PC Sewage Pollutes Again

This one is by Leon County’s Superintendent of Schools, Jackie Pons.  The school district owns Killearn Lakes Elementary School, and that school’s management sent home the following waiver offer—and they’re serious about it, and Pons condones this…stuff.

I understand my rights as a parent and I request that my child, noted above, be excused from reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. This request includes standing and placing his/her right hand over his/her heart.

One parent (among many) is justifiably upset over this example of PC sewage, and he’s posted on his Facebook page his position on the matter.

Just to emphasize the matter, Pons’ contact data are

  • direct phone number: 850-487-7147
  • email: communityinfo@leonschools.net

Feel free to communicate your views of this travesty of education.

Wear It Proudly

The American Association of University Professors has decided to “place on its censure list” the University of Missouri-Columbia for the latter’s temerity in firing Melissa Click—of student journalist assault infamy—for her misbehavior.

The university should make this action by the AAUP a part of its marketing and fund-raising campaigns.  The censure of an organization that actively supports the misbehavior of one of its own is a thing about which the UoM-C can be proud and about which it should brag.

Institutional Racism

Now our public schools are actively teaching racism to our children.

…administrators at Raoul Wallenberg High School decided last September to forgo the democratic process in student elections and appoint members of the freshman class to most of the seats on the student council.  The freshman president and all student leaders for other grade levels were still elected.

Part of the reasoning behind the change was to “encourage more diversity in our student leadership,” according to Principal Cheryl Foster, who responded to questions from the San Francisco Examiner through a district spokesperson.

Because, like all voters in the eyes of the Left, these students are just too grindingly stupid to know what they must do, and so their Know Betters (at least one of whom was either too afraid, or too contemptuous, of the press to respond directly) must choose for them.

But these worthies gave their game away.

…school officials tried to court her [Christina Martinez] son, James Ortiz, 15, onto the student council because of his surname.

And

Assistant Principal Zaia Vera reportedly told Martinez she wanted Ortiz in office because it would make the student government look more diverse.  Asian girls were the predominant candidates for student office in recent years.

“She said to me, ‘Mrs Martinez, you could understand as a fellow Latina what we’re looking for here,” Martinez, who is not Latina, recalled.  “‘We only have Asian girls run for office and we want the Wallenberg website to show not only Asian girls.'”

Asian girls are the epitome of evil, you see.  But that’s not all of it.  Of course, Vera knew Martinez and her son were not Hispanic; like any competent high school official, Vera knew her students and their parents.  This is just Vera’s and Foster’s stinking racism.

Their racism is doubly damaging: not only does it deny others a fair shot—they’re explicitly held back in this case solely on the basis of their race—or perceived race—it tells the favored minority—Hispanics in the present case—that they’re inherently inferior, with no hope of success without such precious coddling.

If the district officials had any integrity, they would fire Foster and Vera for cause.

Wealth Redistribution

Now it’s threatening to spread to our education institutions.

Lawmakers have a new solution for the high cost of college: make the wealthiest universities pay for it.

Of course.  Because competition among colleges to bring down costs, or reducing Federal funding for them under [pick an excuse] programs to reduce the non-student population money available to drive up costs just can’t be done.  Too many special interests would be perturbed by such a thing.

Elite US schools have grown richer since the 2008 financial crisis by investing their endowment money in everything from California vineyards to Chinese startups.  State and federal policy makers now want to tax those profits….

Gotta punish that success.  How dare these institutions accrue moneys without a government’s faretheewell?

…or force the wealthiest schools to spend down their endowments—to defray soaring student bills and refill depleted higher-education budgets.

Which governments could do easily by not sending so much taxpayer dollars to these schools.  But…special interests.

Interestingly, Republicans are in on this move.

Congressman Tom Reed (R, NY)…floated a plan late last year that would require endowments bigger than $1 billion to pay out a quarter of their earnings in grants to working-class families or face steep penalties or even the loss of their tax-exempt status.

It isn’t Government’s place to tell these schools—or any other institution—how to spend its money.  It is Government’s place to not send taxpayer dollars to these schools—or to any other institution.

No wonder Conservatives are so angrified.

The Bias of Professors

One example is from the faculty of George Mason University.

George Mason University’s faculty governing body on Wednesday called on its administration to suspend the naming of the law school after Justice Antonin Scalia.

By a vote of 25-12, the university’s faculty approved a resolution asking for an indefinite delay of the renaming.

Why the delay?  First comes the obfuscation:

The faculty resolution questions how the money was being used and expressed concern that the donation could generate negative publicity and that the donors could wield too much influence over the law school’s mission.

They argue in all seriousness that this has something to do with the new name of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law.  Apparently the freshman logic classes some of the professors pretend to teach aren’t safe spaces for those same professors.

The heart of the matter had been addressed earlier.

Last week the faculty senate passed another resolution that called the name change “problematic” and characterized Justice Scalia as intolerant to gays and minorities.

This is a cynical distortion of Scalia’s views.  Scalia was a textualist who insisted—and whose oath of office, the same oath that “living Constitutionalists” like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took, bound him to that—that the Constitution and the laws enacted by Congress and the President actually meant what their texts said.  This required Scalia, and it should have required the Ginsburgs on the Court, to rule on what the laws said, not on what the Justices might have wanted the laws to say.

But that’s anathema to current professors, who insist that the law should say what the judge wants it to say, consistent with that judge’s (especially a Liberal judge’s) personal social agenda and sense of justice.

Never mind that it’s the citizens of the United States whose social agenda is the only legitimate agenda, never mind that justice is what the citizens of the United States say it is, through our elected representatives.  For these Liberals, we citizens don’t know what we’re doing, and we need to be overruled by our Know Betters.  Like professors.