I remember how it was -- JR
School System’s Decision Against Flying ‘Pride’ Flags Outside Buildings Angers LGBTQ+ Activists
LGBTQ+ protesters gather April 27 in front of the Westwood Regional school board in Bergen County, New Jersey, to complain about a policy allowing only the U.S. and state flags to be flown outside schools. (Photo: screenshot of livestream)
School board meetings in one New Jersey district have turned into a toxic fiasco as LGBTQ+ protesters screamed and cursed at board members over a policy to fly only the American and New Jersey flags in front of schools.
The last two scheduled school board meetings of the Westwood Regional School District in Bergen County, New Jersey, erupted into controversy because the policy excludes the outdoor display of rainbow flags and other banners of the LGBTQ+ movement, along with all other types of flags.
Protesters accused the school board of using the policy to attack the LGBTQ+ community, since it bans flying the “Pride” or “Progress Pride” flags from flagpoles outside schools, as several other government buildings in New Jersey do.
School board members responded that the policy prohibits all flags except the American and New Jersey flags, not just flags associated with the LGBTQ+ movement, which includes transgenderism.
“I don’t want any special-interest flag flown over a government building,” board member Laura Cooper told the crowd April 27.
However, no board policy states that teachers may not fly flags of their choice in their classrooms, or that students may not display the Pride or Progress Pride flags on their backpacks or clothing throughout the day.
Four hours into the school board’s April 27 meeting, former board member Andrea Gerstmayr called out Cooper for “not looking” at her as Gerstmayr criticized the flag policy.
“I would like to say that nobody on the board should ever criticize nor undermine [a student’s] words when she says that she needs the Pride flag to feel safe,” Gerstmayr said, “or any LGBTQ+ child needs to know when it is flown outside of a building, Ms. Cooper—Ms. Cooper …”
Gerstmayr began chastising Cooper for “not giving me the respect” of attention while she spoke, although it appears from a video of the meeting that Cooper was writing something down.
“You need to look at me when I am—” began Gerstmayr, before she was cut off by board President Michael Pontillo, who informed her that she wasn’t allowed to directly address board members and asked that she take her seat.
Gerstmayr refused, waving her arms as she exclaimed, “She should look at me. I can talk.”
Pontillo responded: “You’re not supposed to address board members directly, Andrea, you would know that—you were a board member. It’s actually in the rules, so you can have a seat. Thank you.”
Gerstmayr persisted, shouting: “No, I am standing here and I am going to say what I’m going to say.”
Pontillo then asked a police officer to escort Gerstmayr from the lectern. As many in the crowd yelled or booed, Pontillo said, “We have rules, folks.”
When the crowd began to become unruly, shouting obscenities at the board, Pontillo requested that Gerstmayr finish her statement without distractions.
But Gerstmayr continued to complain, saying that Cooper appeared to be on her phone. Several other board members, looking exasperated, informed Gerstmayr that Cooper clearly was taking notes.
Gerstmayr abandoned her criticism of Cooper’s note-taking, asking the board why U.S. embassies fly the [Pride] flag, if the American flag is a symbol of pride and unity:
Why do U.S. embassies fly the [Pride] flag? To show our citizens around the world that they are a safe haven, for anyone to come and come to the embassy to know that they are safe. And that is what our LGBTQ children need to know, that when they see this flag outside flown on—doesn’t have to be the same mast as the one as the United States flag, but to know that they are safe. They need the symbol.
The May 11 school board meeting descended into more chaos, as the board adopted the flag policy and several speakers used the public comment segment to air grievances.
May 11, 2023, Westwood Regional School District Board Meeting
Sharon McDonough, an administrative assistant for the Westwood Regional School District, wore a Progress Pride flag in her hair as she began her remarks by telling the students present that the district’s classrooms were safe spaces for them.
McDonough then turned around and accused board member Douglas Cusato of telling others to “go f— themselves” when she asked him to wear a mask in 2020.
Many protesters at the May 11 meeting also accused the school board of “dehumanizing an entire community of people,” as one speaker put it, because it appointed a committee to examine the district’s sex education policy and to determine whether teachers may promote LGBTQ+ topics in elementary classrooms.
One student told the school board this was “gross overreach.” She said the board needed to “listen to experts” and review “peer-reviewed studies” in order to determine policy.
“It feels like you are using your own beliefs and agendas to push a prejudicial and discriminatory viewpoint on this district,” the student said.
Another speaker, who identified himself as a teacher, suggested a scenario at a local carnival in which a student asks him whether “someone can have two moms.”
“What would you say?” the teacher asked the board. He then began repeating the word “empathy” into the microphone as a small crowd behind him waved Pride and Progress flags.
However, no proposed or adopted policy in Westwood Regional School District prohibits teachers from mentioning spouses or parents who are in either straight or gay relationships.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/17/lgbtq-activists-protest-new-jersey-schools-flag-policy
*****************************************************DeSantis Signs Bill Curtailing Diversity Programs at Public Colleges
This week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill into law to curtail spending on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs at the state’s public colleges.
The law, S.B. 266, prohibits public colleges from using federal or state funds on diversity programs, which DeSantis described as “discriminatory initiatives” that divide students.
“Florida has ranked number one in higher education for seven years in a row, and by signing this legislation we are ensuring that Florida’s institutions encourage diversity of thought, civil discourse, and the pursuit of truth for generations to come,” DeSantis said in a statement. “Florida is taking a stand for empowering students, parents, and educators to focus on creating opportunities for our younger generations. I am happy to have worked with the legislature to get this important legislation signed, sealed, and delivered.”
In remarks at the bill signing, DeSantis said that college staffers feel like they “walk on eggshells” and “don’t have the freedom to speak their minds” on campuses.
“For us, with our tax dollars, we want to focus on the classical mission on what a university is supposed to be. We don’t want to be diverted to a lot of these niche subjects that are heavily politicized. We want to focus on the basics,” DeSantis said.
“Universities should be on the hook for the student loans,” he added, pointing out that many of the “woke” majors offered at colleges and universities do not make students employable after graduation.
“If that were the case, they [the schools] would make sure that their curriculum was really fit to be productive for the students when they graduated,” he explained. “We’re going to have traditional education. We want courses and majors that have high return on investment.”
“Some of these niche subjects, like Critical Race Theory, other types of DEI-infused courses and majors – Florida’s getting out of that game. If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to Berkeley,” he said.
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Grand buildings are no substitute for genuine scholarship at our universities
A symbol of what is wrong with today’s universities is the new building at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, opened last week.
Costing $250m, and taking five years to construct, this gleaming white 12-storey edifice towers over its neighbouring Victorian-era suburb of Fitzroy like a graceless box-shaped Taj Mahal, but in this case named after St Theresa of Kolkata.
The student facilities inside are of plush five-star quality, with generous workspaces and airy lounges set among internal gardens and external terraces, offering spectacular views over the city. So, what is the problem?
The top priority of a university, as a teaching and research institution, should be the quality of its academic staff. Where excellence is valued and privileged over everything else, morale is likely to be high, books and articles influential, teaching inspiring, and departments and faculties can be pretty much left to look after themselves.
Yet it is hard to discern any serious concern with excellence from vice-chancellors, their deputies and deans, over the past 25 years, especially in arts and humanities faculties – apart, that is, from mantras vented in rhetorical mission statements.
This has been the era of the hollowing out of departments, in wave after wave of retrenchment. Tenured lecturers and professors have been replaced by low-paid casual staff, usually part-time lecturers and tutors.
Concurrently, the traditional lecture has been abandoned, with students shifting to online learning, partly by choice but also with encouragement.
Less and less actual attendance at the campus has meant that real tutorials and seminars, in which actual teachers conduct discussions, are starting to look like anachronisms from a long-distant past. In a virtual university, fewer staff are needed.
The waves of retrenchment have been conducted with one aim in view – cost efficiency. The once-upon-a-time collegiate, imbued with a centuries-old humanist ethos, has morphed into an industry like any other, obeying a value-free logic, as if to vindicate the Marxist caricatures of capitalism that humanities disciplines have increasingly purveyed to students over the past 40 years.
I haven’t seen one instance of discrimination along the lines that there are some staff we can’t afford to let go, on the grounds of their research and teaching excellence. To give one example with which I’m familiar, of a smallish Humanities department that had one senior staff member with a well-justified, high international reputation – and who was the intellectual soul of the department, and a gifted teacher. He was encouraged to retire early as if he were no different from some lazy hack, of no greater benefit to the university than a first-year tutor on half his salary.
Administrators seemed to have no conception of mediocrity, including the depressing effect of uninspired and uninterested lecturers on students. I hope I’m wrong here, and there have been odd exceptions to this rankly unprofessional behaviour from top university management.
As a somewhat absurd comparison, I remember being told decades ago when I was a postgraduate student at Cambridge University that if you wanted to find the Nobel prize winners then look in tin shacks along the river, as you wouldn’t meet them dining leisurely at college high tables. Admittedly, the nature of scientific research has changed since those days, but the lesson remains. In any creative area, the rigours of producing the best work are formidable and unrelenting.
The ACU has announced, coinciding with the opening of its Melbourne Taj Mahal, that it needs to cut at least 110 full-time jobs. It is facing a reported $30m deficit.
The deficit is not just due to building largesse. The ACU is also faced with plunging enrolments – 30 per cent in humanities’ students at the Melbourne campus – making one speculate about white elephants. Indeed, humanities enrolments are in decline around the Western world, partly due to the pall of boredom spread by over-politicised curriculums – who wants to hear about Jane Austen’s passing, obscure concern about slavery at the expense of her magisterial displaying of characters suffering the vicissitudes of life!
Sociologists call it conspicuous consumption. The executive invests its hopes and its pride in opulent campus palaces, with office suites at the top, reminiscent of Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burnt beneath him.
It is allied to the fact that in recent decades, university administrations have relentlessly expanded their tiers of management. The manager has replaced the professor as the key figure in the institution. Lip-service these days, at best, is paid to professorial boards, which once were influential.
Over the past century, university employment has swung from a ratio of 20 per cent administrative and 80 per cent academic, to about 55 per cent non-academic today. The real work of the university – teaching and research – is now being carried out by a diminishing, largely underpaid minority, overseen by a large bureaucracy.
To be fair to the ACU, its current projected staff cuts are non-academic. I have some sympathy for any vice-chancellor today who wants to improve the quality of his or her academic staff. This is difficult to achieve.
It would take Jeff Kennett’s determination, via the appointment of ruthless deans with the will to clear out dead wood and make new appointments according to international merit, overriding the political and disciplinary biases of those many existing staff who traditionally control appointments committees.
It would also mean culling the expansive ranks of deputy and pro-vice chancellors, and those under them, cutting back building budgets and creating new first-rank research and teaching centres.
The online university is cruel to students. It destroys student life. A physical campus, with teaching buildings intermixed with cafes, squares, shops, and libraries, provides places for students to gather together with their fellows, catch up, and discuss classes.
The ACU perhaps had this in mind, in providing a luxurious, very comfortable building to attract students into the campus. But the thinking is consumerist, as in drawing people to a picturesque shopping centre.
In universities that are functioning rightly, students are drawn to classes where there is some charisma, where the intellectual content is engaging; attracted by lectures where there is the seriousness that what they are studying really matters, seminars in which there is heated discussion of ideas.
In these universities, the teachers, and at all levels, reign supreme, even when their classes are held in tin shacks up the River Cam.
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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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