Campus watch: English Dept. vs. English
Among its several “actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” Rutgers University’s English Department will de-emphasize “traditional grammar rules,” reports Alex Frank at The College Fix. In an e-mail celebrating Juneteenth, department head Rebecca Walkowitz, vowed to incorporate “ ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy,” which will challenge “the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues,” so as not to put students with poor “academic” English backgrounds “at a disadvantage.” Another goal: “decolonizing the Writing Center.” How does lowering standards serve justice? Executive dean Peter March and spokeswoman Dory Devlin didn’t respond to Frank’s request for comment.
Conservative: Blame the Prosecutors, Too
“Democratic mayors, backing Joe Biden, are on the defensive” over President Trump’s threat to send in federal agents to deal with urban violent-crime waves, says The Chicago Tribune’s John Kass. But the worst culprits aren’t always the mayors, but prosecutors often elected with the help of billionaire George Soros: “They promised to empty their jails through the social-justice warrior policy of ‘decarceration.’ They also help give repeat, violent criminals little or no bond when arrested. And in many of the violent cities, the prosecutors have delivered on their promises, not to keep the violent in jail, but to let them out.” In Chicago, for example, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx “reportedly received at least $2 million from a Soros-backed political-action committee.” She has announced she won’t prosecute “peaceful protesters,” including those who normally face charges for “disorderly conduct and curfew violations.” In all, “you can see that something is growing in the big cities: an overwhelming sense of lawlessness.”
Legal desk: Trump Is Doing His Job in Portland
The elites blasting President Trump’s decision to send federal agents to face the Portland riots haven’t said “much about the Constitution,” Andrew C. McCarthy notes at FoxNews.com. Yet the nation’s central legal document gives the president the “solemn duty” of enforcing federal law, even if locals don’t request intervention. Critics of Trump’s move, including Sen. Rand Paul, have wrongly complained of uniformed agents “covering their names” and going undercover — both constitutionally valid when “radical militants” have started to “threaten the police and their families.” Far from “trampling on state sovereignty” by sending the agents to Portland, then, Trump is performing his “constitutional duty” of “faithfully executing our nation’s laws.”
COVID journal: My Family Didn’t Have to Die, Gov
Janice Dean’s in-laws died of the coronavirus in their New York elder-care homes, she recounts at USA Today. She blames the Cuomo administration order that “recovering coronavirus patients be placed into nursing homes” without requiring tests. Yet the loss of “at least 6,500 of our most helpless seniors” hasn’t led national media to ask Gov. Cuomo about the “nursing-home tragedy.” Cuomo, meanwhile, has blamed “everyone and everything else,” including “God, Mother Nature, The New York Post” and even “nursing-care workers.” If he won’t “own up to his catastrophic decisions,” we need “a nonpartisan investigation” to determine “accountability for what happened to our parents and grandparents,” whose lives didn’t matter to a governor who is ���as weak as they come.”
Culture critic: Against the Prioritization of Death
Our cultural “obsession with death” is “costing us” our lives and our young people “their future,” frets OutKick’s Jason Whitlock. Once, Americans’ religious faith “softened the consequence of death on this earth.” Now, we have “lost that resolve”: Secularization has left us willing to sacrifice any freedom “in pursuit of avoiding death” from “a virus with a 99 percent recovery rate.” At the same time, our elites urge us to devote our “time, energy and focus” to deaths, including that of George Floyd. “Fear-based decision-making,” meanwhile, has kept our “kids locked in homes, socially distanced indefinitely” without school or sports, which destroys “the lives of millions.” Whitlock asks: “When are we going to resume our fight for the living?”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board