I remember how it was -- JR
Faithful Catholic Colleges See ‘Unprecedented’ Enrollment Numbers, Financial Support
As most collegiate institutions grapple with disappointing enrollment, a slew of faithful Catholic colleges are reporting surprising enrollment numbers and financial support.
Their success is heralded by the Newman Guide, a list of higher education options consulted by Catholic parents throughout the world, as evidence of the positive impact that authentic Catholic education has upon society. The Newman Guide recognizes colleges that are determined to provide a thoroughly faithful Catholic education (and removes colleges from the list when they fall short).
“We keep hearing people refer to a ‘Newman movement’ because these faithful Catholic colleges just keep growing and setting the example of how to attract families today,” Patrick Reilly, president and founder of The Cardinal Newman Society, told The Daily Signal.
“These colleges are traditional and counter-cultural at a time when most of American education is corrupted and on a path of self-destruction,” he added. “In addition, the ‘Newman movement’ includes faithful Catholic educators who long for and search for the environment these Catholic colleges provide.”
According to a release from the organization, Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina saw its largest incoming class ever (1,654 students) for the 2023-2024 school year, a 10% increase from last year’s enrollment numbers.
Meanwhile, in Kansas, Benedictine College boasted a record undergraduate class of 2,213 students, marking a 121% growth for the college over the past two decades.
The Catholic University of America, located in Washington, D.C., saw its highest number of applications and deposits in the last five years, the Newman Guide release said. The Franciscan University of Steubenville welcomed 772 new freshmen, its largest class since its founding, and the North Dakota-based University of Mary had its largest freshman class (559) in its history.
Wyoming Catholic College, which launched in 2007, has reported rapid growth over the past decade, while the California-based Thomas Aquinas College hit capacity at its California campus and the Virginia-based Christendom College reached its 550 total student body size cap, according to the Newman Guide.
“A light shines brightest in the darkness, and increasing numbers of Catholic families are choosing the faithful Catholic colleges recommended in The Cardinal Newman Society’s Newman Guide!” the organization said in a release.
“Most of these colleges are enjoying unprecedented enrollment numbers and financial support in the 2023-2024 academic year, and all are displaying the enormous impact that authentic Catholic education can have in the Church and in society,” the organization added.
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The Antisemitism of the University Double Standard
A central feature of antisemitism is the application of a double standard by treating Jews differently from how other groups would be treated in similar circumstances. By this definition, antisemitism is a common practice at universities.
My recent experience at the University of Arkansas helps illustrate the problem. When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I was the head of an academic department there.
We were told by senior administrators that this election result might be traumatizing to faculty, staff, and students who were not U.S. citizens, so we were instructed to reassure foreign nationals that the university cared about them.
To accomplish this, senior administrators provided us with funds to take these foreign nationals out for lunch to listen to their concerns. The irony that we were using the money of Arkansas taxpayers to buy lunch for people who might feel “unsafe” because of the democratic decision of those same taxpayers didn’t occur to the university’s leaders.
If buying a group lunch to comfort them over an election result is how the University of Arkansas shows that it cares about foreigners, then its recent actions suggest that the university manifestly does not care about its Jewish faculty, staff, and students.
In the wake of the worst atrocity committed against Jews since the Holocaust during World War II, which was followed by mass protests on college campuses nationwide in support of that mass slaughter, rape, and kidnapping, the University of Arkansas didn’t offer to take its Jewish affiliates out to lunch.
Instead, the university organized a panel to discuss the Israel-Hamas war that featured two professors from the school’s King Fahd Center for Middle East Studies who are stridently anti-Israel. One professor praised the chanting of the genocidal slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The other says another Iran-backed terrorist organization, Hezbollah, shouldn’t be considered as one because it provides social services.
Do you see the double standard? The university buys lunch for foreign nationals to address the imaginary trauma of a democratic election result, but Jews who are experiencing actual physical threats get treated to a university-organized hate rally.
The differential treatment of Jews isn’t confined to the University of Arkansas. It is pervasive in higher education.
Following the May 2020 death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police, universities across the country cancelled classes and exams—sometimes particularly exempting black students—for fear that the event was too traumatizing to expect students to focus on their studies.
At UCLA, a professor actually was removed from teaching and placed on leave for failing to agree to a request that he postpone an exam for black students in his class.
By contrast, Jewish students currently are walking past protests, often involving faculty members, to attend classes and take exams in courses taught by those same professors who were just chanting for intifada, or the Palestinian uprising.
Some of the heavily armed Hamas terrorists piloted paragliders to invade Israel on Oct. 7.
After one flyer promoting a pro-Palestinian rally featured the image of a paraglider, the executive director of the Jewish student organization at Cal State Long Beach, Chaya Leah Surfin, colorfully put it this way: “Look at what my Jewish students on campus have to deal with. Those paragliders were used to murder 300 Jewish young people. Only the Jews have to put up with this s—.”
When she asked university administrators for help protect Jewish students, they recommended counseling services.
The double standard in how universities treat Jews isn’t characterized only by a refusal to protect Jewish students from real threats that might legitimately interfere with their studies. It also is marked by the excessive coddling of other groups who are imagined to be completely incapable of managing even remote sources of stress.
Universities expect too much of Jewish students to handle genocidal chants and physical assault and too little of foreign nationals to handle an election result and black students to handle police misconduct in a city across the country.
Of course, no group of students should have to experience distress. But when these incidents happen, universities should respond to them consistently. Subjecting Jewish students to harsher treatment and expressing little concern for their difficulties is precisely what antisemitism looks like.
Higher education has an antisemitism problem and it’s about time that colleges and universities address it by developing consistent policies and practices for all groups of students on campus.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/09/the-antisemitism-of-the-university-double-standard
***********************************************New brand of secularism a shortcut to bad ideas
JANET ALBRECHTSEN
The NSW Teachers Federation is sponsoring the first Secularism Australia Conference early next month, featuring “inspirational pro-secular speakers” who will “share their vision for secularism in Australia”.
Though December is a busy month, I am willing to put up my hand to offer my vision for secularism in Australia. I suspect it will be different from the vision of the scheduled speakers.
I can offer a reality check about how secularism – a noble idea to forge tolerance that emerged in the aftermath of the religious wars – has morphed into its own version of ideological zealotry that mirrors the worst parts of some religions.
The one issue that should be on the agenda is how to return to the best of secularism, rather than stay on the current path where some tenets of this modern secularism are even more doctrinaire than established religions.
I might raise another point with the audience, too. Why on earth is the NSW Teachers Federation – a union with the stated purpose to “protect and improve teachers’ working conditions and salaries, within the public education system” – throwing in its lot with a line-up of speakers whose politics are, let’s just say, hardly centrist?
If a teachers union hosted a conference that featured Pauline Hanson as a speaker, there would be an uproar about the politicisation of the union. It’s no different when you host speakers who include Fiona Patten, Jane Caro and Van Badham.
But the critical issue remains the blind spot many secularists have when it comes to defending modern secularism, in large part because they are the problem. These people would benefit greatly from a few words about how secularism has strayed far from its original purpose.
British social reformer and newspaper editor George Holyoake, who coined the phrase in the mid-19th century after rejecting Christianity and being imprisoned for blasphemy, believed reason and science, not faith and commandments, were a better guide to the physical, moral and intellectual development of man.
Similarly, modern secularism has lost touch with the ideas of French scholar Jean Bauberot, whose model of secularism revered freedom of thought, conscience and religion, opposing discrimination against people on the basis of their religious or non-religious views.
Modern secularism has become untethered from its historical moorings. The separation of church and state is proving harder to abide by when the new secular religion is infused in everything the state does.
Likewise, the fine idea that there should be no religious tests applied to people wanting to hold public office has been turned on its head.
These days you could be squeezed out of a job for holding religious views. It happened to former Essendon chief executive Andrew Thorburn. You could be booted out for not agreeing with trans orthodoxy, for challenging the idea that the “science is settled” about gender transitioning. That happened to former Age columnist Julie Szego.
As American writer Ross Douthat said a few years ago, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Modern secularists who loathe traditional religion have taken their quasi-religious model to new heights with a list of ever-expanding commandments.
Though the latest census shows almost 10 million Australians, or 39 per cent, have no religion – up from 8 per cent in 1971 – people still hanker for a moral code to live by.
As formal religious commitment falls away, the vacuum is being filled with a new quasi-religious rule book, largely political and secular but couched always in moral terms.
And it’s hard to escape this new religion. While you can’t be forced to go to a church, a synagogue or a mosque, you will find a new class of proselytisers busy imposing their commandments in workplaces, schools, universities, sporting clubs and local councils, and most other institutions. There are new moral rules about diversity and inclusion (which normally mean excluding certain categories of people); about accepting climate “science” (where we are told the science is settled); about gender transitioning; on preferred pronouns; on the definition of a woman; on acceptable forms of humour; on welcomes to country; and so on.
There is nothing wrong with a secular-based moral code. The real question is how it is enforced, how doctrinaire it becomes and how dissenters are dealt with.
We are increasingly told a matter is settled, that certain things must be done and said. If you have a different view, you are not just wrong, you are immoral. In which case you risk being treated as a blasphemer. These secular clergymen and women will describe words and ideas they don’t like as a form of violence to justify new forms of censorship. If you offend a commandment, you will be hounded for an apology, only to discover that the sanctimonious secularists among us don’t believe in redemption.
In Victoria, you risk five or 10 years’ jail for saying a prayer for someone that falls foul of the Change or Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act. JK Rowling is not alone in being lynched by online mobs for believing only biological women are women. Comedians are routinely censored for cracking a joke that offends some secular god of wokeness. This year, employees were forced to shut up if they opposed the Indigenous voice.
Public teachers unions are full of these secular activists. They rail against formal religious instruction in public schools while they fully support teachers proselytising their new secular religion in the classroom. It means the core purpose of the teachers union – to advocate for teachers’ pay and conditions – is often sidelined by political zealotry.
This overt politicking doesn’t improve our public education system either.
When the union is overrun by leaders indulging in personal political and cultural agendas, why would we be surprised when teachers condone or even encourage students to go on protest marches instead of learning more English or maths? How can a dead white male such as Shakespeare possibly offer a kid anything when there is a direct line between teachers evangelising in the classroom and students bludging school to join a climate “emergency” march?
The vast gulf between the goals and values of teacher activists and mainstream Australia is on display almost every day. We saw it in the voice referendum when activist teachers urged students to adopt a position resoundingly rejected by Australia at large. At some schools teachers handed out Yes badges and only Yes speakers were invited to address students.
This is politics dressed up as morality, pure and simple.
Last week, in a statement about the Israel-Gaza war, the NSW Teachers Federation said “the actions of the Israeli government cannot be justified in any way”. It’s bad enough that this terrible conflict is tearing Australia apart without teachers making it worse by inflaming immature school students who have taken to the streets screaming for a free Palestine without any understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I’m guessing no one in the NSW Teachers Federation is inclined to point out that, as the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, Israel is the only state in this unhappy region that guarantees freedom of religion, abortion rights, same-sex marriage and a host of other rights that the teachers union rightly regards as fundamental. Or to point out that Hamas, a terrorist organisation that beheaded babies, raped young women, and murdered and kidnapped other civilians, didn’t come from nowhere. Hamas defeated its rival political party, Fatah, in the 2006 elections.
So, let’s not kid ourselves. A serious conference about secularism ought to explore the darker side to modern secularism where inconsistencies run rife and ideology is often more doctrinaire than any formal religion.
If the NSW Teachers Federation would like to make room for some intellectual diversity, I might be free to discuss these issues, along with the hypocrisy of modern secularists banging on about the evils of any form of religious instruction in public schools while using the public classroom as their own secular pulpit.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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