Friday, September 06, 2019


Kansas University faculty wants Chick-fil-A banned from campus for fears of 'safety,' 'mental well being'

Despite being closed on Sunday, Chick-fil-A is still the third largest fast food chain in the country. But there's growing liberal backlash against its conservative Christian values, and its philanthropic support. Shouldn't a business be able to donate to the cause of their choice? Christopher Hale and Shane Idleman are here to debate this growing religious freedom conflict.

A few Kansas University faculty members are not fans of allowing Chick-fil-A to be served on campus because they believe the chain violates "safety and inclusion".

The faculty council, filled with "extreme frustration," wants America's favorite restaurant removed from campus for being a "bastion of bigotry" after KU administrators relocated a Chick-fil-A from a basement to "prime real estate" on campus to the Memorial Union. But worse yet, to the council, is the "Chick-fil-A Coin Toss" at the start of the Jayhawks' football home games.

“The culture of Chick-fil-A fosters hate and discrimination on multiple levels,” the Sexuality & Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council wrote in a two-page letter, accusing university leaders of being "more concerned about money and corporate sponsorship than the physical, emotional, and mental well being of marginalized and LGBTQ people."

Chick-fil-A CEO opens up about company's Christian valuesVideo
While the fast-food chain is celebrated for its exceptional customer service, it has come under fire several times after its president and CEO, Dan Cathy, publicly supported traditional marriage in 2012 and opponents have accused Chick-fil-A of being anti-LGBTQ for its charitable giving to the Family Research Council and Salvation Army, to name a few.

The faculty group added: “The arrival of Chick-fil-A in this building is insulting, counterproductive and unacceptable."

In response, the College Republicans on campus started a petition for students, alumni, and concerned citizens to send to Chancellor Doug Girod. "Tell our university administration that our community wants Chick-fil-A on this campus," the conservative group wrote.

Katie Batza, an associate professor of women and gender studies, told the Kansas City Star that hundreds "will boycott or protest" but lamented that the request was "falling on deaf ears."

Interim Provost Carl Lejuez sent an email to faculty and staff, however.

“Moving forward, I believe it is important to have thoughtful discussion and deliberation when we enter into contracts. In the future, we will do so in a manner that is transparent and informed by our commitment to affirm diversity and to be a welcoming and inclusive campus,” the email said, according to the University Daily Kansas.

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Author of Hoax Gender Studies Papers Punished by Portland State University

In 2017 and 2018, Portland State University philosophy professor Peter Boghossian set out to display the intellectual vacuity of women’s and gender studies as an academic endeavor. He, along with a few others, authored hoax research papers and submitted them to prominent academic publications.

It is impossible to overstate how nonsensical these papers are. From claiming that “manspreading… is akin to [a male] raping the empty space around him,” to a literal feminist rewrite of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, to a paper asserting that “dog parks are petri dishes for canine rape culture,” each paper submitted by Boghossian and his colleagues was, to any sane individual, open mockery of gender studies.

Yet, the lunacy fit right in with PhD’s and the world’s best “gender studies experts.” Hoax paper after hoax paper was accepted and published in prominent peer-reviewed academic journals.

After publicly revealing that the papers were hoaxes, bureaucrats and gender studies pseudo professors organized against Boghossian. He was accused of numerous counts of “research misconduct” by PSU and investigated. Among the charges were accusations of “violations regarding the ethical treatment of animals in research” based on the idea that Boghossian had abused the imaginary dogs in the hoax research paper about dog park rape culture.

In July, Mark McLellan, Portland State’s vice president for research and graduate studies, sent the results of the investigators’ findings to Boghossian, informing him that the charge of animal abuse, along with bogus charges of plagiarism had been dropped, but that he was being formally disciplined for “violations of human subjects’ rights and protections.” According to McLellan and the investigators, submitting a hoax paper is a violation of the rights of the recipients of the submission.

Boghossian’s punishment is that he is now “forbidden to engage in any human subjects related research” and “forbidden to engage in any sponsored research,” until he undergoes “protection of human subjects training.” The most overtly Maoist, Orwellian portion of the letter is the conclusion:

“I believe the results of this office’s review of your research behavior raises concerns regarding a lack of academic integrity, questionable ethical behavior and employee breach of rules. Therefore, a copy of this letter and its attachments are being sent to your supervisory ranks of department chair, dean, and provost. Additionally, as a part of the completion of this review, I am copying the president on this matter.”

According to Peter Wood and David Randall of the National Association of Scholars who wrote about the ordeal in The Federalist on Friday, Boghossian is still mulling over whether he will submit to the “training” of his political adversaries or possibly pursue legal action against the school.

Given that the charges against Boghossian lack any sense of a correspondence to reality and serious academic investigation, we can only gather that Portland State is fine with the public knowing that their harassment and punishment of Boghossian is pure political persecution for the purpose of intimidating any who would try to expose the field of women’s and gender studies again. That’s all the more reason to be thankful for Boghossian and his team exposing the pseudo-academics and higher education bureaucrats for what they are.

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California Wants to Teach Your Kids that Capitalism Is Racist
   
California’s Education Department has issued an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” and is soliciting public comments on it until Aug. 15. The legislatively mandated guide is a resource for teachers who want to instruct their students in the field of “ethnic studies,” and was written by an advisory board of teachers, academics and bureaucrats. It’s as bad as you imagine.

Ethnic studies is described in the document as “the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States.” But that’s not all it is. “It is the study of intersectional and ancestral roots, coloniality, hegemony, and a dignified world where many worlds fit, for present and future generations.” It is the “xdisciplinary [sic], loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity.”

The document is filled with fashionable academic jargon like “positionalities,” “hybridities,” “nepantlas” and “misogynoir.” It includes faddish social-science lingo like “cis-heteropatriarchy” that may make sense to radical university professors and activists but doesn’t mean much to the regular folks who send their children to California’s public schools. It is difficult to comprehend the depth and breadth of the ideological bias and misrepresentations without reading the whole curriculum—something few will want to do.

Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.

In a sample lesson on Native Americans, the curriculum suggests students offer their responses to a fictional environmentalist speech by Chief Seattle as well as an anodyne quote about relationships from the recently deceased rapper Nipsey Hussle. The Chief Seattle error is part of a larger problem. The curriculum perpetuates the myth that the Indians had the same values as present-day ecologists. In truth, Native Americans had a mixed approach to nature. The curriculum writers should have looked carefully at the scholarly evidence presented in Shepard Krech ’s 1999 book, “The Ecological Indian”—about, for example, the setting of brush fires that got out of control and the needless killing of buffalo, beaver and deer.

The curriculum lauds bilingual education, but it omits that this program—in which teachers conducted class mostly in Spanish until seventh grade—failed in California and was disliked by much of the Latino community.

The curriculum is entirely wrongheaded when it comes to critical thinking. Critical thinking is described not as reasoning through logic and consideration of evidence but rather a vague deconstruction of power relationships so that one can “speak out on social issues.” Thinking critically “requires individuals to evaluate phenomenon [sic] through the lens of systems, the rules within those systems, who wields power within systems and the impact of that power on the relationships between people existing within systems.”

Such a curriculum presents a serious problem of fairness to students. In a course titled “Math and Social Justice,” will you be graded on having correct answers on the math or politically correct answers on social justice?

This curriculum explicitly aims at encouraging students to become “agents of change, social justice organizers and advocates.” In the sample unit teachers are directed to have students plan “a direct action (e.g., a sit-in, die-in, march, boycott, strike).” Teaching objective history clearly isn’t the goal. Rather, it’s training students to become ideological activists and proponents of identity politics.

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