I remember how it was -- JR
AZ to Require Parental Permission For Schools to Refer to Students As Different Pronouns
State senator-elect John Kavanagh (R-AZ) introduced a proposal that would require parental permission for schools to refer to students' desired pronouns that are opposite their biological sex.
“An employee or independent contractor of a school district or charter school may not knowingly address, identify or refer to a student who is under eighteen years of age by a pronoun that differs from the pronoun that aligns with the student’s biological sex unless the school district or charter school receives written permission from the student’s parent,” Kavanagh’s proposal read.
The bill also protects those who have moral and religious obligations. It states that a school district or charter school may not require staff to refer to a person that differs from their biological pronoun if it contradicts their religious or moral convictions.
“Under my bill, you can call a person by a different pronoun or you can even call the person by a name associated with the opposite biological gender, so long as the parents have given permission,” the Republicans said.
Kavanagh added that this will help students who need help, find it.
“Transgender students are often under psychological stress… in fact, there’s a term called gender dysphoria and that type of condition needs parental assistance and perhaps even medical attention that the parents refer the students to. This cannot happen if the school keeps the parents in the dark,” he continued.
However, newly-elected governor Katie Hobbs (D-AZ) could potentially throw the bill away.
“I’m not willing to assume that Gov. Hobbs would want to keep parents in the dark, especially when the children have a condition that results overall in higher suicide rates,” Kavanagh said, adding, “I think parents need to know, they need to get help for the children and counseling. I’m not going to assume the governor would oppose that.”
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‘Voice in the Wilderness’ Mounts Run for Harvard Board
One of Harvey Silverglate’s first cases was defending protesting students who took over Harvard’s University Hall in 1969. The long-time lawyer has now found a new front for his fight for civil rights: a bid for Harvard’s Board of Overseers, its governing body tasked with supervising the university’s “overarching academic mission.”
The crusading outsider, who founded the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is making a move for the inner circle. He promises to shine a light into the “dark crevices” of a university he feels has lost its way.
Mr. Silverglate, a Harvard Law graduate who lives at Cambridge, calls himself a “voice in the wilderness” and a “dissident” who aims to bring a new perspective. He argues that the way “Harvard is run is absurd,” and castigates the “suppression of free speech and thought” that has taken root at the 386-year-old school.
Asked about Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, Mr. Silverglate observes that she is “very bad news for Harvard” and finds it unfortunate that the school chose someone from the “inside.” Ms. Gay previously served as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a post that gave her purview over Harvard’s factitious faculty.
Mr. Silverglate asserts that Ms. Gay is “super politically correct.” He suggests that her predecessor, Lawrence Bacow, was undone by an administration staffed by bureaucrats “over which he had no control.” Mr. Bacow is stepping down after five years at the helm.
The lawyer, who has represented Michael Milken, Leona Helmsley, and the Church of Scientology, sees “administrative bloat” as a national malady. “Deans need something to do,” he laments, and the result is less free speech and impoverished due process rights for students. He says that he would fire the majority of Harvard's administrators.
Mr. Silverglate, described in the New York Times as an “old-fashioned civil libertarian,” is the author of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses.” He avers that “affirmative action has been a disaster” and anticipates that the Supreme Court will hand Harvard a legal loss and end the practice when it rules on its constitutionality this June.
This is Mr. Silverglate’s second bid for a seat on the Board of Overseers, and he is working to garner the requisite signatures to secure a spot on the ballot. He says the number of signatures needed to do so has been raised 10-fold from the number required when he first ran for overseer, to 3,000. Members are elected to the body via a vote of Harvard’s alumni, who will cast their ballots between the first of April and the 16th of March.
https://www.nysun.com/article/voice-in-the-wilderness-mounts-run-for-harvard-board
*************************************************The decay of the universities
Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public—and often enraged alumni.
Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition—and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses.
But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether.
Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4% alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14% in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.
Men account for about 71% of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60% of all college students—an all-time high.
Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
The number of history majors has collapsed by 50% in just the last 20 years. Tenured history positions have declined by one-third to half at major state universities.
In the last decade alone, English majors across the nation’s universities have fallen by a third.
At Yale University, administrative positions have soared over 150% in the last two decades. But the number of professors increased by just 10%. In a new low/high, Stanford recently enrolled 16,937 undergraduate and graduate students, but lists 15,750 administrative staff—in near one-to-one fashion.
In the past, such costly praetorian bloat would have sparked a faculty rebellion. Not now. The new six-figure salaried “diversity, equity, and inclusion” commissars are feared and exempt from criticism.
Since 2020, the old proportional-representation admissions quotas have expanded into weird “reparatory” admissions. Purported “marginalized populations” have often been admitted at levels greater than percentages in the general population.
Consequently, “problematic” standardized tests are damned as biased and antithetical to “diversity.”
To accommodate radical diversity reengineering, the only demographic deemed expendable are white males. Their plunging numbers on campus, especially from the working class, are now much less than their percentages in the general population—regardless of grades or test scores.
At Yale, the class of 2026 is listed as 50% white and 55% female. Fourteen percent were admitted as “legacies.” In sum, qualified but poor white males without privilege or connections seem mostly excluded.
Stanford’s published 2025 class profile claims a student body of “23% white.” Fewer than half of the class is male. Stanford mysteriously does not release the numbers of those successfully admitted without SAT tests—but recently conceded it rejects about 70% of those with perfect SAT scores.
In fact, universities are quietly junking test score requirements. Ironically, these time-honored standardized tests were originally designed to offer those from underprivileged backgrounds, or less competitive high schools, a meritocratic pathway into elite schools.
At Cornell, students push for pass/fail courses only and the abolition of all grades. At the New School in New York, students demand that everyone receives “A” grades. Dean’s lists and class and school rankings are equally suspect as counterrevolutionary. Even as courses are watered down, entitled students still assume that their admission must automatically guarantee graduation—or else!
Skeptical American employers, to remain globally competitive, will likely soon administer their own hiring tests. They already suspect that prestigious university degrees are hollow and certify very little
Traditional colleges will seize the moment and expand by sticking to meritocratic criteria as proof of the competency of their prized graduates.
Private and online venues will also fill a national need to teach Western civilization and humanities courses—by non-woke faculty who do not institutionalize bias.
More students will continue to seek vocational training alternatives. Some will get their degrees online for a fraction of the cost.
Alumni will either curb giving, put further restrictions on their gifting, or disconnect.
Eventually, even elite schools will lose their current veneer of prestige. Their costly cattle brands will be synonymous with equality-of-result, overpriced indoctrination echo chambers, where therapy replaced singular rigor and their tarnished degrees become irrelevant.
How ironic that universities are rushing to erode meritocratic standards—history’s answer to the age-old, pre-civilizational bane of tribal, racial, class, elite, and insider prejudices and bias that eventually ensure poverty and ruin for all.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/12/26/are-universities-doomed/
***********************************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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