Tag: universities

PSU uses YouTube’s copyright reporting system to censor video exposing the college’s censorship

Portland State University (PSU) filed a false copyright claim with YouTube on a professor’s video that tried to expose the university’s effort to censor academic freedom of speech. The video followed a resolution passed by the university to silence critics of critical race theory.

PSU Professor Bruce Gilley recently published a report called The New Censorship in American Higher Education: Insights from Portland State University.”

The video, meant to accompany the report, included clips from a March 1 meeting of the faculty senate. During the meeting, the senate unanimously passed a resolution that deems critics of critical race theory bullies and anti-progressives.

His report claims that the resolution “imposes a gag order on criticisms of a university’s professors, programs, teaching, and research — criticism which is itself the heart of academic freedom — as an abuse of academic freedom.”

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Critical Race Fragility

The critical race theorists are feeling the heat. Over the past decade, they have had remarkable success in perpetuating the concepts of systemic racism, unconscious bias, white privilege, and white fragility in American institutions, beginning with universities and moving on to schools, government agencies, and multinational corporations. Their campaign began mostly without opposition, as most conservatives were either ignorant of what was happening or dismissed it as a campus fad.

That changed last year. The intellectual movements around the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, Quillette magazine, and the 1776 Unites coalition of dissident black scholars had laid down a theoretical case against critical race theory (CRT). President Trump elevated the debate into the mainstream, denouncing CRT by name at the National Archives, signing an executive order banning CRT-based training programs from the federal government, and sparring on the topic during a televised presidential debate. Since then, investigative journalists, including me, have reported on the negative impact of CRT in government, schools, and corporations; states such as New Hampshire, Arkansas, Iowa, West Virginia, and Oklahoma have introduced legislation seeking to ban CRT programs that promote the concepts of race essentialism, collective guilt, and race-based harassment in public institutions.

This shift in momentum against the new racial orthodoxy, which has now grown beyond America’s borders to England, France, Italy, Hungary, and Brazil, has rattled the American Left. Their first argument against this change is that conservatives are using state power to “cancel wokeness.” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg recently followed this line, attacking my work “leading the conservative charge against critical race theory,” declaring that the Right wants to ban critical race theory because it is afraid to debate it. This is false, of course. For more than a year, prominent black intellectuals, including John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Wilfred Reilly, and Coleman Hughes have challenged the critical race theorists to debate—and none has accepted. After Goldberg published her column, I called her bluff even further, challenging to “debate any prominent critical race theorist on the floor of the New York Times.” Predictably, none responded, catching the New York Times in a fib and further exposing the critical race theorists’ refusal to submit their ideas to public scrutiny.

The second line of attack, advanced by Goldberg and Acadia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, is that the attempt to regulate critical race theory-based programs is an “attack on free speech.” Goldberg and Sachs are attempting to reclaim the mantle of free speech, but on closer inspection, their case is legally and morally groundless. First, as legal writer Hans Bader points out, the Supreme Court has ruled that states and public schools have the ability to control curricular speech without violating free speech. Furthermore, under the Fourteenth Amendment, states and school districts have an obligation to prevent the creation of a learning environment that promotes hostility toward a certain race or sex. The courts have repeatedly ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment outweighs and limits the First Amendment when it comes to government entities adopting policies and programs that perpetuate racial stereotyping, discrimination, and harassment. Despite Sachs’s hyperventilation about threats to academia (i.e., the public-employment program for new racialist ideology), many legislatures have explicitly allowed the teaching of CRT in university classrooms; it is only forbidden to turn these principles into compelled speech, employee-indoctrination programs, and official state curricula for primary and secondary school students.

The most telling limitation in their argument, however, is that Goldberg and Sachs both refuse to deal with specifics. They present critical race theory as a benign academic discipline that seeks “social justice,” while ignoring the avalanche of reporting, including my own, that suggests that, in practice, CRT-based programs are often hateful, divisive, and filled with falsehoods; they traffic in racial stereotypes, collective guilt, racial segregation, and race-based harassment. The real test for intellectuals on the left is not to defend their ideas as abstractions but to defend the real-world consequences of their ideas.

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Arizona State Dean: Grading Writing Based On Quality Is ‘Racist,’ Promotes ‘White Language Supremacy’

In a book titled “Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom,” professor Asao Inoue encourages teachers to ditch grading for a “labor-based” grading system wherein students earn grades based on their effort. The quality of a student’s writing would not help or hinder their course grade. 

“This book focuses on one kind of grading contract, one that calculates final course grades purely by the labor students complete, not by any judgments of the quality of their writing,” Inoue writes. “While the qualities of student writing is still at the center of the classroom and feedback, it has no bearing on the course grade.”

Near the beginning of the document, the author admits that the theory of “labor-based” grading is rooted in critical race theory. Critical race theory is the idea that America is rooted in racism as are the systems of modern American society.

Critical race theory contributed to Inoue’s idea that ranking things is a system rooted in racism. Because grading is a form of ranking, grading must also be a racist idea. In his book, Inoue dubbed grading and the education system writ large “racist” for their connections to ranking. 

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Cleveland State Professor Is Indoctrinating The Next Generation Of Educators With Critical Race Theory

Two education majors at Cleveland State University did not realize when they signed up for a class titled “The Social Context of Urban Education” that they would be lectured on white privilege, implied racism, and forced to learn critical race theory from a Robin DiAngelo textbook. DiAngelo, the famous “antiracist” educator who was exposed as providing Coca-Cola’s now-deleted “try to be less white” training to employees, has become one of the leaders in the insane movement.

“Every week it’s something different, and our textbook has nothing to do with my major, middle childhood education,” said the whistleblower, a sophomore from Lake County, who first contacted The Federalist. “Last week, we had this presentation from people who hold positions at CSU about the likewise relation between the riots in the 1960s to the riots that took place in Cleveland in 2020. … All the assignments have nothing to do with being a teacher. It all has to do with how I have white guilt apparently. We also had to give a presentation in class on how our positionality and intersectionality interact with us in society.”

The course is being taught by Molly Feghali, who students say has prohibited white people from using the word “ghetto” in the classroom due to its supposedly racist connotation. One paper prompt Feghali has assigned for the class asks students to spend time “reflecting on your educational journey thus far,” and describe “how has your positionality/intersectionality impacted your journey?” Another asks students to “create a graphical representation of how prejudice, discrimination, implicit bias, power, oppression, and socialization are interrelated and impact the isms.”

The radicalism of Feghali is unsurprising given the substance of her doctoral thesis. The 2018 thesis, titled “Interracial Contact at a Diverse High School: How School and Community Structures Shape Students’ Experiences,” is 126 pages of leftist buzzwords. It states that “unconscious bias” manifests in “micro-aggressions,” and that “white privilege” means white students are inherently ignorant.

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The Spectre of Totalitarianism

In March 2019, tax expert Maya Forstater was dismissed from her job — legally, according to a later judicial ruling — for voicing the view that “sex is a biological fact, and is immutable.” When author J.K. Rowling came to Forstater’s defence, she was bombarded with abuse, including an invitation from one lady to “choke on my fat trans cock”. The case became a cause célèbre. But it is only one of many such cases. Today, anyone who ventures a controversial opinion on “trans”, race, disability, Middle Eastern politics and a handful of other issues risks being fired, insulted, intimidated and possibly prosecuted. 

Last year, a “Journal of Controversial Ideas” was launched, offering authors the option of writing under a pseudonym “in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety”. How did things come to this pass?

The new intolerance is often seen as a specifically left-wing phenomenon — an intensification of the “political correctness” which emerged on US campuses in the 1980s. But that is a one-sided view of the matter. It was US Zionists who pioneered the tactic of putting pressure on organisations to disinvite unfavoured speakers; far-right nationalists are among the keenest cyberbullies; and religious zealots of all stripes are prodigal of death threats. 

Generalising, one might say that left-wing groups, being more publicly respectable in our part of the world, prefer to pursue their objectives through institutions and the law, whereas right-wing groups seek out the anonymity of the internet. But the goal on each side is the same: it is to intimidate, suppress, silence. In any case, the distinction between “left” and “right” is becoming increasingly muddled, as lines shift and alliances regroup. All one can safely say is that the various forms of contemporary extremism imitate and incite each other. What has given way is the civilised middle ground.

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Ivy League University Offers Rock Climbing Class — No White Students Allowed

Cornell University was offering a racially-segregated rock climbing class for their students physical education — but no white students allowed.

The physical education class, “BIPOC Rock Climbing,” was originally slated to be restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color.”

After Campus Reform reached out the university for comment about the discrimination, the course description was edited to state that the class is “designed to enable Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color underrepresented in the sport of rock climbing to learn the sport and to feel included and supported.”

The original listing for the course, set to begin during the Spring 2021 academic semester, was archived and can be viewed here.

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SUNY Geneseo Suspends Education Student for Saying ‘A Man Is A Man, A Woman Is A Woman’

State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo has suspended an education student from required teaching programs after he expressed his views on biology in a social media post. In one video, the student says that “a man is a man,” and “a woman is a woman.” The university states that the student’s conservative social media posts call into question his ability to “maintain a classroom environment protecting the mental and emotional well-being of all of [his] students.”

Education student Owen Stevens received an email from SUNY Geneseo, informing him that he was suspended from his field teaching programs after his classmates saw his Instagram videos, according to a report by Daily Wire.

“A man is a man, a woman is a woman. A man is not a woman, and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one of the videos in question. “A man cannot become a woman, and a woman cannot become a man.”

“If I’m a man, and I think I’m a woman, I’m still a man. If I’m a woman who thinks I’m a man, I’m still a woman,” the student added. “Regardless of what you feel on the inside, is irrelevant to your biological status. It doesn’t change the biology.”

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Smith College fails to defend their own employees after false accusations of racism

Smith College, an elite college in Northampton, Massachusetts, failed to defend its working-class employees against false and damaging accusations of racism levelled by a teaching assistant, The New York Times reports.

The story began when Oumou Kanoute, a black teaching assistant at the college, was found eating in the Tyler house dormitory cafeteria, which during that summer was off-limits to students as it was being used for a children’s summer camp.

Kanoute was approached by a cafeteria employee named Jackie Blair, who informed her that the cafeteria was off-limits to students at the time. This caused Kanoute to go to the dormitory lounge, which was also closed to students for the summer, where she was noticed by a janitor.

The janitor, who has been advised to call campus security if he sees someone trespassing, decided to give them a call. “We have a person sitting there laying down in the living room,” he said to dispatchers. He did not mention her race.

When security arrived, the officer recognized Kanoute as a student and had a brief conversation with her. Kanoute expressed her discomfort with the situation, saying she felt threatened, and the security guard apologized for bothering her.

That evening, Kanoute took to Facebook to lambast a number of college employees as racists. “It’s outrageous that some people question my being at Smith, and my existence overall as a woman of color,” she wrote.

Smith College president Kathleen McCartney immediately apologized for the incident without conducting an investigation or contacting the accused employees, and put the janitor who called security on leave.

The actions of both Kanoute and McCartney stunned the employees. Ms. Blair, who did not call security, had her name, picture, and email included in the post. “This is the racist person,” Kanoute wrote.

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Professor suspended for tweets criticizing reparations and bias training

The tweets that led to Manco’s suspension were posted on his pseudo account, “South Jersey Giants.” Someone figured out Manco was the owner of the account, took screenshots of some tweets, and posted them on Instagram.

In one of the tweets shared, Manco argued against slavery reparations, saying, they were like the great-great-grandchild of a murder victim asking the great-great-grandchild of a convicted murdered for compensation. “Now, get this racist reparation bullshit out of your head for good,” Manco added in the tweet.

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