RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/academic-diversity-quotas-are-real/

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat.

Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor).

For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it. Their aim is to seize control over the hiring of new faculty. No longer will admission to the science guild be based on assessed merit and mastery, but on de facto hiring quotas based upon race, gender, and sexual proclivity.

The new quota system is being implemented through the “diversity statement,” which demands an applicant express fealty, not to the guild, but to the new managerial class. The guild’s standards for admission — once a sign of mastery — are thereby subordinated.

https://americanmind.org/features/inclusive-exclusion/the-black-student-body/

This is a response to an excerpt from A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild.

As Peter Wood observes, the notion of academic and cultural “inclusion” was presented as a response to performance disparities between blacks and whites in the 1980s. It has, however, morphed into codified cultural essentialism. “Inclusion” now means assuming a monolithic view of black culture, and judging black students by black standards only.

In accepting the idea that “blacks” as a whole have a distinct and separate culture which must be protected from the incursions of mainstream American values, universities effectively declared that blacks must separate themselves from the prevailing mainstream culture in order to escape racism. What has followed is a distinct pattern of racial self-segregation across America in pedigree universities and even smaller liberal arts colleges.

This neo-segregation has only become more institutionalized since the ’80s. This year, New York University opened negotiations with students to create black resident floors on campus. A group called “Black Violets NYU” has complained that the overwhelming presence of white students makes it difficult for black students “to connect.” Black Violets therefore wants a “themed engagement floor” for black students, as well as more black professors in NYU’s politics department and a black student lounge on campus.

In June of last year, students at Rice University demanded that the University fund a “non-residential Black House” on campus. They also wanted a statue of the university’s founder removed. Other demands included that new black students be able to request and receive black roommates, and that course descriptions have tags indicating which race and ethnic groups are involved in the course material.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/georgetown_universitys_free_speech_double_standard.html

On April 26, Georgetown University histed a talk by Mohammed El-Kurd, who has said that Jews have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood,” and other viciously antisemitic statements. World Israel News reports:

Mohammed El-Kurd, a media personality who has repeatedly accused Israel of harvesting and trafficking organs from Palestinians and described Zionists as “sadistic, barbaric Neo-Nazi pigs” was invited by Georgetown Law’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

News of El-Kurd’s talk sparked a response from the NGOs StopAntisemitism and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which urged the university to intervene and disinvite him.

“Administrations like Georgetown’s state they’re against antisemitism yet allow Jew haters like Mohammed El-Kurd to freely spread hatred against Jews on their campuses,” StopAntisemitism wrote on its twitter account on Monday. “Enough is enough — cancel El-Kurd’s speech ASAP!”

“Mohammed El-Kurd has a long, ugly history of antisemitic incitement & conspiratorial rhetoric that goes far beyond reasoned criticism of Israel,” the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblat tweeted. “Outrageous & indefensible that @GeorgetownLaw invited him to bring his hate to their campus.”

The University brushed aside these concerns, claiming to to be on the side of free speech.

During a meeting with Jewish students concerned about El-Kurd’s campus appearance, Georgetown Law’s dean said that the university prioritizes free speech.

“We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many,” Dean Mitch Bailin is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the National Review.

“Those are things that we think are important to educational values, to promoting free speech, to promoting a free discussion of ideas, even if those ideas are deeply, deeply offensive.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-claims-school-children-dont-belong-to-parents-when-theyre-in-the-classroom/

At the 2022 Teacher of the Year ceremony hosted by the White House on Wednesday, President Biden claimed that school children don’t belong to parents “when they’re in the classroom.”

“They’re all our children. And the reason you’re the teachers of the year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom,” he said.

Later in the speech, Biden targeted Republicans and the parent movements in local school districts that have fought to remove from libraries and curricula books that promote radical gender and racial ideologies.

“There are too many politicians trying to score political points trying to ban books, even math books. Did you ever think when you’d be teaching you’re going to be worried about book burnings and banning books all because it doesn’t fit somebody’s political agenda?” Biden said.

The comments struck a similar tone to that of former Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, when he made his now infamous remark last year that parents should not be involved in K–12 public education. On the campaign trail, he declared at a debate: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

https://www.city-journal.org/ap-radicalism

When the Placentia Yorba–Linda School Board in Orange County, California, considered banning critical race theory instruction, a surprising entity stood in the way: the College Board. The nonprofit, which develops advanced-placement (AP) courses and standardized tests, has stated ambiguously: “If a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course and its inclusion in the AP Course Ledger provided to colleges and universities.” The Placentia Yorba–Linda school district told the school board that removing critical race theory from the classroom would risk the AP status of its courses, and that it “has no intention to proceed with any action that would inhibit its ability to continue to offer AP courses and content.”

Ultimately, the school board moved ahead with the ban, adding an exception stipulating that it did not intend to circumscribe any material appearing in AP courses. But similar difficulties may unfold nationally as more districts seek to remove divisive racial instruction from the classroom. At stake is more than just the curriculum of American high schools. Colleges frequently accept AP classes for college credit, so each class can save a student thousands of dollars in tuition. AP classes can be the difference that makes a student able to afford a college degree and all the job opportunities that depend on a college credential. That gives the College Board a tremendous amount of power—and an obligation to ensure that its policies don’t stand in the way of the determinations of democratic bodies.

Not that the group has managed to remain apolitical in the past. As the National Association of Scholars documented in a recent report, the College Board has abused its monopoly to impose on American students a politicized, progressive version of history.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/dont-say-it-an-interview-with-amy-wax/

American campuses have become the last place to find open debate about controversial matters.
Editors’ Note

Last December, Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, raised hackles on the Left when she appeared on Glenn Loury’s podcast to discuss the topic of American identity in an age of mass immigration from non-Western countries. Professor Wax’s comments prompted a round of denunciations and demands that she be suspended from her duties at the University of Pennsylvania. The following is a lightly-edited transcript of a conversation between Amy Wax and Alexander Riley from February of this year.

Alexander Riley: There is much going on in the current effort to cancel you at Penn Law. As is clear from the facts of the case here and in previous situations where you’ve faced pressure from your institution for perfectly defensible statements, important questions about tenure and academic freedom are at issue here. What does freedom of academic inquiry mean, and what does tenure protect, if a professor cannot present cases that might make someone somewhere unhappy?

Amy Wax: Nobody wants to talk about what’s most interesting about this. I did a podcast recently with Gad Saad and we discussed some of this on a meta-level. We were talking about how academia operates. I think there is a growing divide between academia—where less and less real intellectual life takes place—and what’s happening extra-academically, in think tanks and in online sites such as podcasts and Substack. There are now all sorts of fora and places of contact in which there’s a real exchange of ideas and you can talk about things like what I was talking about with Glenn Loury on his podcast.

We have a very large number of Asians who are capable, whose families are strong and who are pretty traditional in their personal conduct, but whose values are totally non-Judeo-Christian, completely foreign to us. At what point do we become South Asia? At what point do we become India, which is a failed state, by the way. Nobody wants to ask, “Why do Asians vote Democratic?” People have emailed me to say “Well, why do Jews?” That’s a good question too!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2022/04/25/angry-moms-vs-lgbtq-groomers-in-spicy-glendale-school-board-meeting-n1592514

The 2022 “year in review” specials should feature the angry moms of school board meetings. The army of moms standing up against the sexualization of their children by groomer teachers is a defining moment in the culture wars this year. It is happening again in Glendale, Calif. at the Glendale Unified School District, and the board there got an earful at their last meeting after a third-grade teacher, Tammy Tiber, was caught teaching LGBTQ sexuality to 8-year-olds three days a week.

The teacher played several videos for her 8-year-old students that addressed “queer kid stuff,” “pride parades,” “love is love,” and a lesson on Stonewall. One of the videos (below), called Talking to Kids About Pride Month, was pretty disturbing.