Wednesday, July 08, 2020


Liberal Logic Eats Itself: Harvard Students Win Push for Single-Sex Campus Organizations


The Fly Club, one of the exclusive final clubs at Harvard University

This goes back to 2017, when the university authorities were suffering heartburn over the university's long tradition of all-male "final clubs", which were claimed to be misogynist

The hypocrisy and sheer anti-male hostility in this is mind boggling. Feminists worldwide campaign for safe spaces for women.  Why must there be no safe spaces for men?  What is a "safe space" for women is apparently a "gender-discriminatory organization" for men.

Why the university has caved and removed its restrictions is a bit obscure.  The rationale seems to be that there are now no longer two sexes and that the male/female division is wrong.  So a ban on one sex is wrong



In a twist of irony that could happen only to the Left, Harvard College has rescinded its sanctions on single-sex campus organizations -- which it implemented to promote inclusivity -- after a recent Supreme Court ruling redefining “sex” to include “gender identity” rendered the sanctions discriminatory.

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided that protections against sex discrimination of the 1964 Civil Rights Act also protected LGBTQ employees from workplace discrimination on the basis of their sexual orientation. The ruling, in which the majority opinion was authored by Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch, stunned conservatives who asserted that equating sex with sexual orientation would jeopardize single-sex environments like women’s sports and shelters.

But while the full fallout remains to be seen, the ruling has had the opposite affect at Harvard, which was forced to reinstate single-sex clubs. 

According to the Harvard Crimson, the college announced a set of sanctions in 2016 which applied to members of certain clubs and single-sex Greek organizations. These sanctions prevented students in those groups from holding student-group leadership positions, varsity athletic team captaincies, and college endorsement for certain prestigious fellowships.

“Harvard College is committed to ensuring an inclusive student social life on our campus,” wrote Associate Dean of Student Engagement Alexander R. Miller in a 2018 email. “While we understand the cultural significance of these groups, our policy clearly states that we do not recognize single gender social organizations or fraternities and sororities, and therefore they are not recognized by Harvard College.”

As a result, Greek houses affiliated with national organizations were forced to disaffiliate, turning into new, gender-neutral social clubs instead: Kappa Kappa Gamma became the “Fleur-de-Lis,” Delta Gamma became the “Kali Praxi,” Alpha Epsilon Pi became “The Aleph,” and Kappa Sigma the “K.S. Club,” to name a few. The groups saw recruitment interest drop by half following the sanctions, which received intense scrutiny and pushback from students.

The new rule caused the national organizations of the former sororities and fraternities to bring two lawsuits against Harvard, ironically asserting that the college’s policy of recognizing only co-ed organizations is discriminatory, coercive, and unconstitutional.

“Harvard’s discriminatory policy has done enough harm already,” national Panhellenic and Interfraternity Council leaders wrote in a statement. “It has decimated Harvard women’s groups and created a culture of fear and distrust. Harvard should stop discriminating against its students on the basis of sex, immediately.”

But upon the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County in June, Harvard announced they would drop the sanctions, allowing single-sex clubs on campus once again. According to an email from Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, the court’s reasoning would impact the college’s policy and result in a legal loss for the college.

“In essence, [United States District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton] accepted the plaintiffs’ legal theory that the policy, although adopted to counteract discrimination based on sex, is itself an instance of discrimination based on sex,” Bacow wrote. “It now seems clear that Judge Gorton would ultimately grant judgment in the plaintiffs’ favor in the pending lawsuit and that Harvard would be legally barred from further enforcing the policy.”

Sororities and fraternities were quick to cheer the news.

“This is a huge victory for those who choose to stand up to power for the simple right to belong to a single-sex leadership organization without worry of being sanctioned for that choice,” said Gail Owen, president of Kappa Kappa Gamma. “In a much broader sense, this means that women can be free to join with other women who share in Kappa’s mission to learn, grow and inspire positive change without the threat of sanctions for choosing to do so.”

Harvard’s chapter of Alpha Phi also celebrated the news.

“We are so happy that Harvard has recognized something that we have long known,” the sorority said in an Instagram post. “Female voices have a right to be heard and deserve a place on our campus, and we cannot express how much today’s decision means to us.”

Whether Harvard students realize it or not, their fight to reinstate the college’s single-sex organizations admits that there are inherent differences between men and women and that clubs have the right to discriminate in who they welcome into their organization. For a notoriously liberal campus, that sounds pretty conservative.

SOURCE 






Why We Must Advocate for Better Civics Education in Our Schools

The sharp decline in civic knowledge among America’s youth is a growing concern. The violent turmoil of recent weeks, including the destruction of statues and memorials, has made it an urgent issue.

Justice can only be achieved if America remains a nation governed by the rule of law, committed to the founding belief that all men are created equal. But ignorance of America’s founding among today’s youth has led many of them to seek justice in ways that will lead to tyranny.

A major source of the problem is that the nation’s Founding principles are being undermined not only in colleges and universities, which have drifted steadily leftward, but even in K-12 education, where students are taught inaccurate, revisionist versions of history, such as Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” and The New York Times’ 1619 Project.

To address this problem, The Heritage Foundation recently hosted a conversation, Advocacy for Better Civics Education in Our Schools, which focused on programs and initiatives that can help restore the proper teaching of American history and civics. This conversation featured four distinguished panelists:

Tom Lindsay, distinguished senior fellow of higher education and constitutional studies and director of the Center for Innovation in Education at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Elizabeth Schultz, Fairfax County School Board member, emeritus, and education and public policy expert.
Beth Feeley, freelance writer and editor at the Woodson Center.
Janine Turner, founder and co-president of Constituting America.

Angela Sailor, vice president of Heritage’s Feulner Institute, began the discussion with a quote from Ronald Reagan:

‘Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.’

Burke noted that only 39% of all native-born Americans can pass the U.S. citizenship test. Even more alarming is what the data says about the sharp generational decline: Among native-born senior citizens, 74% pass the citizenship test, while a mere 20% of native-born Americans under the age of 45 can pass it.

Burke flagged one particular pitfall in the current approach to civics, known as “action civics” (also known as civic engagement or project-based learning civics). This methodology emphasizes “doing” civics over learning civics.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation recently completed a large-scale survey of action civics across the country. It found that the majority of civics classes are teaching students how to protest in favor of progressive political causes.

According to Burke, “There is no appreciation of the Founding documents, except to dismiss them as the sham rationalizations of white male property holders. We need to be wary because action civics is a movement that is pushing hard for wide-scale acceptance. We know our students are civically illiterate. Let’s first teach them what our principles are, and then, there are very proper ways for them to go out and ‘do civics.’ But understanding the Founding has got to be in the driver’s seat.”

In response, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has made it a priority to strengthen civics education in Texas. It is introducing legislation that would require students to study the founding documents and started a summer institute that equips high school civics teachers with resources and strategies for teaching those documents.

Schultz stressed the importance of engaging with school boards. Across the nation, 90,000 school board members play a critical role in educating the 51 million children in K-12 education. School boards help shape the curriculum and shape the education our children receive.

She warned that Fairfax County, the 10th-largest school district in the country, condones the teaching of revisionist history. Field trips to important national landmarks and historic sites have been canceled because the reference to America’s colonial history may make some “uncomfortable.”

Schultz encouraged participants to serve on school boards and actively support and advocate for leaders who understand our history.

As a parent, Feeley engaged in education advocacy to protect her children from social justice programs that teach students left-leaning views on race relations. Three years ago, her local high school proposed to hold a left-wing program on race. In her view, it was indoctrination, not education, and she felt a need to speak out to bring more balance to what they were proposing to teach the kids. The controversy that ensued became a national news story.

“Our little group of parents learned the hard way how valuable it is to have a network in place to deal with such situations,” Feeley said.

She and other parents formed New Trier Neighbors to connect conservatives in her area and to educate others on what is happening in schools and local government.  Now they have a mailing list of about 2,000 people that they can communicate with when issues arise.

Feeley also collaborates with Bob Woodson and the Woodson Center’s 1776 Unites, a project launched to refute The New York Times’ 1619 Project and its grievance-based narrative on race.

1776 Unites works to assemble independent voices who uphold our country’s authentic founding virtues and values and challenge those who define America by its past failures, notably slavery. The initiative offers alternative perspectives that celebrate the progress America has made on delivering its promise of equality and opportunity.

Turner, an actress best known for her role as Maggie in the popular series “Northern Exposure,” started Constituting America in 2010. When her daughter was 10 years old, Turner recognized that something needed to be done to save civics in education, so she reached out to her friend Cathy Gillespie. Together, they formed the organization, which enables Turner to go to schools around the country to teach the Constitution and what it means to students.

The panelists agreed with Burke, who closed by saying, “The stakes in this struggle couldn’t be higher. The philosophy taught in the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy practiced in the legislature in the next generation.”

SOURCE 






Reopen the Schools!

These big disruptions to the education system are not necessary to fight COVID-19.

At a recent meeting to discuss back-to-school procedures amid the ongoing pandemic, officials representing a school district in Wake County, North Carolina, detailed a complicated plan that would require bus drivers to administer temperature checks to students.

Any student who failed the check would be denied entry onto the bus, and a parent would be summoned to come get them. But bus drivers can't leave kids alone at bus stops, so the entire bus would have to stay put until the child was retrieved.

"Bus driver should remain on the bus to continue supervising other students on the bus, while also visually monitoring the student," declared the proposed guidance. "Bus remains with the student until they have been picked up by their parent/guardian or until another transportation official arrives to supervise the student."

It should be obvious that this plan—which is maximally disruptive for all students, parents, and employees involved—will never work. You can easily imagine kids spending all day on a bus, their restlessness and frustration mounting, as the driver waits in vain for an adult who either couldn't be reached or can't leave work.

As educators across the country begin to plan how classes will function in the fall, many proposals to make schools safer from the virus involve heavy degrees of unreality: children in masks throughout the day, classrooms half empty to accommodate social distancing, playgrounds closed, heavy reliance on virtual instruction, and so on. These precautions are largely unworkable—it's no more reasonable to expect children to wear masks and avoid interacting with each other all day than it is to make the bus wait hours if somebody fails a temperature check.

They are also at odds with the current scientific consensus about the coronavirus: that the risk to young people is minimal, and that they do not seem to spread the virus easily.

There is much that we don't know for certain about COVID-19. But the available evidence suggests that reopening schools as close to normal as possible is the most pragmatic approach. In Wired, David Zweig has presented a compelling case that the U.S. should follow Europe's lead and let students go back to school with minimal disruption:

Let's review some facts: Children are, by and large, spared the effects of the virus. According to the latest data from the CDC, infants, little kids, and teenagers together have accounted for roughly 5 percent of all confirmed cases, and 0.06 percent of all reported deaths. The Covid-linked child inflammatory syndrome that received fervent media attention last month, while scary, has even more infinitesimal numbers. "Many serious childhood diseases are worse, both in possible outcomes and prevalence," said Charles Schleien, chair of pediatrics at Northwell Health in New York. Russell Viner, president of the UK's Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, noted that the syndrome was not "relevant" to any discussion related to schools.

There is also a wealth of evidence that children do not transmit the virus at the same rate as adults. While experts note that the precise transmission dynamics between children, or between children and adults, are "not well understood"—and indeed, some argue that the best evidence on this question is that "we do not have enough evidence"—many tend to think that the risk of contagion is diminished. Jonas F. Ludvigsson, a pediatrician and a professor of clinical epidemiology at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, reviewed the relevant research literature as of May 11 and concluded that, while it's "highly likely" children can transmit the virus causing Covid-19, they "seldom cause outbreaks." The World Health Organization's chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, suggested last month that "it does seem from what we know now that children are less capable of spreading" the disease, and Kristine Macartney, director of Australia's National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance, noted a lack of evidence that school-aged children are superspreaders in her country. A study in Ireland found "no evidence of secondary transmission of Covid-19 from children attending school." And Kári Stefánsson, a leading researcher in Iceland, told The New Yorker that out of some 56,000 residents who have been tested, "there are only two examples where a child infected a parent. But there are lots of examples where parents infected children." Similar conclusions were drawn in a study of families in the Netherlands.

This is hardly surprising, given that closing the schools in the first place does not appear to have been a sound strategy for containing the coronavirus. Studies in JAMA Pediatrics and The Lancet have found ample reason to doubt whether school closures saved a significant number of lives. As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum pointed out in a review of the scientific literature, closures "have (a) little effect and (b) are probably nowhere near worth the tremendous impact they have on both parents and kids."

That's an important point: Reducing the amount of time that children spend at school is terribly burdensome for many parents who rely on school's day care effect. Keep in mind that public schools are funded through taxes. It's hardly fair for the state to confiscate vast sums of money from its citizens, in part for the purpose of child care, and then suddenly cease offering this service while keeping the money. States that want to make it possible for people to return to work—for the economy to reopen—really need to prioritize schools: They are among the first elements of public life that must return to a semblance of normality, and the risks seem comparatively low.

It won't be possible to have a completely normal school year, of course. Officials should axe egregiously risky activities—no indoor pep rallies, for instance—and adult school employees might very well opt to wear masks or take other precautions, especially if they are elderly or immunocompromised. Wherever possible, district officials should make it possible for at-risk employees to work from home, or even to take the semester off. But they should not force kids to stay at home, clinging to the delusion that distance learning under these circumstances is anything other than an horrible burden on parents, and they should not force kids to hermetically seal themselves in bubbles when they do return to class.

SOURCE 



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