NABJ scholarship winners
“Desegregation may finally be coming to Columbia University.” That bit of misleading hyperbole from the joint pen of Daily News writers Dareh Gregorian And Joe Kemp kicks off a triumphal article noting:
The Ivy League school is asking a judge to change some requirements of the Lydia C. Roberts graduate and traveling fellowships — which limit recipients to people born in Iowa who are ‘of the Caucasian race.’
The IRS didn’t just investigate groups based on their perceived political views, but also targeted groups for “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” or advocating limits on government or deficit spending, reports the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Obama Justice Department is demanding that colleges adopt sweeping unconstitutional speech codes that ban even speech that would not offend a “reasonable person,” but only hypersensitive people, notes a prominent law professor. The Post describes the additional groups targeted by the IRS:
“This is a test.”
OK, let’s summarize where we are five months out from the Newtown shootings. If a student so much as mentions the word gun in school or (God forbid!) bites a toaster pastry into a shape that to some resembles a gun, he is suspended if not expelled. But if a school wants to run a mock “active shooter” drill in which a camo-clad adult bursts into a classroom with an assault weapon and opens fire, no problem.
The Justice Department and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights have now effectively defined dating and flirting as “sexual harassment,” in addition to demanding that colleges adopt unconstitutional speech codes.
The definition is found in a May 9 Title IX Letter of Findings and Resolution Agreement involving the University of Montana.
Controversial fashion designer John Galliano, who was fired from his post as creative director at Christian Dior in 2011 following an anti-Semitic rant, will not be teaching a workshop at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City after all, the school announced today. But it won’t be because Jewish students sounded off in opposition to remarks Galliano had made that led to his ouster from the Paris design firm, which included, “I love Hitler. Your forefathers would be [expletive] gassed, and [expletive] dead.”
For those who may otherwise find the story hard to follow, Urban Dictionary defines the verb twerk as “to work one’s body, as in dancing, especially the rear end.” Of more import is the definition given by Scripps Ranch High School in San Diego (viz., obscene and sexually suggestive) as well as the actions school officials have taken toward 33 seniors who made a video of themselves twerking. All have been suspended and barred from attending the prom and commencement.
Too cruel for school?
The mother of a seventh-grade student at a school in suburban Detroit has launched a crusade to get Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” barred from her daughter’s classroom.
Fox News Detroit reports that Gail Horalek of Northville is upset over Frank’s references to her own genitalia in the first-person narrative, which provides a chilling account of the Holocaust and of a Jewish family in hiding during World War II.
Luckily, no one was hurt when a mixture of household chemicals brought to school on Monday by a 16-year-old student blew up. Unluckily for the student, Kiera Wilmot, she was arrested on Wednesday and charged with possession and discharge of a weapon on school grounds. She has also since been expelled.
The jobs picture, which was bleak for 2012 college graduates, is looking even bleaker for this year’s graduating class. According to a survey by the consulting firm Accenture, 41% of recent grads who managed to find work hold down dead-end jobs that don’t require a degree.
Ouch! Some bad news for those who believe that schools should be used as moral incubators in which young people can be made to learn tolerance by having it drummed into their heads. Mail Online reports that a major study published yesterday by a team of Dutch researchers found that children who are spoon-fed “anti-racism lessons in school are more likely to be intolerant outside the classroom.”