I remember how it was -- JR
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Almost Three-Quarters of U.S. Academics Wouldn't Even EAT With Someone Who Rejects Transgenderism
The insanity on America’s college campuses appears to have abated somewhat. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) database, university speaker disinvitations peaked in 2016 and have slowly declined since. The Niskanen Center declared that “the campus free speech crisis” ended in 2018, and Commentary magazine reported that things were “looking up on campus” in 2019. The latest education scandals often involve elementary and high schools more than college campuses.
Yet this comparative decrease in campus outrage does not mean conservatives have made any headway in academia. In fact, an exhaustive survey of bias in academia paints a horrifying picture of systemic leftist orthodoxy and demonization of conservative dissent.
Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of London’s Birkbeck College and a board member at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, insisted that despite the relative placidity of campus news, “Academic freedom is in crisis on American campuses.”
Kaufmann noted that the National Association of Scholars recorded 65 instances of professors getting disciplined or fired for protected speech in 2020, a fivefold increase from 2019. He also reported the results of his exhaustive new study from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. In the study, he analyzed eight comprehensive surveys of academic and graduate-student opinion across the U.S., Canada, and Britain — and the results paint an ugly picture of academic groupthink.
“High-profile activist excesses are mere symptoms of a much wider problem of progressive authoritarianism,” Kaufmann argued. His study found that roughly 1 in 3 conservative academics and graduate students have faced discipline or threats of disciplinary action. “A progressive monoculture empowers radical activist staff and students to violate the freedom of political minorities like conservatives or ‘gender-critical’ feminists, who believe in the biological basis of womanhood—all in the name of emotional safety or social justice.”
Kaufmann’s report found that political discrimination pervades academia. Four in ten American academics said they would not hire a known Trump supporter for a job. In Canada, 45 percent said so. One in three British academics said they wouldn’t hire a Brexit supporter.
Between 20 percent and 50 percent of academics and graduate students have said they would discriminate against right-leaning grant applications, journal submissions, and promotion cases. Kaufmann noted that this “virtually guarantees” conservatives will face discrimination from any four-person panel.
Pro-transgender bias seems particularly virulent. Only 28 percent of American academics said they would be comfortable sitting with a gender-critical scholar over lunch, even fewer than the 41 percent said they would sit with a Trump-voting colleague. This preference isolates academics from millions of Americans who accept the truth of biological sex over the nebulous concept of gender identity.
About 75 percent of conservative academics in the social sciences and humanities in the United States and Britain said their departments have a climate hostile to their beliefs. Nearly 40 percent of faculty members who describe themselves as centrist agree.
According to Kaufmann, only 9 percent of Trump-supporting academics said they would feel comfortable expressing their political beliefs to a colleague. Only 14 percent of U.S. academics said a Trump supporter would feel comfortable expressing his beliefs at their college or university. Seventy percent of conservative U.S. academics said they self-censor in their teaching, research, or academic discussions.
Kaufmann’s studies have found that only 5 percent of American scholars in the social sciences and humanities identify as conservative and that academics on the Left outnumber those on the right by 14 to 1 in the U.S. and Canada.
Only one in ten academics support “canceling” controversial right-wing professors by firing them from their jobs, but younger academics and doctoral candidates are more likely to support this ideological enforcement. Even without high support for outright “canceling” conservatives, the hostile ideological climate exiles right-leaning academics from the outset.
Conservative and centrist students learn that if they want a future on campus, they have to self-censor — or, more likely, they decide academia is not right for them. As Kaufmann noted, “Conservatives who think their politics wouldn’t fit are significantly less likely than others to be interested in pursing an academic career.”
“In effect, there is a feedback loop: Low viewpoint diversity reproduces the hostile climate that sustains the progressive monoculture that has developed in many faculties over the past four decades,” Kaufmann explained.
Colleges and universities don’t have to engage in controversial “cancelations.” Their leftist orthodoxy is self-perpetuating and without reform, the situation will only get worse.
Tragically, this leftist stranglehold on academia often translates to claims that conservative ideas are unscientific or false, because many of the authorities automatically exclude them from discussion.
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Race-Based Admissions Are Wrong, and It's Time the Supreme Court Said So
Nearly seven years ago, the nonprofit group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) brought suit against Harvard University, claiming that its admissions process illegally discriminates against Asian Americans. After protracted litigation in US District court and the First Circuit Court of Appeals, the case has now arrived where everyone always expected it to end up: at the doorstep of the Supreme Court.
In a forceful petition for certiorari, the plaintiffs are asking the justices to review the lower-court rulings, which accepted Harvard's claim that its race-conscious admissions process passes muster under Supreme Court precedents — especially the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, which allowed the University of Michigan to take race into account in the interests of achieving "diversity." But SFFA goes farther. It wants the court to overrule Grutter and ban the use of race in college admissions altogether.
The idea of race-blind admissions may be anathema to progressive activists, but it appeals to the great majority of Americans. The Pew Research Center found in 2019 that 73 percent of US adults believe that universities should not consider race or ethnicity when considering student applications. That belief holds across racial and ethnic categories: Majorities of white, black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans all oppose the use of race as a factor in admissions. In a number of states, voters have made it illegal for officials to discriminate for or against anyone on the basis of race in higher education. One of those states is Michigan, which in 2006 banned the racial preferences that Grutter had allowed.
Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, it is against the law for any institution that receives federal funding to discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin. If Harvard were willing to forgo the more than $550 million it annually collects in federal subsidies, its race-based admissions program would be immune to legal challenge. What Harvard cannot do is take public funds and then exclude applicants because of their race. Yet for years, the plaintiffs argue, that is exactly what it has been doing.
In Grutter and subsequent cases, the Supreme Court has stressed that while universities may pursue diversity, blunt racial quotas or "outright racial balancing" are forbidden. In a memorable phrase, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg suggested that race could be taken into account as long as it was merely a "factor of a factor of a factor of a factor" in weighing a student's application. But the evidence uncovered by Students for Fair Admissions — much of it from internal Harvard documents — makes it clear that racial balancing is integral to Harvard's admissions process. According to the petition for certiorari, the university sedulously monitors the racial composition of each class as it takes shape and the dean of admissions "regularly informs the entire office of the racial makeup of the class and how it compares to the year before."
So meticulous is the emphasis on racial balancing that in the decade before SFFA filed its lawsuit, Harvard's racial percentages hardly budged: Year in, year out, Asian Americans were held to no more than 20 percent of each freshman class. Yet by every objective admissions yardstick — grades, test scores, extracurricular activities — Asian Americans outshine applicants from every other racial category. "More than 60 percent of Asian American applicants received academic ratings of 1 or 2 [the highest], compared to 46 percent of white applicants, 9 percent of African American applicants, and 17 percent of Hispanic applicants," wrote Judge Allison Burroughs following the trial in federal district court. If Harvard had been making admissions decisions strictly on the basis of academic qualifications, just over half of the average admitted class would be Asian American. The university may deny having an "Asian quota," but the data tell a different story.
Harvard explains the abnormally low percentage of admitted Asian American applicants by claiming that they consistently fall short on subjective assessments of their personality. Admissions officers routinely give Asian American students poor ratings on such traits as "likability," "kindness," "courage," and "self-confidence." Harvard calls this a "holistic" system that bases admissions decisions on a "whole-person review." SFFA calls it naked anti-Asian stereotyping.
The "holistic" process whereby Harvard turns away academically accomplished Asian Americans today is a direct descendant of the process adopted to radically curtail the number of Jewish students in the 1920s and 1930s. Explaining his proposal to deal with the "race problem" of too many qualified Jewish applicants, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell wrote in 1922: "We can reduce the number of Jews by talking about other qualifications than those of admissions examinations." The stratagem succeeded at putting a ceiling on Jewish admissions. Now it succeeds at holding down Asian American admissions.
Again and again, the Supreme Court has warned that race must not be the deciding criterion in college admissions. Unfortunately, the history of affirmative action shows that once race is allowed to be taken into account at all, it inevitably grows in importance. At Harvard, the university's own data confirm, race has come to outweigh every other diversity factor and all but the most exclusive academic and extracurricular factors.
Which is why Grutter should be overruled. "No one has a legitimate interest in treating people differently based on their skin color," the plaintiffs write in their petition to the high court. Besides, it isn't necessary to focus obsessively on applicants' race to achieve meaningful diversity. In California, the state constitution bans racial preferences in public higher education. Yet the University of California in 2019 welcomed "the largest and most diverse class of Californians ever," according to the Los Angeles Times. It followed up a year later by doing it again.
Discrimination on the basis of race, in Thurgood Marshall's words, has "no moral or legal validity in our society." There is no "diversity" exception in the Civil Rights Act, let alone in the Constitution. The Supreme Court ought to take this case, and say so once and for all.
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‘Equity’ Policy Results in Firing of 2 Veteran Educators for Refusing to Do ‘Wakanda Salute’
Two veteran educators from the Bronx were fired recently for the simple act of refusing to do the “Wakanda salute,” a gesture from the popular superhero movie “Black Panther.”
The gesture of Marvel Comics’ fictional African nation of Wakanda has been co-opted as a symbol of black power, like the raised fist iconography used extensively beginning in the 1960s by the militant Black Panthers.
Both fired teachers had nearly 30 years of service.
One, Rafaela Espinal, said she felt uncomfortable doing the Wakanda salute, and that afterward she was targeted by her colleagues. In a lawsuit filed against the New York City Department of Education, Espinal alleged that she “was admonished and told that it was inappropriate for her not to participate.”
Espinal herself identifies as Afro-Latina, and didn’t want to engage in the salute—not because she’s some secret white supremacist, but because, in her words, it introduced a racial divide where there should be none.
As her colleagues realized Espinal wasn’t going to join in their performative “wokeness,” they began harassing her. They said she wasn’t black enough, and degraded her by telling her to just “learn to be quiet and look pretty.”
The Wakanda salute that Espinal refused to do is touted by the New York City education administration as a move to promote racial equity by fostering understanding and tolerance among the staff. The irony of firing a black woman for refusing to do a black power symbol is seemingly lost on them.
To make matters worse, Espinal was not the only educator let go for refusing to toe the woke line.
Karen Ames, another veteran Bronx educator, previously hailed for raising math scores in her school district, was also fired for refusing to do the Wakanda salute.
Ames provides an even more disturbing insight into the “equity-based reforms” and the intolerance of those who push them.
One particularly horrific incident occurred during an implicit-bias workshop, where attendees were asked to recount personal anecdotes. Ames, who is Jewish, shared the story of her grandparents who lost two children in the Holocaust.
In a truly despicable response, one of Ames’ colleagues told her to “check herself” and “that [it’]s not about being Jewish. It’s about black and brown boys of color only.”
And in that one response we see the true nature of “equity.”
It’s not about achieving any real progress, and it’s certainly not about empowering minority communities. It’s about control.
Take Ames, for example. Her prior successes in increasing test scores for her students was completely overshadowed by her refusal to bend the knee and do the Wakanda salute. Her colleagues diminished the tragic loss suffered by her grandparents during the Holocaust, telling her to shut up because she wasn’t black or brown.
But here we see another problem.
Espinal is a black woman fired for refusing to indulge in a silly woke ritual. Her skin color didn’t make a bit of difference when her colleagues insulted her for wrong think. She has black skin, sure, but she doesn’t have the right opinions, so she doesn’t count.
Equity is a bludgeon used by the left to force its racist and divisive views on society.
Mike Gonzalez, a scholar at The Heritage Foundation, has written numerous articles and commentaries decrying equity for the divisive ideology it is, but he puts it most succinctly in a piece from early February. Gonzalez writes:
Equity has now come to mean the functional opposite of equality. The latter means equal treatment to all citizens, such as the Constitution calls for in the clause of the 14th Amendment that deals with equal protection of laws. Equity means treating Americans unequally to ensure that outcomes are equalized—the old tried (and failed) Marxian standard.
No one is safe in an America where equality is abandoned in favor of forced equity. As the firings of Ames and Espinal show us, the groups that equity initiatives are supposedly helping can be the first on the chopping block.
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Liberal Blogger Realized Something About His Local Schools During COVID...and It Will Anger Panic Peddlers
Trust the science, right? Trust the science unless it comes into conflict with the Democrats’ lockdown agenda. Some of you already knew this would happen in the beginning. With an election where the Left so desperately wanted Donald Trump out of office, well—the temptation for corruption on this front has proven too much for Democrats who now after defeating Trump—face absolute embarrassment as the ‘science’ says it’s safe to reopen schools. One key group is not allowing the Biden White House to come out forcefully: teachers’ unions. Almost on every front, the Biden White House has either delayed or backtracked its agenda. Funny—I thought with Biden in office, he would reopen the schools and end the virus. The only thing that’s helping us get back to normal is the vaccine which is a Trump initiative as well as its distribution plan which is on track to vaccinate 100 million people in 100 days.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is facing a recall effort and is pretty much doing what he can to get some vestige of the state reopened in time for the election. In Irvine, schools reopened eons ago and the unthinkable has happened…for the COVID panic peddlers. And that would be nothing. The CDC has for weeks said it’s safe to reopened schools. Overall, kids don’t get it or spread it. Even Joe Biden admitted that fact during CNN’s town hall event last month. Kevin Drum, a liberal blogger formerly with Mother Jones, posted about Irvine last week.
“Here in Irvine the schools have been open all year, and today it occurred to me that I've heard . . . nothing . . . about this. No complaints big enough to make the paper. Apparently, no dramatic deaths. Nothing,” he wrote. And here’s the excerpt of the report he cited:
Since resuming in-person instruction on September 24, IUSD and the Orange County Health Care Agency have found no evidence of student-to-staff or student-to-student transmission, and only two confirmed cases of staff-to-staff transmission. In each of these cases, physical distancing practices were not followed.
....Case rates remain extremely low and isolated. Our site rates have not come anywhere close to the state’s threshold for closing schools or other facilities.
Drum added that when you analyze the caseload, only 17 students out of 23,000 have contacted the virus as of March 3. What about the staff? Only three out of 3,000. Reopen the damn schools.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
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://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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