RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-higher-educations-leadership-problem

Now that the tents have been cleared from Columbia University’s campus, now that the NYPD has liberated Hamilton Hall, now that arrests have been made and outside agitators named, it’s time to begin making sense of the Tentifada. Mysteries abound: Who paid for all that matching, high-end camping gear? How did the same violent playbook spread from one campus to the next overnight? And what must we do now that the young collegians have made it clear that there’s more mayhem coming?

Let’s hope that our more astute observers get answers to these questions. But we have a more pressing duty: that of observing how various men and women in positions of power and authority acted when the barbarians stormed the gates.

First up: Columbia president Minouche Shafik. If you knew nothing about Shafik, or Columbia, or modern universities, and wanted to ascertain how the president might meet the troubling moment, you wouldn’t have needed to look past one number: $13.64 billion. That’s the value of Columbia’s endowment as of last June; it’s also, more or less, the Gross Domestic Product of Moldova, Rwanda, and a host of other smallish nations. With so much money at stake, it’s likely that anyone in Shafik’s position would have reacted as she did, with a symphony of bluster, obfuscations, and half-truths designed to make sure that business proceeds as usual.

Testifying before Congress in April, for example, Shafik delivered sweeping, emotive statements, such as saying that “for me, personally, any discrimination against people for their Jewish faith is anti-Semitism.” But when asked whether she intended to discipline Professor Joseph Massad, who celebrated the massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 as “awesome,” Shafik merely said that the errant teacher was “spoken to.” When pressed further about Massad’s employment status, the president replied that she just wasn’t sure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/useful_idiots_for_hamas.html

Current campus disturbances outwardly resemble past protests. It would be as if they all shared a common script—righteous indignation, yelling and screaming slogans, lists of non-negotiable demands, going limp when police try to remove them, piles of trash, and all the rest.  Don’t be fooled.  Today’s protestors are profoundly different despite the superficial resemblances, and these differences make them particularly dangerous.

Current disturbances lack this rational: self-interested elements and many participants are clueless when asked to explain their action.  In a nutshell, while anti-war protestors wanted to end the draft and avoid Vietnam, and blacks demanded more educational resources, today’s protestors want to eradicate a country of nine million people possessing the most powerful, nuclear-equipped army in the Middle East. Moreover, this mission is to be accomplished by shouting “Death to America” and disrupting classes.  Brilliant, and one can only ask, “Are these the smartest of the smart?”  Ironically, perhaps the only rational participants in these disturbances are the non-student professional agitators bedecked in their balaclavas whose mission is just to create violent chaos.  They at least have a chance of succeeding.

Stupidity abounds.  Why, for example, are so many of these pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrators women who drape themselves in Muslim style headscarves, embracing a religion so antithetical to feminism? They surely know how women are treated in Muslim-dominated nations.  Are these female demonstrators demanding an intifada so they can now obey their husbands unconditionally?

Similarly, what if protesting students holding a “Queers for Palestine” sign or wearing a sweatshirt proclaiming “Fags for Palestine” were magically transported to Iran, a theocracy that executes homosexuals?  Are those American blacks rallying for Islam aware that African Muslims are slaughtering blacks in West Darfur?  Or that Arabs once dominated the slave trade?  Where on the planet do Muslims help blacks?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/will-scotus-revisit-discriminatory-admissions-policies

n February, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case that concerned a change in admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Alexandria, Virginia. After the new policy took effect, the share of Asian students admitted to TJ, one of the nation’s top public high schools, dropped by nearly 20 percentage points from the previous year. The share of white, black, and Hispanic students, by contrast, increased. As it turns out, this had been the goal of education officials in Fairfax County all along. At an October 2020 meeting, TJ’s own principal revealed that she wanted a “student body that more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.”

Justice Samuel Alito described the majority’s refusal to hear the case as “hard to understand.” In 2007’s Parents Involved v. Seattle School District, the Supreme Court held that a school district’s interest in racial balancing could not justify the district’s use of race in selecting students for admission to public high schools. In 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Neither decision, however, addressed admissions policies that—like TJ’s—are race-neutral on their face but race-conscious in aim and effect. Thus, “TJ offers a roadmap,” Alito warned, “for other selective schools to skirt the Equal Protection Clause.”

The Supreme Court has a second chance to remind education officials that “eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Students for Fair Admissions. Last month, the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence—a group of parents and students who support merit-based admissions and improving K–6 education—asked the justices to examine the 2021–22 admissions policy for Boston’s three selective public high schools. This policy, while facially race-neutral, diminished the share of white students (from 33 percent to 24 percent) and Asian students (from 21 percent to 16 percent) at Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant). As in Fairfax County, the Boston School Committee adopted the new admissions policy because it believed Asians (and whites) were “overrepresented.”

https://www.jns.org/protesters-at-penn-seek-clash-police-refuse-to-clear-encampment/

As tensions escalate at a Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, administrators are taking a dialogue and de-escalation approach, possibly because they have no choice.

U. Penn asked the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) to dismantle the encampment, but the police refused, the student-run Daily Pennsylvanian claimed on May 2.

Police asked that the university first provide proof that the encampment “presents an imminent danger,” reported the paper, citing a source familiar with the matter.

If accurate (and the Philadelphia police refused to confirm or deny the report), it suggests the PPD is creating a new standard for enforcing the law. As the university points out, “The encampment itself violates the university’s facilities policies.”

In response to JNS requests for clarification, the police said, “We do not publicly discuss specific planning or engagement strategies related to ongoing situations. Our response will be based on the specific circumstances of each situation.”

The office of the interim university president was also vague, telling JNS, “We have reached out to the City of Philadelphia to ensure we have the necessary resources to keep our community safe. The Mayor’s Office has asked for more information, and we are providing it.”

The protesters may have sympathy among senior public officials. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a George Soros-funded DA sharply criticized for his soft-on-crime policies, visited the protesters three times, saying the purpose of his third visit on May 2 was “to find out what the truth is.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mit-scraps-diversity-statements-in-faculty-hiring-process-after-discovering-they-dont-work/

MIT will no longer require diversity statements in its faculty-hiring process, making it the first elite university to abandon the practice.

The decision was made by MIT president Sally Kornbluth, with support from the school’s provost and six academic deans, a spokesperson told National Review on Sunday afternoon.

“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said in a statement provided to NR. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Higher-education writer and researcher John Sailer first reported Kornbluth’s statement for UnHerd on Sunday. MIT previously required diversity statements across its academic disciplines, including its nuclear-science and engineering department.

The campus climate at MIT and Korbluth herself came under intense scrutiny when she testified before Congress last year and struggled to say definitively if calls for genocide against Jews violated campus policies. She testified alongside former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and former Harvard University president Claudine Gay about the explosion of campus antisemitism following Hamas’s civilian massacre in Israel.

During her testimony, Kornbluth said she does not believe “speech codes” work to promote an environment of free expression on campus.

Magill resigned shortly after she gave similar testimony to Kornbluth’s regarding campus antisemitism. Similarly, Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace after her congressional testimony on antisemitism and a plagiarism scandal that implicated much of Gay’s academic output.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/adults-in-blue

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of CompStat, the technology-enabled innovation that turned the gritty New York City Police Department into a modern, transparent, and strategically intelligent public safety force. Every week, commanders from the city’s roughly 100 precincts come in front of top chiefs for a grilling on what’s happening in their command, what they plan to do about it, and if they’re succeeding. It can be terrifying. But the demand for individual accountability—on a podium, exposed under scrutiny—is what created an agency of leaders and the nation’s best police force.

This week, former NYPD captain and current mayor Eric Adams went through a version of this exercise in front of the press as he was grilled on the situation at New York City’s campus protests (especially at Columbia University), how police planned to deal with it, and how it was going. He shared the tactical and strategic planning that went into the arrests of roughly 300 people from Columbia and City College of New York on Tuesday. (An additional 13 from NYU and 43 from the New School were arrested today). He explained the authority granted for these raids by the school administrations—and by the laws allegedly broken, from criminal mischief to burglary.

And, Adams explained: “Young people are being influenced by those who are professionals at radicalizing our children, and I’m not going to allow that to happen as the mayor of the City of New York.” What is the NYPD doing now? “We are processing the arrests to distinguish between who are actual students and who were not supposed to be on the ground,” the mayor said.

It was quite a scene on Tuesday night: NYPD officers entering Columbia’s illegally barricaded Hamilton Hall via an armored vehicle that got them through a second-floor window. Bodycam video illustrates what they encountered inside: physical blockades of furniture, garbage cans, and other objects obstructing their path, which they cut through with electric saws and blow torches. Then they had to deal with the demonstrators, some resisting—“Put it down, you’re gonna get hurt,” a cop told one idiot trying to block him with a makeshift shield—others complying, all amid the steady din of the rioters’ frenzied chanting. Not an easy day’s work: how many of us could handle it, even for a few minutes, without losing our composure? Yet the NYPD accomplished its assignment in an intensely hostile environment without using undue force. And when they were done, they lowered the Arab colors of the Palestinian flag that protesters had raised over CCNY and reinstated Old Glory.

Contrast this professionalism and competence with the squawks of protesters, most of whom have likely never been tested away from the protection of social media, group-based entitlements, and the safety blanket of anonymity. Unlike protesters of earlier generations—Mayor Adams conjured his own participation in bygone demonstrations with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton—the current crusaders distinguish themselves by cowering. They hide their faces behind pandemic-era masks, sinched hoodies, and keffiyehs wound tightly around their faces as if to keep out the worst Arabian sandstorm. They demand those who might challenge their ideas, mission, and strategy to stay away. And they block pro-Israel students from coming close enough to ask them a question—or even attend final exams in their vicinity.

Whatever the breakdown may be between outside agitators and enrolled students, these campus crusaders are leaders in the mold of Hamas’s own, who prolong the suffering of Gazans in their perennial dream of destroying Israel and world Jewry from the safety of hideaways throughout the Middle East and Europe. Even October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar is reportedly hiding underground with his family, surrounded by hostages as human shields.

Media reporting this week has been inundated with the petulant accounts of arrestees complaining about how “brutal” they found the experience of being held, finally, accountable for their actions. “As a human chain, draped in keffiyehs and shaking like leaves in the autumn wind, we sang with hushed tones,” recounts Columbia student and arrestee Allie Wong. “As [NYPD] approached from multiple directions, we sang with frail and cracking voices.” And then: “We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls.”

Wong professed herself shocked by the “brutality” of being “arrested, bound and shuttled down to 1 Police Plaza,” where “they threw us in cells like animals—cells where the only toilets women could use lacked any privacy.” (While, she gripes, the NYPD “had a pizza party prepared for arresting officers.”)

For these protesting rag dolls, getting arrested must have been jarringly consequential. You can’t put your hand over the camera when police are taking your mugshot—not like you do on campus when someone critical of what you’re doing approaches to ask you a question. And your fingerprints are permanently yours—as is the recorded account of what laws you have been charged with trampling. Like the officers whose faces, badge numbers, and activities were all fully exposed and documented on video, campus agitators now have their personal identities and actions memorialized for all to see and judge.

This week has thrown into sharp relief for Americans, in New York and beyond, the difference between leadership—which the NYPD showed throughout—and what passes for courage and character among those who sow disorder.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-leaders-vow-to-identify-outsiders-fueling-anti-israel-protests-radicalizing-our-students/

A New York Police Department leader said Friday that officials believe that an outside organization is likely behind the anti-Israel protests that have roiled college campuses and that have led to thousands of arrests around the country, and they intend to “find out who that is.”

“I just want to say, and I said it before, there’s somebody behind this movement,” NYPD deputy commissioner of operations Kaz Daughtry told reporters after police arrested 56 protesters at New York University and The New School on Friday.

“There is some organization behind this movement. The level of organization that we’re seeing in both of these schools and at Columbia,” he said, adding that officers discovered leaflets at the demonstrations that outlined how to protest or how to commit civil disobedience.

The leaflets told protesters what to do if they were to be arrested and what to say to police.

“There is somebody funding this. There is somebody radicalizing our students,” he said, adding that “we will find out who that is.”