Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet By Stephen Kruiser
Ever since the terrorist murderers in Hamas attacked Israel almost three weeks ago, we’ve been witnessing the disgusting spectacle of American college students very vocally condemning Israel, some of which the esteemed VodkaPundit recently chronicled.
For being attacked.
Yes, parents, this is what a small fortune gets you when you send your kids off to have their minds polluted by the leftist filth that controls Academia.
These kids didn’t come out of the womb being virulently anti-Semitic, they had to be conditioned. To be sure, the American public education indoctrination mill helped get them there, but it’s the lunatics in Academia’s ivory towers who are responsible for the finished product. As I said in a recent podcast, the students are only working with the facts that their professors presented to them.
A handful of college presidents and boards of regents have issued statements condemning anti-Semitism and Hamas, but that can all be filed under “Too Little, Too Late.” The damage to young minds has already been done.
Wholesale changes in American public education and academia are long past overdue, but it’s been considered sacrilege — mostly by the left — to disparage the sainted teachers or institutions of higher learning. Eyes are being opened now, however. The corrupt agenda of the teachers’ unions that run K-12 public schools was revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and got parents involved in curricula decisions in great numbers.
The behavior of the rabidly pro-Palestinian/Hamas students at many elite universities has shocked a lot of people who aren’t online and consuming news for most of their waking hours.
There is, of course, BIG money in academia. It takes a lot to keep the hegemonic brain-washing apparatus humming. Obviously, the best way to fight it is to hit them where it hurts the most — in the bank accounts.
Shortly after I decided to write this column, my friend Ed Morrissey posted one of his own at our sister site HotAir which came at the money issue from a different angle than what I’m about to get into. Ed says that we should “decolonize” academia, and here are some of his suggestions:
Rather than launch destructive campaigns that will undermine the rights of all Americans, we need to address the issue at its core. The issue isn’t the NSJP, or the current flock of moral idiots on American campuses at the moment. The problem is the firehose of federal tax dollars propping up the Higher Ed Industry, and the way it gets manipulated to transform education into the kind of indoctrination that produced this anti-Semitic Hitler Youth Movement.
In other words, we need to end the student loan programs. We need to end Pell grants, and every scholarship from the federal government, even the ones for left-handed Laplanders with Lyme Disease. We need to end the transmission of every federal dollar into the bloated, corrupt Academia as it exists now and has existed over the last several decades. Its main product has become a blizzard of non-performing administrators and crops of moral idiots, the latter of whom emerge with crippling lifetime debt and nihilist fantasies that many of them will never outgrow.
To put it another way that might appeal to our progressive partners: We need to Defund the Fleece.
This violates no rights. It doesn’t dictate speech codes to college campuses, another point on which conservatives should know better than to impose. Not a single thing will change, except that we will finally kick the financial struts out from underneath a persistent parasite that has finally come close to achieving its goal of killing its host.
That’s a long quote from Ed’s piece, but I wanted to use it to set up what I was already going to write about.
Public funding is, as Ed points out, the biggest problem, but the tonier institutions of higher learning rely on the generosity of wealthy alumni to ensure that there is always a nice sheen on those ivory towers and that they’re fortified from reality.
Well, the frothing, pro-Palestinian/Hamas student minions are making reality crash in for some schools.
Top universities such as Harvard and Penn are facing backlash from alumni angry about the schools’ reactions to the attacks and their aftermath. The alumni say their schools didn’t move quickly and forcefully enough to condemn Hamas and denounce antisemitism after the Oct. 7 attacks, and that they have done a poor job since then protecting Jewish students as on-campus tensions rise.
Some say it was the final straw after years of growing disenchantment with the schools over what they see as a leftward political shift. Many big donors have announced plans to stop giving or said they are reconsidering future gifts.
The pullback could dent the finances of some universities that rely on big givers to fill their coffers. People giving $1 million or more made up less than 1% of donors but 57% of total donations across surveyed U.S. universities, according to a study by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education covering the fiscal year ended June 30, 2022.
Donations from the “big givers” can usually be penciled into the donation ledger every year and not worried about. Now, thanks to the fruits of their indoctrination labors being on display for all to see, upper crust universities are facing situations like this:
Retail billionaire Leslie Wexner’s foundation said it would cut financial ties with Harvard and end a program it funded at the school for Israelis. Wexner and his wife have donated more than $42 million to the Cambridge, Mass., university.
Forty-two million is a lot of money even in Harvard dollars.
Some might ask if this will really bring about any positive change in the long run. That’s impossible to predict, of course. The bully needs to take a few on the chin if he’s even going to think about leaving you alone though.
Those in upper management at America’s universities are obsessed with finances and fundraising. For a long time, they’ve been well-oiled machines when it comes to bloating their institutions’ bank accounts. When big, regular donors slam their checkbooks shut it’s a cause for overwhelming concern, if not outright panic.
We continue to see backlash against people who have long gotten away with ignorant anti-Israel, anti-Semitic world views. Those in academia had reason to feel more shielded from criticism than other inherently anti-Semitic groups; they’ve been getting rich off of their hatred for decades, after all. If it can’t be ended altogether, let’s hope that dangerous grift will at least be weakened now.
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