But political correctness is a symptom of the campus Left’s deliberate effort to broaden the definitions of the terms “violence,” “bigotry,” “hate,” “racism,” and “white supremacy,” so as to impugn everyone’s conduct and narrow the bounds of permissible dissent to include only their own way of thinking about anything.

Concepts such as privilege, oppression, and violence have been broadened to implicate everyone belonging to a historically enfranchised group in the systematic subjugation of minorities.

White supremacy, for most Americans, likely conjures images of the Ku Klux Klan marching with torches or skinheads tattooed with swastikas spewing bigotry. When most of us think racism, we think of separate drinking fountains or those harrowing pictures of police dogs attacking our fellow Americans in the streets. We may even think of Philando Castile’s shooting, or of birtherism, or of people who remind us of Archie Bunker.

It’s certainly true that racism and white supremacy rear their ugly heads outside these confines. Well-intentioned people can make hurtful mistakes, sometimes subtly, in their interactions with those who experience discrimination. But lumping in proponents of stricter immigration laws or conservative writers such as Heather Mac Donald with proponents of genocide is objectively ridiculous. And, of course, it also fans the flames of conflict on campuses. Conservative students told that standard center-right views are not only wrong but actually justify violence against them, are even more prone to challenge their censorious peers by embracing any forbidden idea they stumble across, including the ones that are actually bad.

This article contains explicit and potentially offensive terms that are essential to reporting and commenting on the topic.

The white supremacist participating in the “Unite the Right” march who claimed that Charlottesville, Va., is “run by Jewish communists and criminal niggers [1]” clarified that anti-Semitism and racism are the hateful intersectional bedfellows of the so-called alt-right. The events in Charlottesville should make it harder to deny that white Jews as well as people of color, immigrants, Muslims and LGBTQ people are the targets of those who clamor for a white ethno-state. The omnipresence of Nazi symbols, the chants of “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” along with the intimidation and threats leveled against a synagogue in Charlottesville [2], make it clear that anti-Semitism is a real and contemporary danger.

But not all forms of anti-Semitism are as crude and explicit as those on display in Charlottesville earlier this month. Soft forms of anti-Jewish sentiment are steadily becoming part of our culture, even and especially in higher education. And sometimes the most seemingly ordinary academic rituals unwittingly reveal the slow creep of anti-Semitism or, at the very least, an imperviousness to that particular form of hate and ignorance.

For instance, although I’m a literary critic by trade, I don’t generally read catalog changes all that closely. Nor do I usually consider them a canary in the coal mine. But a curriculum discussion that started last year about an Introduction to Judaism course at my Texas liberal arts college, Southwestern University, is beginning to look like a harbinger of a disturbing academic and national trend: the disappearing Jew.

Catalog changes are usually pro forma. By the time they reach the faculty at large, all invested parties have been consulted, and we simply approve the list of changes at a spring faculty meeting. Although I regularly teach Jewish literature and film courses, I had no idea that Introduction to Judaism was on the chopping block until an email that listed catalog changes showed up in my inbox.

University rules about the catalog, budget cuts and personnel changes were all offered as reasons for this curricular change once I started a public discussion about it. Ultimately, the elimination of this course ended up being deferred.

Except, apparently, it wasn’t. Through what has been framed as a bureaucratic mishap, the faculty decision not to delete the course was not officially communicated to the records office, and the course was deleted from the catalog. When the issue came up for discussion again this year with the curriculum committee, the religion department affirmed its unanimous decision to get rid of the course. Since the course had already been mistakenly deleted from the catalog, it wasn’t considered a catalog change, so it wasn’t reported to the faculty at large.

So now the following introductory religion courses are regularly offered at my national liberal arts university: Introduction to Christianity, Introduction to Islam, Introduction to Hinduism, Introduction to Buddhism and Introduction to Native American Traditions. I celebrate the religious diversity of such course offerings, but it eludes me that Introduction to Judaism no longer has a place at this multifaith table. Academically, it simply doesn’t make sense. As one alumna put it, “How do you study Abrahamic traditions without Judaism?” Another affirmed that her study of Judaism was essential to her understanding of Christianity and Islam. Teaching Christianity and Islam without Judaism in the mix is curricular supersessionism. Although I’m not surprised that replacement theology is advocated by hate groups such as Vanguard America [3], it’s chilling to discover that progressive academics are, perhaps unintentionally, developing their own brand of replacing Jews.

When this curricular saga first started, it seemed like a local story. My inquiries to the American Academy of Religion and the Association of Jewish Studies confirmed that the disappearance of Intro to Judaism courses was not a thing. However, I now think that the disappearance of Introduction to Judaism on my campus is mirrored by extracurricular activities on college campuses across the country as well as by events in the public square. And it is precisely that mirroring that makes this curricular change so troubling.

This morning the New York Times published an extraordinary, data-rich article examining the outcome of diversity efforts at colleges and universities from coast to coast. The results, quite frankly, are sobering.

After decades of affirmative action, billions of dollars invested in finding, mentoring, and recruiting minority students, and extraordinary levels of effort and experimentation, black and Hispanic students are “more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago” (emphasis added). White and Asian students, on the other hand, remain overrepresented as a percentage of the population, with Asian students most overrepresented of all.

On the one hand, these statistics represent a staggering failure. It’s difficult to overstate the modern campus obsession with diversity. To judge from marketing materials, campus investments, and the explosive growth of diversity bureaucracies, increasing minority representation on campus isn’t just a priority on par with, say, a good math, English, or engineering department, it’s deemed to be an indispensable part of a high-quality college education. That’s the legal rationale that’s used to justify racial discrimination in college admissions — that there is a “compelling state interest” in creating a truly diverse educational experience.

On the other hand, however, one wonders whether failure was inevitable. Not even the most aggressive of affirmative-action programs can find students who don’t exist. And when it comes to college admissions, the problem isn’t a lack of collegiate demand for qualified minority students but rather a serious deficiency in supply. There are simply not enough students who are ready, willing, and able to do the work.

That’s not to say that affirmative action is meaningless or irrelevant. Absent admissions preferences, the number of black and Hispanic students would decrease even further. It does mean, however, that educational disadvantages exist long before the college admissions process, and the college admissions process can’t come close to closing the gap. Here’s the Times:

Affirmative action increases the numbers of black and Hispanic students at many colleges and universities, but experts say that persistent underrepresentation often stems from equity issues that begin earlier.

Elementary and secondary schools with large numbers of black and Hispanic students are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, high-quality instructional materials and adequate facilities, according to the United States Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

Wait just a moment. There’s little doubt that these factors matter, but isn’t there a word missing from the Times’ summary of disadvantages? Isn’t it, quite possibly, the most important word? Yes, I’m thinking of “family.”

THANKS DPS!

Last week, Chancellor Carol Christ shared a back-to-school message outlining her goals for the campus. Today, she also sent a message to the campus community articulating her thoughts and Berkeley’s approach this academic year to free speech:
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Dear students, faculty and staff,

This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear: Public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.

But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint — that we’re required to allow it — but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it.

Berkeley, as you know, is the home of the Free Speech Movement, where students on the right and students on the left united to fight for the right to advocate political views on campus. Particularly now, it is critical that the Berkeley community come together once again to protect this right. It is who we are.

Nonetheless, defending the right of free speech for those whose ideas we find offensive is not easy. It often conflicts with the values we hold as a community — tolerance, inclusion, reason and diversity. Some constitutionally protected speech attacks the very identity of particular groups of individuals in ways that are deeply hurtful. However, the right response is not the heckler’s veto, or what some call platform denial. Call toxic speech out for what it is, don’t shout it down, for in shouting it down, you collude in the narrative that universities are not open to all speech. Respond to hate speech with more speech.

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space. These are not easy tasks, and we will offer support services for those who desire them.

This September, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos have both been invited by student groups to speak at Berkeley. The university has the responsibility to provide safety and security for its community and guests, and we will invest the necessary resources to achieve that goal. If you choose to protest, do so peacefully. That is your right, and we will defend it with vigor. We will not tolerate violence, and we will hold anyone accountable who engages in it.

We will have many opportunities this year to come together as a Berkeley community over the issue of free speech; it will be a free speech year. We have already planned a student panel, a faculty panel and several book talks. Bridge USA and the Center for New Media will hold a day-long conference on Oct. 5; PEN, the international writers’ organization, will hold a free speech convening in Berkeley on Oct. 23. We are planning a series in which people with sharply divergent points of view will meet for a moderated discussion. Free speech is our legacy, and we have the power once more to shape this narrative.

Sincerely,

Carol Christ
Chancellor

I grew up in Harlem in the 1960s and early ’70s. My brother and I attended a failing school where we were the only white students. My parents, both professors, supplemented our education at home, but we understood that our classmates were wholly dependent on the inadequate education the school offered. Even at that young age I perceived this as a terrible injustice.

Thirty years later, when I was again living in Harlem and ready to send my own son to school, those same schools were still abysmally low-performing. In 2006, when I opened my first charter school in Harlem, the district schools were still failing.

Today, there is a different story to tell about Harlem, and it is thanks to a school-choice movement that has given rise to dozens of high-performing charter schools. Today, almost half of the students in Central Harlem attend a charter school; in East Harlem, a quarter do.

The results of the 2017 New York state tests were released Tuesday, and my staff has been busy crunching the numbers. They demonstrate how transformative this development has been for Harlem residents. In Central Harlem, for example, the number of students meeting rigorous, Common Core math standards has more than doubled since 2013—from 1,690 to 3,703. Students attending charter schools account for 96% of that growth. Results for English language arts are similarly inspiring.

The highest performing charter schools, like Success Academy, have actually reversed the achievement gap. Black and Hispanic students from Central Harlem’s seven Success Academy schools outperform white students across the city by 33 points in math and 21 points in reading; low-income students outperform the city’s affluent students by 38 and 24 points in math and reading respectively.

Recently, the NAACP called for a moratorium on charter schools, claiming they created a system that was “separate and unequal.” Lily Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, made a similar argument at a summer gathering of her members. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten went so far as to say school-choice and charters were the “polite cousins” to Jim Crow segregation.

Given the incredible academic progress evident among Harlem’s charter-school students—and among low-income children of color attending charter schools across the country—these accusations are breathtakingly cynical, designed to protect a union-dominated system that has failed urban communities for decades.

To justify their arguments, Ms. Weingarten and others propagate the myth that charter-school successes have come at the expense of traditional district schools. But this claim has been disproved again and again. In New York City, for example, a comprehensive study found improved academic performance, safety, and student engagement at district schools with charter schools, particularly high-performing ones, located nearby or in the same building. CONTINUE AT SITE

As it happens, after the war, he became a college president and dealt with racially tinged spontanous outbreaks

With statues of Robert E. Lee being torn down all over, it’s fair to wonder how he would have reacted to today’s mob violence. As it happens, we have some sense of how he might react to spontaneous racially tinged violence because after defeat and reconciliation, he became a college president of what is now Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.

This put him in charge of restless males during their years of peak testosterone, and at a politically charged historical moment, to boot.

While he was a college president, a number of his students were involved in altercations with African-Americans in a nearby town. Once, an African-American shot and nearly killed a student. The students, nearly all veterans, talked of lynching. Lee put a stop to that with a few judicious words. Two other incidents illustrate the point: one of his students, without provocation, grabbed and insulted a civil rights activist. Lee expelled the student. A few others attempted to break up a political gathering of African-Americans. Those involved were also expelled personally by General Lee. When asked what the rules of the college were, he had but one rule: “Be a gentleman.”

We can see from his actions that Lee would not have approved of the violence that occurred in Charlottesville or was seen recently on campuses. But Lee was not a social injustice warrior. Robert E. Lee expected his students to be orderly and courteous in a changing world. He did not tolerate disorder. He also focused his students’ education on those courses that had applications in the practical world – engineering, business, journalism. I think it is fair to speculate that he would have seen no sense in parents spending their life savings on a gender studies degree.

Obviously, we live in different times, but instead of shunning the man, college presidents today would do well to consider his example.

A Clemson University professor took to Facebook recently to voice his contempt for Republicans in a post that called all members of the GOP racists, according to screenshots of his personal page.

“All trump supporters, nay, all Republicans, are racist scum,” Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing Bart Knijnenburg wrote in an Aug. 16 Facebook post, reports Campus Reform, which obtained a screenshot of that sentiment and many others.

The professor also posted on Facebook:

“This society is aggressively structured to make cis white males succeed, at the expense of minorities,” Knijnenburg continued, though he didn’t stop there. In another post, Knijnenburg equates President Donald Trump, Trump voters, the GOP, and Steve Bannon to “Nazis,” the “KKK,” and the “Alt-right,” declaring that they are “all racists.”

Additionally, Knijnenburg explicitly endorses violence in one post, stating, “I admire anyone who stands up against white supremacy. Violent or non-violent. This needs to stop, by any means necessary. #PunchNazis” …

In a shared photo from a page titled, “Crapitalism,” President Trump is quoted as saying, “George Washington was a slave owner… Are we gonna take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?” The meme concludes, “You’re g*dd**n right,” while Knijnenburg captioned the photo, “What I was thinking, too.”

The professor has yet to respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment. Click here to read the whole article.

Racial, gender courses face faculty and financial shortfalls

Cornell University’s ‘identity-based programs’ are struggling to attract enough professors and receive enough funds to continue.

“Identity studies programs like [Feminine, Gender and Sexuality Studies] and ethnic studies programs like Asian-American Studies have battled numerous problems in recent years, leaving them struggling to match the demand of growing enrollments,” reports The Cornell Daily Sun.

Students at Cornell have lobbied the administration to address the problems plaguing “ethnic and identity based programs,” the Sun reports.

The funding and instructorship problem means that “some students are left unable to pursue classes in identity-related programs and the programs themselves cannot expand.”

Enrollments in “Feminine, Gender and Sexuality Studies” courses have nearly doubled in the last three years, the Sun reports. Many of the slots in these courses are snatched up by upperclassmen, who are able to sign up earlier than freshmen and sophomores.

“Now we’re reserving 10 spots in the intro FGSS courses for the first-year students,” says FGSS director Durba Ghosh, “but that’s still not enough.”

From the piece:

Five faculty members are jointly appointed in FGSS and other departments, according to Ghosh. So far, the program has been able to hire three tenure-track faculty members since 2010.

“While the faculty in the program feel stretched in our ability to staff all the courses we would like to offer, we have not been restricted as much as other departments and programs,” she said.

Ghosh said the college has “done very little hiring” in recent years. She did note that this is soon to change.

“I learned on Friday that the Arts college has increased the number of positions it will fill in 2017- 2018, due, in part, to some new hiring initiatives,” Ghosh wrote in an email in late July.

The College of Arts and Sciences is planning to hire a new faculty member in FGSS and Africana Studies, according to Ghosh.

However, Chowdhury believes there is more work to be done.

“My number one thing would be to hire more people,” she said. “But if they’re doing that, I’m happy to hear that. My only concern is that the administration would hire someone and then be like, ‘we’ve done our job, that’s enough.’”

One particular program highlights the dearth of faculty members in identity courses: Cornell’s “LGBT Studies” program has “no faculty members” appointed to it.