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Portland State University Professor Resigns, Says School Is a
‘Social Justice Factory’
Peter Boghossian, assistant professor at Portland State University and co-author of “How to Have Impossible Conversations.”
BY JACK PHILLIPS September 8, 2021
Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian said he’s resigned from his position in an open letter and accused the college administration of creating an environment that imperils dissent.
“I never once believed—nor do I now—that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion,” Boghossian, a philosophy professor, wrote in the letter. “Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.”
But over time, he argued, Portland State University—a publicly-funded college—made “intellectual exploration impossible” and has transformed itself into a “social justice factory” with a primary focus on race, victimhood, and gender.
“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” said the letter, which was published on Bari Weiss’s Substack page. Weiss herself previously worked for the New York Times until 2020 when she resigned, accusing her Times colleagues of bullying, and argued that the paper capitulated to Twitter-based pressure campaigns.
Portland State University
“Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions,” Boghossian added. “This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.”
Later in his letter, Boghossian said that over time, he faced retaliation for speaking out against academia’s narratives around race, gender, and social justice.
“For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes,” he wrote.
The lecturer added: “And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation. I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.”
Years ago, Boghossian drew headlines when he and two other authors submitted bogus race, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies to academic journals to see whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication.
Many of these papers were subsequently published, which Boghossian and the others suggested was due to lackadaisical criteria and institutional rot in several academic fields.
Madness: UCLA Suspends Professor for Refusing to Assign Grades
Based on Skin Color
OCT 6, 2021 7:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
My latest in PJ Media:
This is the state of American academia today: Gordon Klein has taught courses in business law, tax law, and financial analysis at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for no fewer than forty years. He is a respected academic who has been on CNBC and quoted in the Wall Street Journal for his economic expertise. But now, after being suspended, he has filed suit in California Superior Court against the university regents over his suspension. Klein has a good case: He was suspended from teaching at UCLA for the crime of refusing to discriminate and treat his black students differently from how he treated others.
“I was suspended from my job,” Klein explained, “for refusing to treat my black students as lesser than their non-black peers.” His ordeal began on June 2, 2020, when “a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater ‘leniency’ than others in the class.”
In a sane society, a “non-black student” who demanded that black students be graded with greater “leniency” than others would be castigated as a racist. But in the Left’s funhouse mirror ethics, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and treating students differently based on race is racial justice.
The student wrote to Klein: “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates.” Klein believes that the student was using an online racial justice form letter: “There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the ‘we’ in this case was. I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.”
The letter went on to claim that black students were too traumatized by racism to do well on the final exam: “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” It concluded: “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.”
Klein notes that “in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator,” the student who wrote the letter made it clear that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.” To strengthen the case, the student invoked the Anderson School of Management’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which stresses that a “commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to achieving Anderson’s mission.”
There is more. Read the rest here.
‘A falling tide lowers all ships’: NY Mayor de Blasio hammered
for scrapping gifted education programs in the name of ‘equity’
8 Oct, 2021 18:07
New York City, September 21, 2020 © Reuters / Brendan McDermid
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio will scrap the city’s gifted and talented program, which critics say discriminates against black and Hispanic students. However, the mayor was accused of dumbing down his schools to appear woke.
“The era of judging four-year-olds based on a single test is over,” de Blasio said on Friday, announcing that New York’s ‘Gifted and Talented’ test, administered to kids leaving kindergarten to sort out the brightest students for admission to more selective middle and high schools, would be phased out from next year onwards.
In its place, de Blasio is introducing ‘Brilliant NYC’, a “new and equitable” program where promising children aged eight and up will receive special lessons while in class alongside their less gifted peers. Rather than establishing eligibility by test, the new system will take on board feedback from teachers and continuous assessment, the New York Times reported.
The move is a direct response to critics who have called the ‘Gifted and Talented’ program racist. Though students of all races are allowed to take the test and pursue Gifted and Talented education, “about 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes in New York are white or Asian American,” the New York Times noted. Splitting education by intelligence in this manner has resulted in New York having “one of the most racially segregated school systems in the country,” the paper added.
De Blasio won’t be overseeing the transition to ‘Brilliant NYC’. The mayor’s term expires at the end of this year, and managing the new program will fall on his successor. Eric Adams, a black Democrat widely tipped to win November’s election, is in favor of keeping the Gifted and Talented system, but increasing access to it in lower income neighborhoods. This plan reportedly has the backing of many black and latino parents who want to give their kids a leg up.
Asian American parents, represented by a number of their co-ethnic lawmakers, also want to keep the elite programs in place. “Gifted and talented programs have been an integral option for generations of schoolkids,” State Senator John C. Liu tweeted on Friday, adding that de Blasio’s “total elimination” of these programs “won’t help his abysmal record.”
De Blasio’s decision caught national attention, with pundits and commenters accusing the Democrat mayor of hampering gifted children’s prospects to score points with the “woke.”
“The gifted children in our public schools shouldn't be abandoned in the name of far left woke speak,” one left-wing Twitter user posted. “Don't kneecap the critical thinkers to promote some arbitrary ‘fairness.’”
Switching over to the new program presents numerous challenges for New York. For one thing, all of the city’s 4,000 or so kindergarten teachers will need to be trained “to accommodate students who need accelerated learning within their general education classrooms,” per the New York Times.
This training will cost tens of millions of dollars, and city authorities face the daunting task of ensuring that every single teacher – some of whom don’t even have to pass a literacy exam – can differentiate between students of differing abilities and teach them appropriately in the same classroom. Furthermore, schools that exist exclusively to serve gifted children will now need to be repurposed, and no clear plan has emerged on how to do this.
With all of these factors in play, Adams, if successful in November, might be tempted to ignore the woke and simply undo de Blasio’s decision with the stroke of a pen.
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