RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/02/can-the-current-universities-be-saved/

Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm. Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170 percent.

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/01/they-arent-revolutionaries-theyre-bigoted-brats/

If you want to know what’s driving the Israelophobic protests and occupations at New York’s Columbia University – and many more elite campuses across America – get a load of this clip that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past 24 hours.

In it, one Johannah King-Slutzky – spokesperson for the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was forcibly ended by the New York City Police Department last night, with around 100 arrests – issues her and her comrades’ demands. On top of Columbia ‘divesting’ from Israel and such, King-Slutzky also demanded meals and water.

Apparently, Columbia was refusing to allow the students who were then breaking windows and barricading themselves inside Hamilton Hall to access their usual canteen grub. ‘We’re saying that [Columbia is] obligated to provide food to students who have paid for a meal plan here’, King-Slutzky told a sceptical press conference.

When pushed, she said they were only asking that supplies be allowed to be brought in:

‘Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?’

It’s all there. The whinging cadence, the ‘like’-strewn patter, the obligatory keffiyeh, the industrial-strength victimhood, the bloke in a crop top stood behind her… King-Slutzky and Co are the picture of trustafarians in revolt. Their anti-Israel bigotry is matched only by their profound sense of entitlement. How dare the university not provide adequate refreshments while we are smashing shit up?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nypd-reclaims-city-college-lowers-terror-flag-raises-u-s-flag/

I’ve written quite a bit since 9/11 about where I expected the growing battle between America and Islamic terrorists to go, but this is still a stunning moment.

There’s the NYPD reclaiming a portion of a New York City campus, lowering a terror flag and raising the American flag again.

There are echoes here of the flag at Ground Zero and of the Star-Spangled Banner.

This is literally a battle for our country being fought on college campuses between the NYPD and Islamic terrorists and their Marxist allies.

It’s all the more stunning in contrast to what’s going on in Los Angeles at UCLA.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-poisonous-antiwar-protests/

The sorry spectacles being staged at our most prestigious universities bespeak the accelerating degeneration of our future cognitive elites. How else do we describe the aggressive ignorance and moral idiocy of protestors who identify with sadistic, savage terrorists, and adopt the rhetoric and tropes of Nazi Germany? Who shamelessly smear Jews––the intended victims of Hamas’ widely publicized and celebrated genocidal aims­––the perpetrators of genocide? Who clearly know nothing of the region’s history, or that of Islam’s “settler colonialism” and millennium of imperialist depredations and slaving, or the Koranic foundations of that sanctified  aggression?

The letter of these chants and slogans is new, but the spirit goes back to Marx’s debut in history, whence it gradually migrated to Western fellow-travelers and progressives, until emerging during the Sixties to drive the protest movements against the Vietnam War.

There too willful ignorance about the facts of the conflict filled antiwar propaganda––especially the canard that the war was a “civil war” between North Vietnamese “patriots” seeking “national self-determination,” “decolonization,” and “human rights,” just as the American colonies did in the Revolutionary War. Wasn’t Ho Chi Min just another George Washington?

On the other side were the South Vietnamese, the willing collaborators with the “racist” occupiers and oppressors, the capitalist, imperialist Americans propping up the quisling regime in Saigon in order to take control of natural resources like “tin and tungsten,” the talking point provided to Jane Fonda by her handlers when she first became an activist against the war.

And of course, ignored was the reality of the conflict––a proxy war in the U.S.’s efforts to contain Soviet communism’s imperialist ambitions to turn the world into communist satrapies like Eastern Europe. The same callow, mostly affluent youth who demonized America soldiers as the feral attack dogs of the capitalists masters, never mentioned the millions slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved by Soviet and Maoist communist tyrants.

Also then as now, the shock troops of the antiwar movement were college students, some of the most privileged young people not just in America, but the world. Like today, they were cultivated, praised, and sometimes financed by America’s enemies exploiting these “useful idiots” who couldn’t have survived for five minutes living under communist totalitarianism, any more than the pro-Hamas feminists and champions of the LGBTQ alphabet people could survive under illiberal, homophobic, misogynist Islamic sharia law that recognizes only one “human right”––the right to submit to Islam by accepting dhimmitude or converting.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/04/30/five_ways_campus_turmoil_hurts_democrats_and_america_150863.html

Higher education is sinking lower and lower. That’s bad news for our country, which has benefited enormously from having the world’s best system of higher education. And it’s bad news for Democrats, who face a tight election. Their party is closely tied to education at all levels, especially at elite universities. It is the party of experts, after all, and the party of the left. Universities are both. Moreover, since the Democrats control the Executive Branch, the public holds them primarily accountable for ensuring social order. Their failures are obvious to the average voter. That’s bound to hurt Democratic Party candidates in November.

Parents with children in college or expected to matriculate soon have every right to expect their kids can learn in peace, hear diverse viewpoints, and speak freely without threats, intimidation, or indoctrination. That’s true whether the parents are Jewish or not. Decent Americans won’t tolerate threats against Jewish students any more than they would tolerate them against blacks, Muslims, Christians, or Asian Americans. Yet they now see those threats against Jewish students every day, and, at many universities, they don’t see administrators standing up for their rights.

Parents don’t understand why their kids aren’t being protected. They are unhappy that classes have been canceled and graduation ceremonies relegated to Zoom. They are dismayed that their tax money is being flushed down a sinkhole of anti-American propaganda. They wonder what in the world has happened to once-respected institutions. Good question.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20606/us-campuses-grooming-terrorists

For these Arabs, including some Palestinians, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about supporting the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group….

Those who are chanting “we are all Hamas” on the streets of New York and U.S. college campuses are not helping the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip even slightly. They are being used as human shields by the terrorist group Hamas in its genocidal war against Israel and Jews.” — Loay Al-Shareef, social media influencer from the United Arab Emirates, X, April 23, 2024.

“You would not survive a day in Gaza under Hamas, which demands that ‘infidels’ live with dignity only if they are subordinate to Islamists…. You do not understand Arabic, nor do you know Islam well enough to comprehend what awaits you if Hamas prevails (God forbid).” — Loay Al-Shareef, X, April 23, 2024.

“[Y]ou would also be the target of hatred because radical Islamists like Hamas believe in eternal enmity towards Jews and Christians. They interpret the Quranic verse (“O you who believe, never take Jews and Christians as friends,” as timeless, applicable to all Jews and Christians forever.” — Loay Al-Shareef, X, April 23, 2024.

“Hamas’ approach, in other words, has been a disaster for Palestinians in Gaza…. If universities cannot instil their students with peaceful, tolerant, and coexistent attitudes, then they have failed as institutions of higher learning.” — John Aziz, a British-Palestinian writer, Jewish Chronicle, April 22, 2024.

“Violence has failed us for decades, and the only way to accomplish justice for Palestinians is through peace.” — Hamza Howidy, Palestinian from Gaza, X, April 25, 2024.

By blocking the three Palestinian social media influences, the SJP, which claims to seek justice for the Palestinians, is proving that it does not care about freedom of speech for the Palestinians and is as intolerant as Hamas and other terrorist groups to criticism.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is a cancer on every university campus.” – Amjad Taha, Emirati researcher and journalist, X, April 23, 2024.

While protesters at Columbia University and Yale University celebrate Hamas and its “resistance” (a euphemism for violence and terrorism), Arabs have been ridiculing the “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators on American college campuses. For these Arabs, including some Palestinians, there is nothing “pro-Palestinian” about supporting the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group, whose members slaughtered 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped more than 240 others on October 7, 2023.