I remember how it was -- JR
Sorry, College Dems: George Mason University Won't 'Silence' Glenn Youngkin
This article has been updated to reflect how ridiculous the change.org petition against Youngkin speaking is, as well as to highlight how many of the petitioners are not even from Virginia, where Youngkin governs and where GMU is located.
As woke as university administration, there's been something of a glimmer of hope as of late that they will at least stand for sanity. Then again, what they must contend with is nothing sort of insanity from both students and faculty. As Leah covered earlier on Wednesday, a professor at Wayne State University was referred to the police and suspended for quite the threatening social media post. And, at George Mason University (GMU), the administration is standing by its decision to have selected Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) as commencement speaker, despite outcry from Democrats at Mason.
While one wouldn't expect the Democrats on campus to have selected the Republican governor as their first choice for their commencement speaker, he is the governor of Virginia, where GMU, the largest public university in the commonwealth, is located. It's within the realm of possibility to believe that the university would have invited Youngkin's Democratic opponent, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, to speak if he had been elected, but he was not. McAuliffe did address the class of 2016, though, when he was in office.
A Monday statement from President Gregory Washington, "What it means to be a patriot," highlighted such a distinction of it being the largest public university in the commonwealth and also referred to GMU as the "most diverse public university" in Virginia. Diversity, as these students evidently refuse understand, also applies to diversity of speech, expression, and politics.
His statement went on to raise several more thoughtful points:
Is [Youngkin's] inclusion in commencement a betrayal of our core identity of diversity, and commitment to inclusivity? Or are his presence and the passionate objections it has inspired actually the purest reflections of who we are as Mason Patriots?
Mason students come by their objections to the Governor authentically, and their rejection of his positions are rooted in very real, deeply personal, often painful life experiences. It is my sincere hope that our students use this opportunity to share their stories, challenges and triumphs, and that the Governor will hear their opinions, respectfully consider and reflect on them, and consider that feedback when making, amending or changing his administration’s policies.
This discourse highlights one of the fundamental purposes of a university. It is a place to engage, debate, and educate on topics where we agree and disagree, sometimes profoundly. If the Governor’s speech were to be cancelled, it is unlikely that such public attention would be paid to the policies students so passionately oppose.
This is vital because our students must prepare to inherit and lead a world with endless conflicts and divisions. Would we really be preparing them for that world if we removed the opportunities for them to safely engage in debate and discourse?
Or is it better to expose them to people and ideas that may offend or challenge them, but in an environment of steadfast support and safety, so they may develop the agency to effectively express and advocate for themselves once they leave the university environment?
I believe it is the latter. If we teach that the only way to deal with opposition is to suppress it, we rob students of the very tools they will need to build an effective society.
Such points are lost on the angry students, though. Since Washington's statement, the Democrats at Mason's Twitter account has posted pictures and coverage of their protests against Youngkin. One tweet declares they "won't be silenced," though it's worth noting Washington in his statement acknowledged he had "heard from both" those opposed to the governor speaking and those opposed.
The group's retweets also suggested the students believe that Fairfax, where the university is located, is the only part of Virginia that matters in elections. Fairfax is heavily populated, and is one of the most democratic localities not only in the commonwealth but the country. That ought to be irrelevant to the governor speaking at the university, but it's also worth pointing out that Youngkin actually overperformed in the area as part of his victory in 2021. Such facts don't fit the students' narrative, though.
The account also tweeted and retweeted mockery of Washington's handling of the matter.
While the students may appear to have a loud and hyped up response, the numbers of those protesting represent a very small amount of the student body. Fox 5 highlighted about 100 students, but the student body is over 36,000 students.
Worse than the students who can't handle true diversity is that many of those who have signed the change.org petition appear to be non-students. Many are even from out of state, and thus had no business in voting to elect Youngkin or not to the state office he holds.
Many comments from those who signed are unfortunately about as immature as you'd expect. "F**k that hoe," Kiva Brazier from North Carolina wrote, though the expletive was spelled out. Nancy Hawkins from Maryland inexplicably claimed "Youngkin does not believe in free speech." Cathy Knights from Florida made a particularly bold claim that "It's spreading through all red states and is just racism and hatred dressed up as freedom." Virginia has been considered a purple or even blue state.
The petition, created by Alaina Ruffin, who describes herself as a "prospective alumna," further highlights how insufferably aggrieved and entitled college students claim to be, and how tiring it all is, as it's worth wondering how these ill-equipped young people will be able to function in the real world. A significant portion of the petition doesn't even have to do with Youngkin. One paragraph, for instance, laments:
Preceding this announcement, GMU has neglected to meet the needs of students. From allowing homophobic, transphobic, racist, and/or anti-abortion groups to regularly occupy campus and harass passersby, to ignoring students and student organizations requesting assistance or support in their endeavors, GMU administration has taken pride in the diversity of the student body. At the same time, however, the administration has failed to protect and defend those same students from harm.
Commencement is a celebration, and it's not mandatory. Rather than just staying home, though, these students seem to be suggesting that they will cause a disruption and potentially ruin the ceremony for their fellow graduates, with it being quite chilling that they think such warnings would be acceptable.
The concise and cordial statement from Gov. Youngkin's spokeswoman Macaulay Porter could not stand in more stark contrast to the disruptive students. "Governor Youngkin looks forward to addressing the 2023 graduates of George Mason University and celebrating their tremendous accomplishment," she told Townhall.
"Youngkin" was trending on Twitter throughout Wednesday, in part to the news about him indeed speaking at GMU's commencement in May, but also because of chatter he may run for president in 2024. On Wednesday, RealClearPolitics (RCP) featured a POLITICO column from John F. Harris, who wrote that "Why Glenn Youngkin Would Be Crazy Not to Run for President." Youngkin remains committed to doing the best job he can as governor of Virginia.
When asked by press last August about potential plans for higher office, the governor emphasized his "top priority is to make Virginia the best state to live work and raise a family" and that "2024 is a long way off." Reiterating his focus being on the present, he also said that "I am focused on delivering on promises made last year that have been kept. We've got a giant agenda for the rest of this year and into next year. And 2024 will happen when 2024 gets here."
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Virginia School District Boots 14 Sexually Explicit Books to County Libraries
A Virginia school district’s new superintendent decided Wednesday to remove 14 sexually explicit books from school libraries and donate them to the county government’s public library system.
The 14 “young adult” novels to be removed from libraries in Spotsylvania County Public Schools by order of Superintendent Mark Taylor, on the job since Nov. 1, include:
“All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto” by George Johnson
“Like a Love Story” by Abdi Nazemian
“Dime” by E. R. Frank
“Sold” by Patricia McCormick
“Out of Darkness” by Ashley Hope Perez
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison
“America” by E. R. Frank
“Looking for Alaska” by John Green
“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
“Water for Elephants” by Sarah Gruen
“Neanderthal Opens the Door to the Universe” by Preston Norton
“More Happy Than Not” by Adam Silvera
“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison
“Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult
It is not clear whether the Spotylvania County government’s library system would accept copies of the 14 books from the school system, or place restrictions on minors’ access to them if it does. A committee of school district staff consulted by Taylor had defended the 14 titles.
A detailed complaint filed by local parent Jennifer Petersen outlines excerpts from these 14 novels that include questionable content for a school library.
“All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto” includes a detailed scene in which the author (age 13) is molested, both receiving and giving oral sex to his cousin (age 17 or 18). The author also describes several other obscene sexual scenes.
“Dime” contains explicit scenes describing the statutory rape and prostitution of a 13-year-old, who expresses joy at losing her virginity to her pimp, “Daddy.”
“America” contains several disturbing scenes in which the 15-year-old main character is raped, describes his erections and how excited he gets by seeing both boys and girls naked, and relishes how no one can stop him from imagining rape:
“The Bluest Eye” contains several instances of characters fantasizing and experiencing incest, rape, and pedophilia. Morrison spends considerable time with many scenes intimately describing sex with children.
The effort to ban sexually explicit content from public school libraries isn’t unique to Spotsylvania County, Virginia, which is about 67 miles south of the nation’s capital. Parents and teachers around the country recently have questioned the placement of explicit books in school libraries that romanticize sexual abuse and describe or picture intimate sexual acts.
Picture books in which small children question their sexuality and express a different “gender identity” have flooded libraries around the nation in the past few years as LGBTQ+ activist groups reach out to younger audiences.
Missouri, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all recently passed measures limiting sexual content in public school curriculum and pedagogy.
Virginia law specifically states that local public schools must notify parents of “sexually explicit instructional material,” permit parents to review the material, and provide an “alternative to instructional material and related academic activities that include sexually explicit content, nonexplicit instructional material and related academic activities to any student whose parent so requests.”
Taylor, the superintendent, reasons in a memo issued Wednesday that the definition of instructional materials “includes library resources” in Spotsylvania County Public Schools libraries—and so those books are subject to parental and committee review.
Following the parental complaint made by Petersen, the Spotsylvania school district appointed a committee of school staff members to review the 14 books.
Taylor notes in his memo that, regardless of the sexually explicit content, the staff committee suggested that all 14 of the books remain in school libraries.
But Taylor disagreed with those findings, writing that it is “indisputable” that the 14 books contain graphic sexual content as defined by Virginia law:
As used in this new law, ‘sexually explicit content’ means (i) any description of or (ii) any picture, photograph, drawing, motion picture film, digital image or similar visual representation depicting sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity, as nudity is defined in § 18.2-390, sexual excitement, sexual conduct or sadomasochistic abuse, as also defined in § 18.2-390, coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism.
The superintendent also noted the difficulty of creating controlled spaces in each school library to store “sexually explicit books” that would be reviewed and curated from among over 300,000 books in the Spotsylvania school system’s library for students to check out upon request with parental permission:
The full control over sexually explicit books that is required to comply with the law would necessitate setting aside secure, controlled space in each library to store the sexually explicit books and a system to make them available to students only upon request and after checking for any parental prohibition. This would be a cumbersome and time-consuming process at best. We have no funds budgeted for the creation of secure, controlled spaces in our libraries for sexually explicit books. I am concerned also that our SCPS librarians are already stretched thin and lack the workload capacity to provide the mandated notifications, track objections, and implement parental prohibitions.
Critics have claimed that removing any book from a public school library is tantamount to book-banning, fascist practices.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, has called efforts to ban explicit books a “culture war designed primarily to goose conservative turnout at election time.”
Weingarten apparently has defended the “young adult” graphic novel “Gender Queer,” which contains illustrations of a child giving oral sex to an elderly man. The union president accused Republicans of “banning books and bullying vulnerable children,” also blaming them for the number of teachers leaving the profession.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in January 2022 against the Wentzville School District in Missouri for removing Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.” One month later, the Wentzville school board voted to reinstate the novel. The school district previously removed over 300 books after the Missouri Legislature passed a bill banning sexually explicit books from schools.
Taylor’s proposed solution in Virginia’s Spotsylvania school district is to move all copies of the 14 sexually explicit books from the school libraries into the county government’s public libraries:
Moreover, it is also apparent that no law requires SCPS [Spotsylvania County Public Schools] to keep books that include sexually explicit content in our school libraries. To the contrary, the only mandated sexually explicit instructional content in the Commonwealth of Virginia is (or is supposed to be) the Family Life Education curriculum materials prescribed by the state. Clearly, there is no information suggesting that any of the 14 books listed above is part of the Commonwealth’s Family Life Education curriculum.
I find that none of the 14 books listed above truly needs to be included in any SCPS school library. So, having met with the complainant [Petersen], it is my decision and direction on our further course of action as a division … that all 14 of the books listed above are to be excluded from our SCPS school libraries. All copies of these books are to be removed from our libraries and delivered to the School Board Office, and I will recommend that they be declared surplus property and donated to a public library.
This move appears to provide access to students whose parents grant permission to read the 14 explicit books, while keeping sexually explicit content out of Spotsylvania County’s school libraries.
Given the chaos of prior Spotsylvania County school board meetings, this memorandum is almost certain to make the next one quite the battle.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/03/29/virginia-school-district-removes-14-sexually-explicit-books
******************************************************NYC: The UFT should stop trying to close excellent public schools
Relentless in its war on public charter schools, the United Federation of Teachers is suing to evict two Success Academy schools from spaces the city Department of Education awarded them last year.
This particular brand of UFT lawfare goes back over a decade.
The courts have tossed well over a dozen similar suits brought by the union or its allies, dating back to 2011.
The new cases are based on a pure technicality, a claim that DOE didn’t adequately consider the new (UFT-engineered) class-size mandate when it designated the space for SA.
Yet both buildings clearly have plenty of room. One site, in Rockaway Park, is more than a third empty, and the other school that’s there has seen steadily falling enrollment. The other building, in Sheepshead Bay, is more than half empty.
This is nothing but harassment: filing endless nuisance lawsuits in the hopes that someday one of them will manage to triumph — and so prevent a few dozen kids from escaping to a public school that actually teaches.
Despite the union’s best efforts, Success Academy keeps growing; if it were its own school district, SA would be one of the state’s largest — and by far the most successful.
Its scholars regularly beat the results of some of the state’s most affluent districts on state math and English exams
That, though enrollment at SA is overwhelmingly from low-income black and/or Hispanic families.
The disastrous performance of DOE schools during COVID, and the evisceration of the city’s once-selective middle schools, has enrollment plummeting in the regular public school system.
The middle class, lured back under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, is fleeing.
Success and other charters now represent the best hope for saving public education in New York City.
But the UFT doesn’t care, because charters don’t serve its needs.
To ensure that future members actually have jobs, the union would do far better working to restore excellence in the regular system, rather than trying to shut down schools that work.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/29/the-uft-should-stop-trying-to-close-excellent-public-schools/
***********************************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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