I remember how it was -- JR
Leftist Segregation Trends Are Racist
Racism is bad but segregation is good?
Growing up, I learned that someone was being “racist” when they treated certain people differently based on the color of their skin or ethnicity — and especially when excluding them from participation in the activities enjoyed by the majority race. Shockingly, the segregated graduation events taking place at Columbia University fit that exact criterion.
The graduation ceremonies being held are selective to Native, Asian, “Latin X,” and black students, as as well as low-income students. There’s even a special lavender ceremony for the so-called “LGBTIAQ+ community.” In a social media post this week, Columbia officials said, “Reports today … misrepresent our multicultural graduation celebrations, which exist in addition to not instead of, university-wide commencement.” Interestingly enough, middle-class and white students do not get these special segregated privilege ceremonies.
It does not stop there on university campuses. Candace Owens recently noted, “Netflix now has a category for ‘Black Cinema,’ and Uber eats now has a category for black restaurants — the Left has reintroduced segregation back into American Society under the guise of progressivism.”
I support the celebration of cultural heritage and our differences as individuals, but I find the double standards blatant and offensive. Elevating certain races or cultures while excluding others amounts to segregation, which encourages ethnocentricity and racial supremacy. American civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, the first black child through the desegregated doors of all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana, once observed: “Kids know nothing about racism. They’re taught that by adults.”
The constant effort of leftist adults to segregate colleges, TV shows, restaurants, and social media has the effect of teaching my generation that this is how the world is supposed to be. It’s not.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/78655-leftist-segregation-trends-are-racist-2021-03-25
*****************************************Why Liberal Arts Colleges Are Failing and How to Revive Them
The loss of public trust in universities that has risen to front page news did not suddenly emerge in 2020. In 2018 the non-partisan Gallup organization found that, for the first time, less than half of Americans have “a lot of confidence” in higher education. Even more pointedly, Gallup reported that “No other institution has shown a larger drop in confidence over the past three years than higher education.”
The loss of civic faith in higher education has been building for a while.
American liberal arts education has lost its moorings. A 2012 article in Inside Higher Ed crystallizes the debate into one between the “crisis in the humanities and…the task of making them relevant in the 21st century.” Should college be a professional trade school preparing students for white-collar vocations such as accounting, or is its purpose a purely academic exercise?
This foundational question has immediate budgetary repercussions as universities, having avoided dealing head-on with the reality of ongoing revenue shrinkage since 2008, are now facing a moment of fiscal reckoning. The Chronicle of Higher Education has projected there is a chance that universities may “lose 25 to 50 percent of their revenue in 2021.”
For a path forward, we need to look beyond the liberal university. The Harvard Business Review reminds us that solutions are often found in models outside of a particular industry. There is indeed a living, breathing, under-the-radar example of what our universities should be doing.
It is called conservatory.
Here is how a place such as the Juilliard School of Music or any similar kind of arts institution can inform the reorganizing of the American liberal arts college. They don’t follow the standard liberal arts prototype most Americans think of when conjuring up an academic and social image of college. That’s precisely why conservatories might be one of our best resources at this sink-or-swim moment in higher education.
I went to college at a place like Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music. I studied the development and practice of classical music during a four-year undergraduate program. At a conservatory there is a seamless weaving together of vocational training alongside a rigorous theoretical disciplinary immersion.
The college experience at a conservatory has an exceptionally well-structured academic curriculum that combines the intensive study of a literature, such as the history of music, alongside interpretation and performance by students of that canon.
Let’s start from the beginning to show how this model can offer an alternative approach to our sagging liberal arts formula.
Students enter conservatory with a major from their first day, such as the instrument in which they specialize. This doesn’t mean that if they find they love another field, perhaps music composition instead of an instrument, they cannot switch majors. But, there is a concentration from their first semester that lends meaning and direction to their work.
A conservatory freshman enters college with a laser focus. Making a commitment to a major upon entrance provides a framework that enables the student to transition from high school to college with personal meaning and a felt need to study and practice a discipline. Students have direction. The aimlessness many college undergraduates experience is not an option in conservatory.
The floundering student syndrome of the liberal arts college was noted over a decade ago. Over 50 percent of U.S. college students fail to graduate, mostly due to a lack of taking on the independent responsibility needed to finish school. Available data indicates that conservatory students do better in seeing through their commitment to achieve a bachelor’s degree. For example, at 92 percent, the New England Conservatory of Music has one of the highest student retention rates in the country.
Because the arts evolved in consecutive historical periods, such as Baroque, Classical, and Romantic epochs in music, the conservatory staggers its academic curriculum accordingly. As the course catalog at Manhattan School of Music states,
During the freshman and sophomore years…students in the classical division take a sequence of courses especially designed to unify, coordinate, integrate, and interrelate basic studies in music theory, music history, and the humanities…The unified core curriculum prepares the undergraduate student to take intense, specialized, elective courses in the junior and senior years.
There is no jumping from course to course as in a liberal arts college. Rather, students build their knowledge of their art and the cultural contexts in which it developed. By the time they graduate, conservatory alumni have at their fingertips command over both a discipline and the progress of human thought as it has matured over time. The curriculum is tightly woven so that it is clearly sequenced from semester to semester.
The conservatory program also entails the vocational aspect of praxis regarding one’s major. Students take weekly lessons in the studio of a master teacher, work with classmates in ensembles, take a music pedagogy course in how to teach, and must pass a jury every year where they play for faculty. Students play a concert program to qualify for a bachelor’s degree. When students reach their final two years of coursework, they are taking “advanced courses” that include multicultural interdisciplinary classes which combine music, art, and literature.
Fiscally, conservatories got it right. They often work out of one building. They do not have expansive administrative overhead. Students frequently work during college. Many of my classmates played in Broadway pit bands or did studio work.
There is no jumping from course to course as in a liberal arts college. Rather, students build their knowledge of their art and the cultural contexts in which it developed.
There is no crisis in the world of arts conservatories. They have a clear grasp of their mission, and so do their applicants. Job placement numbers reflect the success of this kind of educational model. Almost half of performance majors work in their discipline, while over half of music education majors also work in their major. However, only 27 percent of liberal arts graduates find employment in their major field.
What can we learn from this model?
First, students should enter college with a major. Colleges should abandon the typical two-year freshman and sophomore course buffet. Students come to their university with intellectual purpose. A declared discipline from the start mitigates early student floundering in finding academic focus.
Second, create cohesive curricula in which classes speak to each other consistently over the four-year liberal arts course load. When courses are clearly in dialogue, students understand what they are doing day in and day out in the classroom.
Colleges need not be bound by a singular academic subject. Some may choose civic engagement as their theme. Others may choose the Great Books. Regardless of emphasis, a lucid mission will detract from those who might just wonder what a college is doing with its students’ tuition payments.
Third, engage students with serious practitioner roles. In the liberal arts context, that could be through practicums with community partners in the arena of civic engagement. For example, just as conservatory students must perform chamber music in public concerts, have students make public presentations about issues of local concern to community stakeholders, thereby bringing theory to practice.
Finally, remember that the goal of higher education is to transmit the scope of one’s field. That is how we train the workforce of tomorrow, whether for an orchestra or a tech company.
If we can implement these reforms in the American liberal arts college, there is hope yet. While there is no comparative study on conservatory enrollment, they are not declining like many colleges are. One conservatory reported to me that it has only lost its international students during this unique year of COVID-19, but its domestic applications are doing fine.
At Wagner College, there is evidence this strategy works. While we have not required a major for entering students, our interdisciplinary curricular commitment to civic engagement, in terms of ongoing partnerships that take various forms (such as student research think tanks or volunteering with community organizations all under a cohesive rubric called “The Wagner Plan”) has helped us hold steady, even during the pandemic. While there are always adjustments to be made, our anchor in community work offers clarity of institutional mission and resolve in our pedagogy and purpose.
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The Latest Canceling at Vanderbilt Shows That Everyone Is Awful and We Are All Doomed
The latest episode of cancel culture at Vanderbilt University should terrify Americans. This is a harbinger of the damage the woke “social justice” mob can do when there are no adults in the room, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of not standing up to the ridiculous standards of modern outrage.
Last month, Vanderbilt University held its elections for the president and vice president of student government. The two leading campaigns pitted Jordan Gould and Amisha Mittal against Hannah Bruns and Kayla Prowell.
Shortly after the campaign began, rumors swirled that Gould, who is Jewish, attended a Sigma Chi fraternity event that broke the fraternity into North and South teams, with games and events loosely based on the Civil War. Cue the outrage.
The “North/South week” appears to have been a themed event in good fun. Early reports claimed Sigma Chi used a Confederate flag in the event and that some players chanted, “The South will rise again!” Some claimed the event was a longstanding tradition for the fraternity. Gould claimed that none of these claims were true, but that didn’t stop him from catering to the mob by calling the event “racist.”
“This week we draw the battle lines and celebrate the 79th annual Sigma Chi North/South Week. Our house is historically divided among Southerners and Northerners, so, we like to determine which half of the country reigns supreme,” read an October 2018 email obtained by Vanderbilt’s student newspaper, The Hustler. Monday was to feature a “Battle of Gettysburg Reenactment” in the fraternity’s basement.
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Reports claim that this “reenactment” merely consisted of a game of beer pong, where spilled beer was referred to as “spilled blood.” The Civil War was a serious conflict centered on the expansion of race-based slavery into the territories, but college students are known for making fun games out of a broad assortment of topics. Only a bizarre woke form of Puritanism would demonize this event as racist.
College students — who are ostensibly adults — should be able to recognize that this “reenactment” was not the same thing as an endorsement of the South’s cause.
From the reporting, it seems there was nothing truly objectionable about the North/South week, but on Vanderbilt’s woke campus, this event was radioactive. In fact, it was so radioactive that Jordan Gould made a tremendous mistake — he lied about it. Gould lied to his campaign team and to the student body.
Even when Gould claimed he had not attended the event, the woke mob came for him.
Suddenly I started to get tweets and group messages where people told me to go to hell, that I was a white supremacist and a racist confederate. My senior advisor, a woman of color, was asked why she supported a Colonizer.
The other candidates’ supporters tore down our posters and ripped my head off the pictures, a sinister warning of what was to come. My campaign was called the white supremacist campaign. False social media posts circulated that my fraternity had parties with confederate flags and chanted that the south would rise again. One message said, “White men are the absolute worst!” Soon after, the posts got even more terrifying — “Hitler got something right!” and “he should get dragged for it!” I began to fear for my safety. Why was this happening?
I felt hopeless. It was a level of fear I couldn’t even process. Everything I had worked for was destroyed, and so was my reputation. I felt like I could never come back from this.
Vanderbilt has rules to protect its students, whom Gould described as “not fully-formed adults,” from the rigors of political campaigning. “These rules are also there to cultivate a safe space so students can model collegiality and civility. Vandy’s campaign rules prohibit negative campaigning and ban any remark or attack about a candidate’s personal character. Candidates are held responsible for the actions of their supporters and, when there is a violation, the rules require a formal apology.”
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Yet Gould said Vanderbilt did not stand up for him when he faced the social justice onslaught. “Even the student deputy election commissioner, who was supposed to be impartial and enforce the rules, joined the opposition and participated in the vitriolic shaming and blaming. She violated the very rules she was supposed to enforce,” Gould recalled in a Medium post after the campaign.
The candidate could only sustain his lie for so long. Eventually, he confessed that he had indeed attended the “North/South week,” he apologized, and he dropped out of the race, The Hustler reported.
At that point, Gould explained what actually happened at the “North/South week.”
“The racism that existed is limited to the name of the event and dividing of teams based on cardinal directions,” the former candidate told the school newspaper. “The allegations about the event in the AGL post including the presence of a Confederate flag, chants of ‘the South will rise again,’ that the event was a longstanding tradition, or that any member chose a side based on ‘support’ are completely inaccurate and false.”
“I am sorry to Hannah and Kayla, and to everyone in the student body who has been hurt by my words and actions,” Gould said. “There is no excuse for my participation in that event, for my lies and for the misogynoir in my campaign’s official statement.” (Misogynoir is an intersectionality term that refers to the misogyny directed towards black women in particular.)
Yet the damage had already been done. Amisha Mittal, Gould’s running-mate, wrote a letter to the editor of The Hustler in which she condemned the former candidate and confessed to supporting his racism and misogynoir.
“Two weeks ago, my running mate Jordan Gould was accused of attending a fraternity event during North/South week that made light of the Civil War. When confronted about it, Jordan lied, insisting to the campaign team that he would have never attended such an event,” Mittal wrote. “However, after we trusted his word, defended him and continued to campaign, Jordan revealed on Sunday night that the event had indeed occurred and that he had willingly participated.”
“With that part of the story told, I want to personally apologize for the statement our campaign released on March 19. Our statement was wrong because it contained and defended a slate of falsities, condemned both Hannah and Kayla for rhetoric and discourse that was beyond their control and was harmful to many marginalized communities on campus,” the former running-mate continued.
“This harm was magnified given the relative lack of context into which we released our aggressively targeted remarks. I was complicit in approving the release of this harmful message to the Vanderbilt community that contained anti-Blackness and misogynoir, and I take responsibility for the hurt that it caused,” she added, brow-beating herself further. “I see now that our statements were unjustified and that their tone and language were harmful to so many people, most of all Black Women and Vanderbilt’s broader Black community.”
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Gould and Mittal have removed their campaign profile from Instagram, so it appears the March 19 statement is no longer available. From the context of Mittal’s letter to the editor, it seems the “anti-Blackness and misogynoir” mostly consisted of accusing a black candidate, Hannah Bruns, of supporting or orchestrating the attacks on Gould.
On Tuesday, Gould wrote a long Medium post bragging about his “economic inclusivity” efforts and explaining that the woke mob came for him. His self-congratulatory tone is nauseating, but he does give a salient warning about social justice cancel culture.
“I challenge my fellow students to consider how social justice is being weaponized to do the exact opposite of social justice; false narratives cement dangerous, hurtful stereotypes. When the social justice mob came for me, I was forced into an unsafe space where no one could see my suffering,” he wrote.
To sum up, a woke mob at Vanderbilt demonized a guy for attending a North/South-themed event that didn’t even include a Confederate flag. Rather than standing up to this absurd attack, Gould lied, saying he didn’t attend the event. His campaign appears to have attacked his opponent for digging through the mud — the natural political response. Vanderbilt allegedly did not step in to protect the students, despite its policy.
Then, when the truth came out, Gould issued a brow-beating apology, freely confessing to misogynoir and racism. His running-mate also confessed to spreading hate.
Americans can sympathize with Gould, but he very much made his bed here. Even after confessing to the lie, he didn’t have to confess to racist misogyny. This seems like painful overkill, and it also risks defining racism and misogyny down. Accusing a black female political opponent of getting dirty with political attacks does not constitute racism or misogyny — it’s just ordinary politics.
All this brouhaha came about because a fraternity held a “North/South week.” Imagine the outrage that would ensue if Vanderbilt Sigma Chi had an Axis & Allies tournament!
Americans can laugh at this carnival of nonsense, but these college kids are growing up, and they’re not losing their “wokeness” in the first few years off campus. A school board member recently compared school reopening to race-based slavery. American society is changing, and episodes like this one are a harbinger, not a sideshow.
We should be very afraid
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Professor Accused of Using a 'Racial Slur' After Criticizing Those Who Praised China's COVID Response
A University of San Diego Law School professor, Thomas Smith, is facing calls for his firing after he published a blog post characterizing people who defended the Chinese government’s coronavirus response as “swallowing so much Chinese c**k swaddle.”
The dean of the law school responded to the pressure to can Smith by legitimizing the idiotic charge when he opened an “investigation” into the matter.
Eugene Volokh, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune, points out the danger in trying to equate racism with criticism of any government, regardless of ethnic makeup.
The title of Smith’s post is about China, and the quote refers four times to China in ways that unambiguously reference the government. Though the word “Chinese” can refer to the government, the nation or the ethnic group, here the referent is clear. If there had been any ambiguity, Smith later added a note reinforcing the ordinary reading of his words: “I was referring to the Chinese government.”
And yet, Dean Robert Shapiro wrote a letter to the University of San Diego Law School community where he described Smith’s phrase as “offensive language in reference to people from China.”
Silly man, Since when did context matter to the Visigoths invading academia? He used the word “China” didn’t he? He used the vulgarity, didn’t he?
Guilty as charged.
Some of Smith’s biggest critics wouldn’t think twice about criticizing the Israeli government for its settlement policies. Isn’t that “anti-Semitism? Apparently, not. It’s racism against the Palestinians.
It must be exhausting to be woke. It just gets harder to keep track of all these contradictions. Maybe they should start writing them down.
Needless to say, academic freedom is under threat if the barbarians win.
To say speech is protected as a matter of law is merely a starting point. Smith’s speech must be protected as a matter of academic freedom, social mores, and a culture of liberty. We must always have the right to forcefully criticize governments — American, Chinese, Israeli, Russian, Saudi or whatever else.
Such freedom of criticism is necessary so that we can help influence our own governments’ internal behavior. It’s necessary so that we can help influence our own governments’ behavior towards other governments. It’s necessary so that we can figure out the perils that these governments might be posing, to us, to their own citizens, or to their neighbors.
Those vital necessities pale in comparison to the importance of policing speech with an iron hand. Never mind that it doesn’t make any sense. Nor does it matter if there’s a logical coherence in the policing.
All that matters is to attack and destroy. The Red Guards would have been pleased with their tactics.
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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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