Category Archives: Culture wars

A Rejoinder on the TJ “Fall”

Posted on April 26, 2024 by | 29 comments

Before folks got carried away with sarcasm and “I told you so,” it would have been best to examine a few facts regarding the ranking by U.S. News and World Report of the Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology (TJ):

  • The ranking fell to fifth last year. The data for that ranking pre-dated the change in the admission process for TJ;
  • The changes in the admissions process were adopted in 2020 and were first effective for the class entering in the fall of 2021. Those students would be juniors this year.

Next, it is worthwhile to examine the criteria used by U.S. News:

  • College readiness (30 percent)– proportion of a school’s 12th graders who took and earned a qualifying score on Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams in the 2021-2022 academic year;
  • College curriculum breadth (10 percent)—percentage of a school’s 2021-2022 12th graders who took, and the percentage who earned qualifying scores on, multiple AP or IB exams;
  • State assessment proficiency (20 percent)–standardized tests measuring student proficiency in subjects related to mathematics, reading and science. Data was “based on 2021-2022 state assessment data” (Emphasis added);
  • State assessment performance (20 percent)—This score is calculated based on the total assessment scores compared with what U.S. News predicted for a school with its demographic characteristics in its state. As the magazine explains, “In all 50 states, there is a very significant statistical relationship between the proportion of a student body that is Black, Hispanic and/or from a low-income household – defined as being eligible for free or subsidized school lunch – and a school’s results on state assessments. Schools performing best on this ranking indicator are those whose assessment scores far exceeded U.S. News’ modeled expectations.”  This year’s score is based on 2021-2022 data;
  • Underserved student performance (10 percent)—“This is a measure assessing learning outcomes only among Black, Hispanic and low-income students.” As with the others, it is based on 201-2022 data;
  • Graduation rate (10 percent)—Percentage of students who entered in the 2018-2019 school year who graduated in 2022.

Conclusion:  the fall to 14th in the rankings is attributable to the students who entered TJ before the change in the admissions process took effect.  It cannot be said to be the result of “lowering of standards” in the admissions process.

At this point, it is worthwhile to add some perspective.  The rankings can be volatile. In 2018, the school was ranked 10th, and in 2019, 4th, followed by three straight years as no.1, and a no. 5 ranking last year before this year’s ranking of 14.  As the top data analyst at U.S. News noted, the smallest differences can affect rankings.  “At these top schools, everyone graduates, everyone’s proficient in their state assessments, everyone’s getting a qualifying score on APs,” he said. “So we’re really splitting hairs on the number of AP exams of qualifying scores or the number that earns the highest performance level on math, science and reading.”–RWH

 

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12)

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TJ High School Falls From 1st to 14th Place

Posted on April 25, 2024 by | 25 comments

Score a big victory for “equity.” The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, ranked the top high school in the country by U.S. News & World Report two years ago, has fallen to 14th place, tweets the Coalition for TJ.

TJ had been the center of an admissions controversy after progressives, who found it scandalous that 70% of the school’s students were of Asian ethnic origin, rejiggered its admissions criteria to make it more demographically diverse. The revised policy, which did succeed in increasing the admission of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, survived legal challenges that went as far as the U.S. Supreme Court.

But not to worry. By selecting only the highest-achieving kids, TJ had been perpetuating gross inequality with other high schools. Insofar as its standards have been modified and its rankings have tumbled, the inequality gap with peer schools has diminished. Some observers expect TJ’s rankings will fall and the gap to shrink even further as older students admitted under the ancien regime graduate and are replaced by students admitted under the new, more equitable standards. Continue reading →

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Posted in DEI, Education (K-12)

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Keffiyehs, Yarmulkes and “Belonging” at UVA

Posted on April 18, 2024 by | 52 comments

by James A. Bacon

It’s “Palestinian Liberation Week” at the University of Virginia this week, and the Students for Justice in Palestine have organized loads of activities for antizionists, culminating with a “Die-In for Gaza” Friday.

“Wear your keffiyeh,” urges UVA’s Students for Justice in Palestine on its Instagram page. Keffiyehs are traditional Arab scarfs, which students wear to signal their solidarity with Palestinians seeking to combat “settler colonialism” in Israel.

Meanwhile, Jewish students have stopped wearing yarmulkes, Stars of David or other ornamentation that would identify them as Jews.

What does that dichotomy say about the sense of “belonging” — the holy grail of the Ryan administration — experienced by Arabs and Jews respectively at UVA? Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (higher ed)

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UVA Report Finds No Pay Inequity for Black, Hispanic Profs

Posted on April 11, 2024 by | 14 comments

Adjusted salary differentials for tenure/tenure track faculty.

by James A. Bacon

The Racial Equity Task Force, a 2020 document that transformed governance at the University of Virginia, listed 12 top priorities for addressing the legacy of historical racism. One was to address “serious challenges to racial equity in staff hiring, wages, retention, promotion, and procurement” by auditing where policies and procedures might be “reinforcing entrenched inequities.”

The report cited no actual evidence of disparities in pay, and the authors did not assert that they existed. In a report that lambasted UVA as “an inaccessible, rich, ‘white’ institution,” pay inequities were just assumed to occur and needed to be documented.

Well, last year the Ryan administration hired the DCI Consulting Group to evaluate “pay equity” for UVA faculty based on gender and race. The results, based on 2022 compensation, were made available to UVA January 5 and, sure enough, pay inequities were found…. for non-tenured Asian-American faculty.

Remarkably, adjusted for their level in the academic hierarchy, seniority and other variables affecting compensation, Black professors who are tenured or on the tenure track were f0und to earn 3% more than their peers, Hispanic professors 3.4% more, and Whites 1.6% less — although DCI did not deem the differences to be “statistically significant.” Continue reading →

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Posted in DEI, Education (higher ed), Race and Race Relations

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Jewish Parents Decry Double Standards at UVA

Posted on April 4, 2024 by | 99 comments

by James A. Bacon

A half year after Hamas terrorists assaulted Israel, hostility at the University of Virginia toward Israel and Jews is unrelenting, according to parents of Jewish students there. In collaboration with other parents, Julie Pearl complained in a letter Tuesday to Rector Robert Hardie that a “blatant double standard against Jewish students persists at UVA.”

Pearl’s letter was prompted in part by the administration’s response to a recent incident in which a truck with digital billboards rolled through the University displaying messages critical of Hardie. One screen said, “Rector Robert Hardie won’t confront antisemitism” while another said Hardie is “unfit to lead U.Va.” The administration’s reaction was to criticize the slogans and investigate who was behind the stunt, Pearl said.

“How does the billboard incident directed at you merit outrage, an immediate statement of condemnation, and investigative action … while the ongoing harassment and intimidation faced by Jewish students receive no such response?” she asked. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Culture wars, Education (higher ed)

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VMI Eschews Standards of Excellence, Devalues Diploma

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 52 comments

by Joseph D. Elie

As an alumnus living in Florida, I have a dearth of information about what is happening at the Virginia Military Institute on a day-to-day basis.

I see the superficial social media postings from the public relations department, the Superintendent, and the Commandant; but I crave the scuttlebutt that tells the truer story.

The recent editorial, “Class of 25: The Elephant in the Room,” in The Cadet was very enlightening, provided much-needed insight and served, in effect, as a detailed report on the Institute.

The editorial also revealed why the administration didn’t want a student newspaper committing acts of journalism – as it validated my own suspicion that Breakout and the entire Rat Line itself have been rendered much less difficult.

From this year’s Breakout videos, the Rats seemed to merely be going through the motions when compared with videos from past Breakouts. The energy, enthusiasm, and the spirit were gone.

The Cadet editorial outlines how VMI’s core standards have been made less rigorous for the sake of maintaining the enrollment retention rate, particularly with regard to the nature and rigor of the Rat Line.

The Rat Line energizes the entire Corps of Cadets. It is an annual rite of passage that the upper classes have historically zealously preserved.

The Rat Line was once extremely difficult to complete and doing so resulted in justifiable pride and a tremendous boost of self-confidence.

Continue reading →

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UVA As a “Maze of Predatory Systems”

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 26 comments

by James A. Bacon

If you visit the latest exhibit at the University of Virginia’s Ruffin Gallery, “EscapeRoom,” it takes no more than five or ten seconds for the artists’ message to sink in — the amount of time it takes to read the signage at the entrance:

The University of Virginia (UVA) is a site of reckoning. The legacies of slavery and white supremacy reverberate throughout its built environment. EscapeRoom confronts the frameworks of injustice that contemporary audiences inhabit and inherit in relation to this UNESCO World Heritage Site. … EscapeRoom charts critical routes through a maze of predatory systems.

Inside, the exhibits contributed by multiple artists elaborate upon the white-supremacy theme. Five 3D-printed pieces of porcelain, for instance, are described as giving “materiality, scale and dimension to the many ‘tools’ that mediate state violence visited upon Black victims: horses, batons, guns, tear gas, and more.”

A mobile made of steel sheet metal “examines violence visited upon Black people at the hands of the American state. It attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.”

To set foot in the EscapeRoom is to enter a world of victimhood that would have been entirely justified a century or two ago but seems tragically out of date 60 years after the passage of Civil Rights legislation, the enactment of the Great Society’s war on poverty, and the dramatic transformation of attitudes toward race in America — not to mention the implementation of Racial Equity Task Force recommendations at UVA itself that made the exhibit possible in the first place. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Race and Race Relations, Virginia history

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In Their Own Words: Jefferson, Whiteness, and Dicks in the Sky

Posted on March 27, 2024 by | 26 comments

Meet Marisa Williamson. The Harvard-educated assistant professor in the University of Virginia art department works in video, image-making, installation and performance art around themes of “history, race, feminism, and technology,” according to her UVA faculty page. Most recently, she co-curated the EscapeRoom exhibition at the Ruffin Gallery, which we highlight in a companion article.

Williamson, who has worked at UVA since 2018, was one of the first faculty members hired under the “Race, Justice and Equity” initiative made possible by grants from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She described her approach to art in a 2021 conversation with Tori Cherry, a Charlottesville artist and UVA Grad, hosted by Charlottesville’s New City Arts.

“One of my big goals is to unsettle and to figure out how to haunt, how to keep things moving, how to agitate through these various forms of performance and monument,” Williamson said. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, DEI, Race and Race Relations, Virginia history

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The Use and Misuse of a UVA Lecture Series

Posted on March 21, 2024 by | 75 comments

by James A. Bacon

The “fixation” of modern-day Israelis on the Holocaust has become a “vast and ugly fig leaf” hiding oppression of Palestinians and giving Israelis license to brush aside moral qualms about their response to the October 7 terror attacks, Brown University historian Omer Bartov told an audience of 60 or so people Tuesday at the University of Virginia.

In vowing to “never again” let Jews fall prey to genocidal extermination, Israelis indulge in “self-victimization,” “self pity,” and “self righteousness,” said Bartov, an Israeli-born Jew who has built his academic career around the study of the Holocaust and genocide. “It’s not a condition conducive to understanding, toleration, and reconciliation.”

The lecture, entitled, “The Never Again Syndrome: Uses and Misuses of Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Global Politics,” was one in a series of events billed by UVA leadership as broadening understanding of the Middle East conflict. The lecture series is an outgrowth of the tension between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups at UVA. Jewish students have complained of a hostile environment that leaves them afraid to speak out or even openly identify as Jews. In a parallel initiative, the Ryan administration created a religious diversity task force to understand how Jewish and Muslim students, faculty and staff “experience life on Grounds.” Continue reading →

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Marriage Promotes ‘White Supremacy,’ George Mason Professor Says

Posted on March 18, 2024 by | 116 comments

by Jerome Woehrle

“Marriage fundamentalism” promotes “white supremacy,” according to a professor at Virginia’s largest university.

“Marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy,” wrote George Mason University Professor Bethany Letiecq in the Journal of Marriage and Family. “Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family.”

Letiecq, an official of the American Association of University Professors, says she employs “critical family theorizing … to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages [white heteropatriarchal nuclear families] and marginalizes others as a function of marriage fundamentalism.”

Letiecq says the government has coerced “its citizens to enter into an institution built upon White heteropatriarchal supremacy.” Letiecq says marriage as an institution has allowed white heterosexual couples “to gain access to benefits, rights, and protections.”

She lives with her partner and their children in what she describes as “a committed heterosexual union outside the institution of marriage.” Letiecq claims that only White heterosexual couples reap the social and financial benefits of marriage subsidized by the government while minority Americans do not gain any such benefits.
Continue reading →

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War on Fossil Fuels Reaches Court of Appeals

Posted on March 13, 2024 by | 29 comments

By Steve Haner

A climate alarmism publicity stunt masquerading as serious litigation had a hearing in front of the Virginia Court of Appeals on Monday, seeking to revive its rejected petition to shut down the fossil fuel industry in Virginia. Why? Because some of the plaintiffs suffered from heat exhaustion while exercising on summer days, and two of them got Lyme Disease after tick bites.

The suit was last discussed on Bacon’s Rebellion when it was filed in 2022. Later that year a Richmond City Circuit Court judge accepted the state’s motion to dismiss it on summary judgement, citing the doctrine of sovereign immunity. It was an appeal of that dismissal which was before a panel of the appeals judges, covered only by Brad Kutner of Radio IQ.

The appeals court is being asked to reinstate the case, which is seeking aggressive if poorly defined relief. Basically, the original petition seeks to repeal Virginia’s Gas and Oil Act and reverse long-standing policy decisions in favor of developing energy resources. It seeks to prevent the state regulatory agencies from allowing any new fossil fuel infrastructure of any kind, presumably from pipelines to coal mines to gas stations to power plants.

The stages and pleadings of the Virginia case are documented by a website tracking it and a handful of similar cases around the nation, with the same basic arguments and a common set of lawyers. So far, the plaintiffs have seen some initial success only in Montana and Hawaii. Their federal level suit is being actively opposed by the Biden Department of Justice. Continue reading →

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Posted in Courts and law, Culture wars, Environment

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San Francisco’s “Algebra for None” Policy and How Virginia Avoided a Similar Fate

Posted on March 12, 2024 by | 28 comments

by Todd Truitt 

On March 5, 84% of San Francisco voters  voted in favor of a referendum for San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to bring back Algebra for 8th graders, overturning their prior ill-fated math reform (a “no middle schooler let ahead” math policy). What does this vote have to do with Virginia?

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) had initially proposed a similar policy for Virginia as part of its Virginia Math Pathways Initiative (VMPI) in 2021. As noted below, VMPI cited Stanford Education Professor Jo Boaler and resources primarily using SFUSD’s misrepresented preliminary data as “empirical evidence” for VMPI’s similar initial proposal. 

San Francisco’s “Algebra for None” Policy and Its Immediate Effects

SFUSD revised its math program in 2014 based on the ideas of Boaler, requiring heterogeneous math classes and restricting Algebra until 9th grade. By 2018, Boaler and SFUSD were claiming success based upon SFUSD’s preliminary data (subsequently exposed as having been misrepresented).

At the same time, a flood of middle class and well-off families pursued workarounds, thereby creating opportunity gaps with less advantaged kids. As a result, the City of San Francisco (not SFUSD) began funding workarounds for less advantaged kids. Meanwhile, SFUSD’s math head used the tired trope that those who opposed the inequity of its “Algebra for None” policy were only affluent parents fighting for their own children to get ahead. Continue reading →

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University of Virginia Spends $20 Million On 235 DEI Employees, With Some Making $587,340 Per Year

Posted on March 5, 2024 by | 119 comments

It takes tuition payments from nearly 1,000 undergraduates just to pay their base salaries!


Bacon’s Rebellion is reposting this article published by Open the Books, a nonprofit group dedicated to transparency in government spending, and republished on the Jefferson Council blog. Open the Books CEO Adam Andrzejewski will speak at the Jefferson Council 3rd annual meeting April 9. Register now to attend. — JAB

The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” banner — including 82 students — whose total cost of employment is estimated at $20 million. That’s $15 million in cash compensation plus an additional 30 percent for the annual cost of their benefits.

In contrast, last Friday, the University of Florida dismissed its DEI bureaucracy, saving students and taxpayers $5 million per year. The university terminated 13 full-time DEI positions and 15 administrative faculty appointments. Those funds have been re-programmed into a “faculty recruitment fund” to attract better people who actually teach students.

No such luck for learning at Virginia’s flagship university – founded by Thomas Jefferson no less. UVA has a much deeper DEI infrastructure. Continue reading →

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Posted in DEI, Education (higher ed), Efficiency in Government, Race and Race Relations

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Youngkin and Confederate Heritage

Posted on March 3, 2024 by | 128 comments

by Donald Smith

Does the Virginia GOP want the help and support of the Confederate heritage community? We should get a pretty good indicator this week.

Three bills just passed by the General Assembly will soon land on Governor Youngkin’s desk, if they haven’t already. They will remove the tax exemptions of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Stonewall Jackson Memorial House in Lexington, and stop further issuance of the General Robert E. Lee and Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates (but not recall existing ones). The governor will have only seven days to sign, veto, or let them become law without his signature.

That is plenty of time. Plenty of time for him to do the right thing, and veto them. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, General Assembly, Virginia history

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UVA Leadership Squelches Debate About University’s Antisemitism Problem

Posted on March 3, 2024 by | 87 comments

Provost Ian Baucom and Academic & Student Affairs Chair Elizabeth Cranwell: Antisemitism issues best addressed “in another setting.”

by James A. Bacon

During the University of Virginia Board of Visitors meeting Thursday, Provost Ian Baucom briefed board members on what the administration was doing to defuse tensions in the UVA community between Jews and the vocal pro-Palestinian faction over the Israel-Gaza war.

He mentioned “sustained academic programming” to illuminate sources of the decades-long conflict. He took note of the mental health services provided those experiencing mental anguish. He assured the Board that the University was working to bring opposing parties together in dialogue and to understand “the reality of Jewish, Muslim and other religious minorities.” UVA, he said, was committed to “deep engagement” and “freedom of expression.”

The Provost reiterated the administration’s support for free speech. UVA, he said, was a place where “people are free to disagree” but where “everyone belongs.” “We need to listen to people we disagree with,” he added, and concluded by thanking the Board for its “help and wisdom.”

But when board members began addressing the hostile environment for Jewish students at UVA, there was no sign that the Provost, President Jim Ryan, or Rector Robert Hardie were interested in “listening” to anyone who disagreed with them, much less in “engaging” with them on the most contentious issue to afflict the University in recent years. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Culture wars, Education (higher ed)

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