Thursday, June 02, 2016



Outrageous Tactics Used by DePaul University to Shut Down Conservative Speech

Back in March 2014, Stanford University’s Graduate Student Council revoked funding and demanded exorbitant security fees (over $5,000!) from the Student Anscombe Society related to its event on traditional marriage, which featured Heritage fellow Ryan T. Anderson.

Selectively charging outrageous security fees in order to make student leaders “voluntarily” shut down events that college administrations don’t like is a routine tactic for silencing dissent on campus.

But what happens when the students actually pay the fees and a speaker shows up? You’d think that at the very least you would have a number of bored security guards and one very safe speaker?

You’d be wrong.

After DePaul University in Chicago changed its policies and overcharged the College Republicans for security at an event on campus, it ordered the security providers to “stand down,” even as some Black Lives Matter advocates physically took control of a stage and threatened to punch the speaker in the face.

Here’s what happened.

The DePaul College Republicans were scheduling an event with a popular but highly controversial speaker, Milo Yiannopoulos, earlier this year.

They immediately hit a snag when they discovered that DePaul has a stated policy requiring a ratio of security to attendees of between 1:50 and 1:75. For their event of 550 attendees, DePaul was required to hire 8 guards for $960.

This might be difficult and might reduce the amount of events that occur on campus, because applying such a policy does place a burden on small student groups that have a hard time raising the money to fund such events.

Nevertheless, at least this policy was publicly available and evenly applied (except it wasn’t).

The DePaul College Republicans had to rely on crowdfunding and donations months in advance, only to have the university change the policy at the last minute, demanding hundreds of extra dollars for additional security less than a week before the event would take place.

According to Jorin Burkhart, an executive board member of DePaul College Republicans, “non-conservative groups are able to hold events without being required to have security.” At DePaul, the College Republicans hosting Yiannopoulos are stuck with an inflated bill.

The “security” meanwhile did nothing to stop attacks by assailants, one of whom even threatened to hit the speaker in the face. According to the event organizers, the administration had promised the College Republicans that it would remove disruptors from the event.

Chicago police were called to the scene, but they too were told by the DePaul administration to stand down, an order that made some of the well-trained police “irate” because they “wanted to do their job” and protect the students and speaker.

In a follow-up email to the student body, DePaul’s president made a tepid apology to the College Republicans—but only after expressing his intense dislike of “speakers of Mr. Yiannopoulos’ ilk,” who he claimed are “self-serving provocateurs,” whose “shtick” is “unworthy of university discourse.” This “apology” may provide some indication that the administration’s real goal in imposing costly additional security requirements on the College Republicans was to incentivize them to cancel the speaker’s appearance.

The university is supposed to protect its students physically as well as safeguard their rights on campus. DePaul not only failed to secure the students and the guest speaker, but they seemed to actively subvert the students’ rights and work against allowing the College Republicans to hold their event.

DePaul needs to ensure that security needs are provided by the university objectively and in a manner that is minimally intrusive on its students’ rights. And, of course, it needs to refund the College Republicans’ security fees.

SOURCE 






GREEN INDOCTRINATION AT SCHOOL

Federal attempts at Green indoctrination of children continue at a furious pace. The primary means are the Common Core State Standard Initiative and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), aimed at schools from K-12.

Common Core is intended to create uniform, one-size-fits-all, national education standards. It is a pet project of billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation not only bankrolled the project but spent over $200 million to encourage widespread political support. It enjoys the support of the National Governors Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).

Despite claims that this originated entirely at state level, the U.S. Department of Education was heavily involved behind the scenes and provided incentives for states to adopt the standards via waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act upon adoption of Common Core and cold, hard cash through President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative.

To date 38 states have fully adopted the standards. This is down from a high of 45 as several states repealed Common Core when it became obvious how strings attached compromised local educational autonomy.

In December 2015 President Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the offspring of No Child Left Behind, which promises to be a source of funding for states that comply and enforce comprehensive so-called environmental literacy plans in K–12 schools.

The federal carrot and stick have enticed not a few states to kowtow. Maryland was ahead of the curve when, in 2011, it was the first state under Common Core to require something called ‘environmental literacy’ in order to graduate from high school.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) approved by the Kentucky Board of Education (BOE), and likely to be adopted in many other states, revolutionizes the classroom landscape for millions of students. Like Common Core it recommends that educators identify global warming as a core concept and stress the relationship between global warming and human activity.

That is ironic because the consensus is that there has been no global warming for (aside from the current short-term rise driven by a super-El Niño this year). Nevertheless, many textbook publishers are incorporating NGSS standards that insist unabated global warming is accelerating and is unquestionably caused by human CO2 emissions.

The West Virginia BOE recently took a lot of heat for suggesting changes to the NGSS they had unwisely adopted early in 2015. NGSS assumes human-caused global warming as a persistent feature of Earth’s climate, but the BOE voted in December for a more nuanced approach. Rather than assuming anthropogenic global warming, as NGSS insist upon, they want to encourage debate.

In March 2016 State Representatives Lynn Bechler and David Hale introduced a bill in the House to withdraw Kentucky from both NGSS and the Common Core Standards. Their concern is that Common Core and NGSS effectively remove state and local control of educational standards and surrender them to a private third party, deeply vested in federal visions of what good citizens should learn and think.

How times change. In 2013 the Huffington Post, a left wing internet site, crowed that the Kentucky Board of Education was on the side of the angels because they had swatted ‘deniers’ and backed the required teaching of evolution and climate change.

When I looked at the standards I found they lack any teaching of the physics of heat, or the relationship between radiant heat and energy. There is no appreciation of the role the sun plays in affecting climate (part of my specialty as a space physicist), or of the relative impact of human contributions. In practice, therefore, the national standards are simply propaganda fitting the party line of the global climate change alarmists. They are “Green” indoctrination of children.

The federal push to have everyone think the same approved thoughts, like a herd of cows, should be troubling to not only parents but also educators and others. What’s so wrong with a little diversity?

SOURCE 






Black British Students call for prisons to be BANNED

This doesn't say much for black IQ

An influential students' group has called for prisons to be abolished because they are 'sexist and racist' in the latest in a series of far-Left interventions by the student movement.

The National Union of Students black students' conference also voted to step up its fight against the Government's anti-extremism agenda.

The controversial votes at the conference in Bradford this weekend came after the current NUS black students' officer, Malia Bouattia, was elected president of the union, defeating the more moderate incumbent.

She has previously argued that it is Islamophobic to oppose ISIS and described one university as a 'Zionist outpost' because it has a large Jewish society.

One of the motions passed at the conference on Saturday was titled 'Prisons are Obsolete! Abolish Them Now!', and resolved to 'call for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex'.

The motion, which pointed to high rates of re-offending and the disproportionate number of black people in jail, concluded: 'Prisons are sexist and racist.'

Students also threatened to deploy 'direct action' to fulfil their aim of disrupting the current prison system.

The vote called for anyone detained under the Mental Health Act to be handed over into NHS care, but was silent on what should happen to other convicted criminals.

Last month the NUS women's conference passed a similar resolution, titled 'Prison Abolition is a Feminist Issue', which called for 'community and transformative justice' to replace incarceration.

In a separate motion on Saturday, the black students' conference voted to campaign against Prevent, the Government's main anti-radicalisation effort, being deployed in further education institutions.

Students compared the official campaign to 'Big Brother' and opposed attempts to teach 'British values' to sixth-formers and other FE students.

The black students' conference is supposed to represent the interests of all ethnic minority university and college students.

It is open to all students who consider themselves 'politically black' - and a motion to confine the definition of black to mean 'of African or Caribbean origin' was voted down by delegates this weekend.

The new black students' officer, Aadam Muuse, was endorsed by Miss Bouattia and has a track record of campaigning against Israel and Prevent.

In his manifesto, he vowed to fight 'the racists in Parliament wrecking black lives with impunity'.

He is currently an official at the students' union of Bradford University, which was responsible for proposing the anti-prisons motion at the conference.

The election of Miss Bouattia, 28, as NUS president last month prompted huge controversy because of her history of radical activism.

She once described her own university, Birmingham, as a 'Zionist outpost in British higher education', and opposed efforts for the union to issue a formal condemnation of ISIS because it would be a 'justification for war and blatant Islamophobia'.

Following her election, Labour MP and former NUS leader Wes Streeting said the union was 'lost', while his colleague John Mann said he was 'aghast' at her statements.

Several universities have since voted on whether or not to cut ties with the NUS, with Newcastle, Hull and Lincoln opting to disaffiliate from the union.

It was reported last week that Miss Bouattia was forced to write a letter of apology after an independent inquiry found she had been unintentionally anti-semitic.

SOURCE 



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