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Revisiting Reagan’s Commencement Address at Notre Dame It is important to remember what a real commencement address delivered by a real president, who isn’t trying to score cheap political points, should look and sound like. By David Keltz

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/21/revisiting-reagans-commencement-address-at-notre-dame/

On Sunday, Joe Biden gave the commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically black male college in Atlanta. Rather than use the moment to inspire the graduating class and provide them with life advice or any sort of wisdom, Biden instead chose to turn it into a highly divisive, racially inflammatory, and anti-American campaign speech—in a pathetic attempt to regain his rapidly diminishing support within the black community.

He called for “an immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, undermining Israel’s ability to defeat that savage terrorist group yet again. He slammed America as “systemically racist.” He warned the audience about the supposed threat of “white supremacy.” He insinuated that black men are randomly “being killed” by cops in the streets—a specious charge not backed by any data—and he uttered this rather remarkable line to the graduating class: “what does it mean, as we’ve heard before, to be a black man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”

Yes, the president of the United States told a group of young black male graduates that the country they live in—and the one he is supposedly in charge of—does not love them. How inspiring.

But rather than spend anymore ink dissecting what was truly a despicable and grotesque speech by a reprehensible man, it is important to remember what a real commencement address delivered by a real president, who isn’t trying to score cheap political points, should look and sound like.

Almost 43 years to the day before Biden’s shameful remarks at Morehouse College, President Ronald Reagan delivered the commencement address at Notre Dame University on May 17, 1981.

The contrast between the two speeches could not have been more stark. Reagan spoke excitedly of a country that he was proud to be a citizen and leader of.

As was typical of Reagan, it was full of humor and self-depreciation.

Northwestern University Received $4 Billion From U.S. Taxpayers Since 2018, While Their Endowment Soared To $15 Billion Plus, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and others gave $1 billion to the university in foreign gifts (2007-2022)-Adam Andrzejewski

This spring, students on dozens of college campuses have built encampments and occupied buildings in anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist demonstrations.

Not surprisingly, some have turned violent.

In general, universities that cracked down on disruptive demonstrations and disciplined the students involved, limited damage both to their buildings and reputations. But other colleges did the opposite and “negotiated” themselves into shocking concessions.

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University is an elite college and admits just seven percent of applicants. It has top faculties in medicine, law, engineering, business, the arts and sciences, journalism, and even theatre. Students come from around the world and from all 50 states. Long called a “near-Ivy,” its place among the best U.S. universities is unquestioned. 

And yet, as happened at so many distinguished schools, this spring, Northwestern students set up an anti-Israel encampment.

The Disgrace and Fall of the American Elite Campus These infantile campuses have a rendezvous with adult accountability, both public and governmental. And they won’t like what is coming. Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/20/the-disgrace-and-fall-of-the-american-elite-campus/

Anti-Israel/pro-Hamas campus protests have engulfed hundreds of college campuses. But the more coastal, blue-state, and supposedly elite the campus was, the more furious the violence that sometimes followed these demonstrations.

Even rowdier and more vicious street analogs shut down key bridges, freeways, and religious services. Protestors often defaced hallowed American monuments, national cemeteries, and iconic buildings. Visa-holders were among the worst perpetrators, adding ingratitude to their criminality.

The vast majority wore masks, not to protect from infection but to hide their identities. It is received wisdom, however, that those who wear masks do so for obvious reasons: so authorities cannot identify and punish those who commit crimes (e.g. the Klan, antifa, bank robbers, criminal gangs), or so that anonymity can help incite mob furor, given that participants feel that their vehemence increases once it cannot be traced.

More mundanely, why don’t the students simply identify themselves, insist they want their “resistance” to be known, and then hope their arrests will be proof of their courage to galvanize like-minded people to join them?

Why? One, because the students are sunshine and careerist revolutionaries. They see no inconsistency between shouting “Death to Israel,” “Global Intifada,” or “River to the Sea” one day and then the next, applying for a top spot at Goldman Sachs, a tony university, or a federal bureaucracy. Jacobin professors protest like it is 1793, but when politely arrested, they collapse into fetal positions and scream hysterically that consequences cannot follow their illegality, given they are privileged, superior intellects and moralists, with titles and degrees no less.

Two, the protestors, deep down, know they are aligning with the murderers and rapists of October 7 and that their chants are Hitlerian. And so few wish for their performance-art antics to become part of their public personas.

Demonstrators claimed they were peacefully acting on behalf of Palestine rather than virulently pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel. But their own bloodthirsty words proved the contrary—to the anguish of embarrassed campus administrators. The latter finally concluded that the overt venom was a bit too much and certainly injurious to their own administrative careers, campus fund-raising, and alumni support.

Note that there was a long hiatus between the slaughter and hostage-taking of October 7 and the entry of the Israeli Defense Forces into Gaza to destroy Hamas. Nonetheless, campuses caught fire immediately after the slaughter. A professor at Cornell characterized the Hamas mass murders as “exhilarating.” Efforts immediately followed to harass and embarrass Jewish students, not to protest the IDF in Gaza.

Who Are the Anti-Israel Campus Protesters?By Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/07/who-are-the-anti-israel-campus-protesters/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

Antisemitism, Marxism, and ignorance were all on display at Columbia

New York City — The first thing anyone walking the perimeter of the erstwhile Columbia University “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” could see was a sign — “WELCOME TO THE PEOPLE’S UNIVERSITY FOR PALESTINE” — that hung on the fence surrounding the school’s South Lawn. On the other side of the quad, at the entrance to the encampment — and behind a legion of self-identified Columbia faculty blocking reporters from accessing the occupied zone — were two billboards, one advertising a list of the protesters’ demands and the other laying out the encampment’s “community guidelines.”

“We will remain until Columbia concedes [sic] to our demands,” the sign read. The encampment organizers demanded that the university divest itself from “corporations that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide, and occupation in Palestine.” They insisted that the university provide “complete transparency for all of Columbia’s financial investments.” They would not leave, they wrote, until the university provided “amnesty for all students and faculty disciplined or fired in the movement for Palestinian liberation.” Next to the list of demands stood the encampment’s Ten Commandments.

Occupiers are to be “grounded” in solidarity with Palestinians, mindful of their environmental impact (they do, after all, “recognize our role as visitors, and for many of us, colonizers, on this land”), and respectful of physical and emotional boundaries. Members of the encampment should not engage with media or use drugs and alcohol, the guidelines note, but, if mistakes are made, occupiers must “grant ourselves and others grace” and approach “conflict with the goal of addressing and repairing.”

At the bottom of the list were a request to contact leaders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), the group in charge, to suggest additional guidelines and a reminder to “free Palestine!”

Those two signs and the scene that formed around them demonstrated in real time the strange contradictions of the current campus-protest movement. On the list of guidelines were the therapy-tinged recommendations of being “grounded” and “granting ourselves and others grace”; the rhetoric of decolonization in describing the land as having been stolen from a Native American tribe; and the presumed heroic self-reliance and antiestablishment, sticking-it-to-the-man attitude of “We keep us safe.” The catalogue of demands — not requests, not exhortations — betrayed a sense of entitlement seemingly at odds with the protesters’ self-conception of earnest advocacy for their cause. The wall of professors preventing members of the press — including National Review — from entering served as evidence of the institutional power that the ideologues possess despite their every effort to claim otherwise. And right there, behind the infantry line of the professoriate, shrieking at reporters attempting to enter, in a voice that would later become instantly recognizable, was Khymani James.

Campus Pro-Hamas Encampments: An Omen of Western Societal Demise Few understand the ultimate goal of the organizers. by Joan O’Callaghan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/campus-pro-hamas-encampments-an-omen-of-western-societal-demise/

Since the October 7 Hamas massacre, rape and kidnapping of nearly 2,000 Israelis, Western democracies have been engulfed in what are commonly called “pro-Palestinian protests.” Aided and abetted by a leftist legacy media, naïve and ignorant university students, and spineless politicians at all levels, our city streets and university campuses have become battlegrounds. But battlegrounds for what? Is this really about Israel and Gaza, or is something more insidious going on?

An answer to this question lies in events that took place in Hamburg, Germany at the end of April, where more than 1,000 Muslims marched through the streets demanding that the country transform itself into an Islamic caliphate.

In recent weeks, the focus has been on encampments which have sprouted like toadstools on university campuses. An examination of what goes on in these tent cities might provide us with a glimpse of what the future could hold.

These insurrections are not about Israel, or Palestine, or even Gaza. The end game is anarchy, chaos, and finally a nation defined by Sharia. The methodology is simple – intimidation. We see it weekly in the marches that shut down our streets, take over the public spaces, and overrun our universities.

Therefore, it is not surprising that any attempt to counter the hateful propaganda embedded in infantile slogans, with facts, is met with howls that the “freedom of speech” is under threat. Yet, how much “freedom of speech” really exists in the encampments? Videos taken by visiting journalists are revealing. Media tents have been erected by entrances. Only “approved” journalists may enter or ask questions, and only designated activists may answer. Attempts to speak to the students directly are met with responses that they are not “trained” to speak to the media; then these students direct the questioner to the “media tent.” In cases where unapproved journalists did manage to enter the encampments, they were soon met by an organizer who inserted himself between the journalist and the student to prevent any dialogue from taking place. Tight control over what is said and by whom is the order of the day. Freedom of speech for some, but not for others.

James Piereson, Naomi Schaefer Riley A Dangerous Road Elite universities may come to regret considering “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” proposals for their endowments.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/for-universities-bds-is-a-dangerous-road

In January, writing for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman lamented that a high percentage of giving in the U.S. goes to wealthy, elite colleges and universities, often at the expense of programs aiding the poor. But donors don’t need to choose between giving to wealthy institutions and giving to areas of the “highest need,” he advised. Instead, they can take a “yes, and” approach. “If donors make a gift to their alma mater, they should pair it with an equally large gift to a program that makes online textbooks free to all college students. Or they could pair a gift to a research institution in a wealthy country with a gift to fund research on infectious diseases that primarily affect poor people in developing countries.”

In a subsequent article, Benjamin Soskis of the Urban Institute added that colleges themselves could facilitate this “pairing” of donations—acting as philanthropic “sommeliers”—by advising donors on how to give elsewhere, too. Schools truly committed to this idea, writes Soskis, could “make such pairings a condition of major gifts—those who want to give a million dollars or more to Yale would need to also donate to one of the university’s equity partners.”

The level of chutzpah such an arrangement would require might challenge even the boldest development officer. But the philanthropic sommelier idea is a possible solution to a dilemma that elite universities confront today. College administrators want to keep raising piles of money from wealthy donors, while at the same time signaling that they are truly concerned about the poor and oppressed. And they want to earn the approbation of leftists on campus without antagonizing donors. In that circumstance, they might take the money, while advising donors how they might “launder” it via gifts to other charities.

Western Universities: A Double Invasion by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20655/western-universities-double-invasion

They introduce themselves as university students, young scholars who are supposedly training to become the nation’s political guides and mentors.

However, you soon found out that their understanding of political issues, including the current war in Gaza, is a reflection more of street politics than academic methods. In other words, the street, and its politique de la rue in French, have invaded the university or at least part of it that wears the label of “humanities”, a witches’ brew of once academic subjects corrupted by ideology.

The crisis in Western universities is further complicated by the advent of wokeism, a corrupted secular version of the seminarian’s sympathy for the innocent scapegoat, a sympathy extended to all real or imagined victims of injustice. While the seminary is chiefly interested in the text, faculty ought to be equally interested in the context. In many “humanities” departments in Western universities, however, the text comes from propagandist pamphlets written by polemicist professors, while the context is regarded as a mere diversion from the truth.

Shakespeare said it best: “Now confusion has made its masterpiece!”

If you visit Paris these days, you may run into solemn-looking youths distributing a tract that’s says: “Palestine is fighting for all of us!” or tagging this message on the walls: “Stop Genocide in Palestine!”

They introduce themselves as university students, young scholars who are supposedly training to become the nation’s political guides and mentors.

However, you soon found out that their understanding of political issues, including the current war in Gaza, is a reflection more of street politics than academic methods. In other words, the street, and its politique de la rue in French, have invaded the university or at least part of it that wears the label of “humanities”, a witches’ brew of once academic subjects corrupted by ideology.

Brittany Bernstein :Pro-Palestinian ‘Anarchists and Communists’ Claim Responsibility for Vandalism at University of California President’s Office

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/pro-palestinian-anarchists-and-communists-claim-responsibility-for-vandalism-at-university-of-california-presidents-office/

A pro-Palestinian group of “anti-colonial anarchists and communists” says it was behind a recent vandalism attack against the University of California Office of the President.

The group claimed to have released hundreds of cockroaches and defaced the building’s exterior in a Sunday morning assault.

“With the Aurora Borealis above us and the martyrs in our hearts, we attacked the UC Office of the President in solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance,” read a post by the “sacred black and red” on Indybay. “Using a fire extinguisher filled with red paint we covered the facade and smashed seven windows. Then, with access to the building, we released 500 cockroaches inside and emptied a second fire exintguisher [sic] onto the interior.”

However, while the president’s office confirmed to the San Francisco Standard there was damage done to its building, it did not confirm cockroaches had been released into the building. Police are investigating the incident as a “hate-related crime.”

The alleged vandals said they “finalized the act by leaving a water jug inscribed with ‘Bonk’ at the scene — an homage to the militants of Cal Poly Humboldt and the international student encampment movement.” The comment was an apparent reference to a pro-Palestinian protester at Humboldt’s California State Polytechnic University who hit a police officer with an empty water jug in April.

The vandals went on to post a screed about the UC system’s “entanglements” with Israel that calls for the abolition of the UC system.

“The University’s true fascist form has been put on full display, and hiding behind hollow progressive ideals is no longer an option for the dead-eyed desk killers,” the group wrote. “Abolish the UC showed us in 2020 that the University of California is nothing more than a settler colonial project, that their police are protecting the gates of colony, where knowledge is produced and captured by the State to only dig its claws deeper into the flesh of Indigenous lands here and abroad.”

“Let us not forget the UC became co-ed to breed settlers and populate the west coast,” it added. “Speaking only to the UC’s material connection to the Zionist entity obfuscates the extent of the political, theoretical, and cultural entanglements between the UC and the Israeli State. The University does not simply fund Israel, it creates Israel, and launches this white-colony into the post-modern Empire. What does divestment mean when the very essence and foundation of the institution is a fascist regime? Where does Zionism begin and end in the University of California? Is divestment an oxymoron? The UC must be abolished.”

California University President Placed on Leave after Approving Israel Boycott:Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-university-president-placed-on-leave-after-approving-israel-boycott/

The president of Sonoma State University in California was placed on an indefinite leave of absence two days after he sent an email to the university community announcing that he had acceded to campus encampment organizers’ anti-Israel demands.

Ming-Tung “Mike” Lee issued a statement on Tuesday informing SSU students, faculty, and staff that, after standing for 19 days, the anti-Israel encampment on the university’s lawn had achieved at least one of its goals: an academic boycott of Israel.

“Over the past week, senior administrators met with students and faculty to listen to and discuss student demands. On Friday, May 10 and Tuesday, May 14, I joined the group to hear directly from them,” Lee wrote.

He went on to address the new academic boycott:

SSU will not pursue or engage in any study abroad programs, faculty exchanges, or other formal collaborations that are sponsored by, or represent, the Israeli state academic and research institutions. SSU also commits to immediately updating any SSU pamphlets and SSU-hosted websites that may still be circulating or searchable and to remove hosting or linking to any pamphlets, flyers, or brochures advertising the study abroad program where students are encouraged to study abroad in Israel. SSU will make it clear to any students that any such programs are terminated until further notice and not simply suspended.

Lee also indicated his desire to seek “divestment strategies” in accordance with the encampment organizers’ demands and wrote of his personal condemnation of what he called Israel’s “genocide.”

Jews at Haverford sue Haverford College in federal court Andrew Bernard

https://www.jns.org/jewish-students-sue-haverford-alleging-antisemitic-civil-rights-violations/

A Jewish group at Haverford College in Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit on Monday in federal court alleging that the highly-ranked private liberal arts school violated students’ civil rights and created a pervasively hostile environment for Jews on campus.

The plaintiffs in the case are five students—one of them named—who are all part of the group, which consists of faculty, students, alumni and parents. The five say that the college has engaged in discrimination against pro-Israel Jewish students in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The suit is the latest in a wave of legal actions against colleges and universities that Jewish students have filed in court or with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University are among the institutions that have been sued by Jewish students for antisemitic discrimination in the wake of Oct. 7.

Jews at Haverford is represented in Monday’s suit by the Deborah Project, a public interest law firm that defends the civil rights of Jews on campus.

In its suit, the group details what Jewish students at Haverford have experienced since Oct. 7 and how administrators have responded—or failed to do so—to their complaints about antisemitic violations of Haverford’s conduct policies. (Haverford told JNS it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.)