Spectator Life

The Supreme Court yesterday administered a well-aimed slap in the face to a liberal arts college in Georgia that employed grotesquely authoritarian methods in order to silence Christian students attempting to witness to their faith. Georgia Gwinnett College prides itself on being the most 'diverse' college in the South. But when, in 2016, a student called Chike Uzuegbunam tried to evangelize and hand out pamphlets, the campus police decided to give him a taste of what life was like for Christians behind the Iron Curtain. Wrong sort of diversity, you see. Now, I'm the first to agree that Evangelical Christians — or any other religious radicals — can make a bloody nuisance of themselves on campus.

One feels for the olds who birthed this cancer. They just wanted to placate the youngs. They had no idea they were disemboweling the same institutions they were charged with safeguarding against the idiot-children. The olds, the so-called progressive elites (so-called because they lacked any sense of noblesse oblige), were scared of being ‘on the wrong side of history’. They wanted the youngs — the new radicals — to like them, to follow them on social media. They wanted to hold onto their power, and they were shallow, and they were vulnerable to their own spinelessness. Blinded by it.

Conservatives like feeling outraged, but they don’t often like to earn their outrage. For most, it’s enough to wait for the AP to mention Dr Seuss getting canceled, briefly become upset, then return to waiting for the next setback to kvetch about. This passivity has created an excellent opportunity for one Christopher Rufo. In the past year, Rufo has carved out a career niche by adopting the novel strategy of actually finding all the poisonous propaganda embedded in America’s schools and government departments, and suggesting that, just maybe, these insanities should actually be tackled instead of being the subject of an instantly-forgotten Fox News segment. Rufo’s latest find is from Arizona, where the Department of Education has crafted an 'equity toolkit'.

This week, Matt Meyer did what many parents long to do. He dropped off his kid at school. That’s unusual in Berkeley, California, where he lives, because the schools there have been closed for a year, and the teachers’ union adamantly opposes their reopening. Parents like Mr. Meyer who can afford private schools, which are mostly open, send their kids there. His child has been there since last June. So he dropped off his child and drove off to his job. His job is head of the Berkeley teachers’ union. His main task there is to keep the public schools closed for everyone else. Matt’s job and that of other teachers’ union bosses is getting harder — and not just because the hypocrisy is so obvious. It’s getting harder because parents and kids across the country are fed up.

Are you white? If so, how white are you? Or to put it another way, where would you place your 'whiteness' on a scale of one to eight? This might seem like an odd question for those who still see whiteness as mere skin pigmentation. For many progressives however the term has come to mean a form of bigotry inherent in, but not exclusive to, white people. In other words, you don’t have to be white to suffer from the affliction of 'whiteness' but it certainly helps. To clear up any confusion, Mark Federman, principal at the East Side Community High School in Manhattan's Lower East Side has sent parents a handy pamphlet. It ranks, in graphic form, eight color-coded 'white identities' with 'white supremacist' at one end and 'white abolitionist' at the other.

President Joe Biden, in defiance of his pro-science mantras, is not going to pressure teachers’ unions to reopen schools and get kids back into the classrooms. This week CDC director Rochelle Walensky said that schools are now safe to reopen. Yet press secretary Jen Psaki is notably unwilling to directly answer questions about the nationwide reopening of schools. The Biden administration is not going to push back on the unions’ demands until a substantial relief package is passed with specific assistance for teachers’ unions, who are some of his most fervent supporters and donors.

The knives are out once again for the man left-liberals love to hate. You'd have thought Jordan Peterson’s recent health scares — wrought about by drug dependency and related depression — might have given him some kind of reprieve but even a medically induced coma couldn’t keep the gloaters from punching the man when he's down. The man who espoused traditional masculine virtues such as strength and stoicism is now having to rely on his 28-year-old daughter — oh the delicious irony! Writing in the Times of London, Hugo Rifkind describes Peterson's 'apparent collapse' as 'a parable', casting doubt on the legitimacy of his illness while viewing the doctor's weakened state as a repudiation of everything he has stood for.

Hwæt. In British and American universities, fewer and fewer students are studying English, history and other humanities. That’s a job killer for the faculty. It’s time for quick answers — and the English faculty at Leicester University has come up with a beauty. The problem with their curriculum, they have decided, is that it is just not left-wing and anti-Western enough. They must figure students want to study English mostly to learn more about imperialism, capitalism and social theory, not to read and interpret great novels and poetry or to read modern works against the background of a great tradition. So, out with the old, in with the new. In this case, ‘the new’ reflects the tendentious political preoccupations of the faculty and their most agitated students.

Earlier this week, the San Francisco school board voted to scrap the names of 44 schools. It turned out America’s most liberal city had been a hotbed of racism all along. How odd. Last summer’s 'reckoning' of several statues and automobile windows wasn’t enough, so now the 'reckoning' must come. CNN’s Nathan McDermott discovered the Google Doc which the board used to log all the sins of the city’s school namesakes. The document makes it clear that, while the city may be happy to disown Thomas Jefferson, its activist class doesn’t exactly match his mental horsepower. Most of the names stricken have a direct or tangential relation to slavery, so you might expect Abraham Lincoln to be well-regarded.

‘We have racism and sexism raging on the left.’  Those are words I didn’t expect to hear from deep inside the East Coast, elite liberal arts college culture — from a person with everything to lose by saying them.  Let’s take a journey to the heartland of wokeness, the western Massachusetts college town of Northampton; and in particular, one of its biggest employers, Smith College.  Smith, established in 1875, has long been a Mecca of sorts for the burdened white girl.  Famous alumnae include Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan and the statuesque firebrand Gloria Steinem, who no doubt began formulating her ideas on female oppression while at Smith — perhaps in part due to the actions of her fiancé at the time.

Cockburn doesn’t have any school-aged children — that he’s aware of, anyway. But a number of his close associates do — and they’ve been complaining a lot recently about schooling. Here’s a brief note from a New York-based mother Cockburn often gets cocktails with, who has a grievance she’d like to air… The ‘closing of the American mind’ is a lament usually reserved for the indoctrination of college students, but it’s now starting far younger. By the time our American students arrive on campus, much of the damage has already been done. K-12 education has been infected with critical race theory, tenets of the 1619 Project, Black Lives Matter doctrine and other debunked, destructive ‘religious’ ideologies.

Conservatives are starting to vote with their wallets when it comes to countering the leftist bent of college campuses.Turning Point USA, the student-focused conservative nonprofit, recently announced its new project, ‘DivestU’, which encourages conservative Americans to stop donating to their alma maters. The idea? To show that left-wing bias will no longer be tolerated. The move comes at a time when universities anticipate financial struggles as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. President Trump even threatened earlier this month to reconsider the federal funding and tax-exempt status of universities that ‘are about Radical Left Indoctrination’. Do conservatives finally have the attention of the liberal elite that run the nation’s colleges?

As New York City schools grapple with how to handle a virus that has an under 1 percent infection rate in children, parenting boards frequented by the educated, monied-but-not-so-monied-as-to-send-their-kids-to-private-school set, are forming ‘pods’. A ‘pod’ will be a small group of children, usually no more than five, who will meet at each other’s homes in lieu of traditional schooling in September. You, and four other families in your same tax bracket, will hire a teacher to educate the five children in the pod. Parenting boards are overwhelmed with requests for these tutors. The families will agree to only interact with each other: an absurd and impossible promise that will surely be broken.

Americans have mixed feelings about opening schools this fall. Some — like the Trump administration’s Department of Education — want schools to reopen, withholding federal dollars from those that remain closed. However, the majority of Americans see opening schools as a health risk to their children.After two-thirds of teachers opposed the reopening of schools, the Los Angeles School District will not be returning to in-person classes this fall. However, United Teachers Los Angeles, the main teachers' union in the city, seemingly wants to suspend the return of quality instruction indefinitely. UTLA — composed of 35,000 teachers — released a list of policy demands that must be met before schools reopen.

Princeton won’t be Princeton without anyone present, grumbled president Eisgruber, lying on the rug. Harvard and Princeton yesterday announced their plans for the 2020-21 academic year, and they don’t look good. Harvard will welcome ‘first-year students’ on campus in the fall and seniors in the spring; Princeton will welcome ‘first-year students’ and juniors in the fall and sophomores and seniors in the spring. (God forbid either university use the term ‘freshmen’.) Remote learning will be the norm and parties will be prohibited. Princeton, at least, offers a 10 percent tuition reduction. Harvard is increasing its tuition by 4 percent.

On November 18, 2015, a group of Princeton University undergraduates calling themselves the Black Justice League, or BJL, invaded historic Nassau Hall and occupied President Christopher Eisgruber’s office overnight, refusing to leave until Eisgruber had agreed to, and signed off on, their list of ‘demands’. Most famously, they demanded the purging of Woodrow Wilson’s name from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and from one of the residential colleges, Wilson College. At the time, Eisgruber promised to form committees to discuss the students’ demands; skillfully sidestepping the controversy. Today, however, nearly five years later, Eisgruber has announced that Wilson’s name is coming down.

Students at Loyola University New Orleans are seeking to oust Walter Block, a libertarian business school professor, through a Change.org petition. In response, a rival petition is asking Loyola’s administration to offer Block a raise.A student called M.C. Calzalas began the petition calling for Block’s termination. According to the petition, Block ‘has publicly stated that he believes slavery to be wrong because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong. He has justified women being paid less than men’.Worst of all, ‘He is allegedly an ableist, too.

The New York Times’s opinion editor resigned in disgrace earlier this month following a newsroom revolt over the publication of an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. The op-ed 'put black New York Times staffers in danger', the newspaper's reporters lamented in nearly identical tweets, because it called for using the National Guard to put down the riots in nearly every major American city. The incident perfectly framed what happens when weak-minded college students who are seldom exposed to opposing or controversial viewpoints graduate into the nation's top newsrooms. The campuses themselves aren't faring much better. Members of Generation Z are thought to be more culturally conservative than their millennial counterparts, but Georgetown students must have missed the memo.

An anonymous Instagram account surfaced this weekend that accused multiple Ivy League students of racism, without evidence.‘Ivy League Racists’ (@ivyleagueracists) — which has since been deleted — posted pictures of white male students alongside descriptions of the racist acts they purportedly committed.For instance, one post read: ‘[name redacted] of [location redacted] raped an innocent black freshman at Penn. The victim is now suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts. Contact Penn Police at 2155733333.’Another post was aimed at a former Princeton sportsman, naming his hometown, parents and siblings. Neither post provided any tangible proof of the students’ alleged misconduct. The Spectator reached out to both men for comment.

From the beginning of the lockdown in March, it became clear that children were going to have a very different experience depending on where they are educated. Many private schools and some of the best public schools immediately made arrangements for teaching to continue online, uninterrupted. For many other children, it has been a case of only being set the odd homework assignment.The quality in educational experience during the lockdown is going to have a very large impact on attainment. A rapid evidence assessment by the Education Endowment Foundation, a British think tank, has attempted to put a figure of just how the attainment gap could grow if children are kept out of the classroom until September.