RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-administration-downsizes-the-extravagant-education-department/

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to proceed with its downsizing of the U.S. Education Department while litigation on the matter continues in the lower courts. The Supreme Court’s emergency order set aside, at least temporarily, a Biden-appointed federal district court judge’s ruling that had reinstated terminated employees at the department.

The Trump administration has announced the termination of more than 1,300 Education Department workers out of a total of about 4,400, as part of a reduction in force to promote maximum efficiency. After also taking into account some probationary workers who have been let go and employees who have accepted the administration’s offer to resign, about one half the size of the Education Department’s workforce prior to President Trump’s second term still remain.

Judge Myong J. Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, who had issued the reinstatement order, based his decision on the premise that only Congress can legally shut down or eliminate a congressionally-created department, not the executive branch unilaterally. But that is not what happened here.

Downsizing, which still leaves about half of the total number of pre-Trump 2.0 employees in place, is hardly tantamount to shutting down the Education Department altogether. Whether the Trump administration intends in the future, and is authorized, to totally abolish the Education Department and leave its discretionary functions to the states, while still performing its statutorily mandated functions elsewhere in the executive branch, is not relevant to this downsizing case.

The Education Department’s net outlays in fiscal year 2024 totaled $267.9 billion, nearly four percent of total outlays by the federal government. Since 1980, when the Department of Education was established, this department’s spending has increased 371.6% in comparison to an increase of 193.7% in overall federal spending during the same period.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/against-all-expectations-georgetown-university-actually-does-the-right-thing/

Jonathan Brown, a professor at Georgetown University, is a living, breathing illustration of a great deal that’s wrong with academic life today. His public statements give the strong impression that he hates America and has contempt for those who live in it, or at least for those who aren’t on the far left. In fact, his hatred doesn’t stop with America alone; as a convert to Islam, Brown has allied himself with a force that has tried to destroy Western civilization for 1,400 years and has even enthusiastically embraced the most noxious aspects of that force, endorsing slavery, including the sex slavery of infidel women.

Given the state of the American intelligentsia, you’d expect such a man to become a cosseted and celebrated member of the academic scene, and you’d be right. Brown stands for so much that is not only un-American but anti-American, that it was inevitable that he would become a rising star on campus, despite the intellectual poverty of his actual output. And sure enough, Georgetown not only gave Brown tenure but made him chair of its Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service.

Now, however, Brown appears to have crossed the line even for Georgetown. It would have been less surprising if university officials had made him president of the university after he called on the Islamic Republic of Iran to carry out a “symbolic strike” against a U.S. military base, but instead, against all expectations, Georgetown has actually placed him on leave and removed him as chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. Is sanity returning to American academia? Well, no. But this certainly is a welcome step in that direction.

Georgetown University interim President Robert M. Groves told a congressional hearing Tuesday: “Within minutes of our learning of that tweet, the dean contacted Professor Brown, the tweet was removed [and] we issued a statement condemning the tweet. Professor Brown is no longer chair of his department and he’s on leave, and we’re beginning a process of reviewing the case.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/university-hiring-dei-diversity-checks-discrimination

In early 2021, Carma Gorman, an art history professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the designated “diversity advocate” for a faculty search committee, emailed John Yancey, the College of Fine Arts’ associate dean of diversity, seeking approval to proceed with a job search.

“I wanted to make sure that the demographics of our pool pass muster,” Gorman wrote. She noted that 21 percent of applicants were from underrepresented minority groups, with another 28 percent self-identifying as Asian.

“The 21% is enough to move forward,” Yancey replied, but he cautioned that concerns could arise depending on how the applicant pool was narrowed. “If 20 of the 23 URM applicants are dropped in the early cut,” he wrote, “then things don’t look good anymore.”

The exchange, which I obtained through an open-records request, offers a window into a diversity practice adopted at many universities. Documents I’ve acquired from institutions across the country—hiring plans, grant proposals, progress reports, and internal emails—show that routine diversity checks are now embedded throughout the hiring process, often enforced with serious consequences for searches that fail to “pass muster.”

This practice raises not only significant legal questions but also highlights how such policies can concentrate power in the hands of individual administrators, granting them effective veto authority over one of a university’s most consequential decisions: the hiring of tenure-track faculty.

In 2023, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17, banning racial preferences and the employment of diversity officers. But just two years earlier, the situation at UT–Austin looked very different.

The documents tell the story. As diversity advocate, Gorman—coauthor of the annotated bibliography Decentering Whiteness in Design History—proposed a detailed diversity plan for her search committee. The plan, which I obtained via a records request, outlined a rigorous process for monitoring diversity at every stage of the hiring process.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/combatting-classroom-chaos/

On April 23, President Trump signed an executive order directing public schools to develop student discipline policies without considering race and ethnicity. The order states, “The Federal Government will no longer tolerate known risks to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom that result from the application of school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology.”

The administration is justified in taking action. Restoring order to America’s classrooms requires reversing years of misguided federal policies that focused on racial quotas and therapeutic interventions. These policies have harmed academic achievement, endangered students, and made it more difficult for struggling students to get help. To succeed, the administration must respect local control while overcoming strong resistance from a deeply rooted education bureaucracy, whose radical agenda remains its primary goal.

Our current problems were intensified by a 2012 report from the Obama administration, which found that black students were “suspended, expelled, and arrested” at higher rates than white students. In response, the administration sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to state and local education agencies in 2014, warning of federal investigations if rates of “exclusionary discipline”—suspensions and expulsions—were racially disproportionate.

Not surprisingly, Obama’s redirect has been a disaster. Where schools have tried the racial bean-counting regimen, the results have been less than noteworthy. A North Carolina school districttried to improve discipline by implementing a policy that paid a non-profit over $800,000 to help develop. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools had fewer suspensions during the school year and no expulsions, part of a broader shift toward “equitable discipline.”

However, the district reported a higher crime rate than the previous year. Critics say the changes have worsened conditions for students because disruption in class is not being addressed.

Surveys consistently show that student behavior has declined over the past decade, with school violence and overall classroom disorder now at all-time highs.