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EDUCATION

The ivory tower jihad In the appalling scenes on campus, chickens are now coming home to roost Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/

The shocking scenes on campus over the past few days are far more significant than mere student demonstrations getting out of hand.

With “Gaza solidarity encampments” having sprung up on more than 100 US campuses (and with British campuses now following suit) Islamists and the hard left have turned western universities into a theatre of war against Israel, the Jewish people and America.

At UCLA, a Jewish girl was knocked unconscious by the mob. On the Berkeley campus, the founder of Students Supporting Israel was repeatedly punched in the head, with one thug shouting “Go back to Europe, coloniser.”

At the Columbia University encampment, the mob called for “10,000 October 7ths” and screamed “Go back to Poland” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground”. One student who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live” was barred from campus but subsequently spotted in the mob that broke into and barricaded the university’s Hamilton Hall. 

Just as on October 7 Hamas stormtroopers burst through the defences of an Israel that was looking the other way, so their supporters have burst through inadequate western defences to turn the Palestinian cause into a beachhead in their war to bring down a west that refuses to acknowledge the threat it faces.

Apart from a few examples, such as when the New York police tore down a Palestinian flag to restore the Stars and Stripes above City College and disbanded an encampment at Fordham University, with the LA police belatedly doing the same at UCLA, America has been signalling surrender to the mob.

The police should have been called in immediately to evict these unlawful encampments. Students perpetrating intimidation, incitement or violence should have been immediately expelled.

Instead, both Brown and Northwestern universities sought to appease the mobs by agreeing to consider their demands for divestment from Israel.

Calls for Northwestern President’s Resignation Mount, Concessions to Protesters Draw Legal Scrutiny By Zach Kessel

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/calls-for-northwestern-presidents-resignation-mount-concessions-to-protesters-draw-legal-scrutiny/

After Northwestern University president Michael Schill announced a set of concessions to encampment organizers Monday that included pledging to implement full-ride scholarships for Palestinian students and faculty positions for Palestinian academics, several organizations have called for Schill’s resignation.

In a joint statement published Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Brandeis Center, and StandWithUs urged Schill to step down from his leadership position.

“For days, protesters openly mocked and violated Northwestern’s codes of conduct and policies by erecting an encampment in which they fanned the flames of antisemitism and wreaked havoc on the entire university community,” the three organizations wrote. “Their goal was not to find peace, but to make Jewish students feel unsafe on campus. Rather than hold them accountable — as he pledged he would — President Schill gave them a seat at the table and normalized their hatred against Jewish students. It is clear from President Schill’s actions that he is unfit to lead Northwestern and must resign.”

The three groups wrote that if Schill does not resign, they expect the board of trustees to “step in as the leaders the University needs and remove him.”

Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) president Morton A. Klein went a step further, arguing in a Wednesday statement that Schill, provost Kathleen Hagerty, and vice president for student affairs Susan Davis should each be relieved of their duties.

“President Schill, Provost Hagerty, and VP Davis should be fired immediately for this disaster — and this dangerous agreement must be rescinded,” Klein wrote. “If a group of white supremacists took over Deering Meadow and chanted for the deaths of blacks, the white supremacists would be immediately removed from the campus — not rewarded with scholarships, professorships, buildings, power over vendors, and investment powers. The same standard should apply here. The Northwestern officials who negotiated and entered into this agreement must be fired, and their agreement must be thrown in the dustbin. The student and faculty trespassers and promoters of anti-Jewish violence should be arrested and expelled or fired.”

Can The Current Universities Be Saved? Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. By Victor Davis Hanson

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.

They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next. Tom Slater

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?

U. Minnesota Dept. of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies: A Vile Font of Jew Hatred Oct. 7 was about “Hamas fighters” who “brought down border fences.” by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/u-minnesota-dept-of-gender-women-and-sexuality-studies-a-vile-font-of-jew-hatred/

Editor’s note: Since the barbaric Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7th, American universities have become an undeniable locus of Jew hatred within our nation. Much attention has deservedly been paid to the radical campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine who call for the genocide of the Jews and cheer the terrorists of Hamas. What has received less attention—but should in fact rank as the universities’ worst offense—is the Jew hatred promoted by official departments and institutes of the universities themselves. In the case of our campuses, Jew hatred is “the call coming from inside the house.”

Just a glance at the website for the University of Minnesota Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies reveals it to be a highly politicized unit of the wider university, dedicated to progressive activism. The site declares that “As a place where research, education, and social change go hand in hand, GWSS identifies, analyzes, and challenges structural inequalities, while imagining and creating just and transformative futures for all.” Instead of searching for truth and knowledge, the Department openly acknowledges that its vision includes “social change,” “challeng[ing] structural inequalities,” and “creating just and transformative futures for all.”

So it should come as no surprise, that like much of the progressive left, the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (DGWSS) is a vile font of Jew hatred on the University of Minnesota campus.

Just six days after the brutal and barbaric Hamas attack on Israel, in which innocent civilians were brutalized and raped, parents killed in front of children, children killed in front of parents, bodies gleefully mutilated by terrorists on camera, DGWSS released a “Faculty Statement on Palestine” in which they described the massacre as “Hamas fighters” (not terrorists) who “brought down border fences.” The statement went on to demonize Israel and its defensive response to the worst attack in its history as “not self-defense but the continuation of a genocidal war against Gaza and against Palestinian freedom, self-determination, and life.”  The statement declared “We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and with Palestinian scholars and organizers.” DGWSS might as well have said, “We stand with Hamas.”

NYPD Reclaims City College, Lowers Terror Flag, Raises U.S. Flag We will remember moments like this in the years to come. Daniel Greenfield

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.

America’s Poisonous Antiwar Protests Have we moved the doomsday clock to the brink of midnight? by Bruce Thornton

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.

Death to Facts: Northwestern journalism prof Steven Thrasher tells pro-Palestinian demonstrators to reject objective reporting –

https://wirepoints.org/death-to-facts-northwestern-journalism-prof-steven-thrasher-speaks-at-pro-palestinian-demonstration-rejecting-objective-reporting-wirepoints/

In a speech Saturday to protesters at Northwestern University, Professor Steven Thrasher of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism endorsed the worst of what’s wrong in journalism today. “To the Medill students and journalists within earshot, I say to you: Our work is not about objectivity,” he said. “Our work is about you putting your brilliant minds to work and opening your compassionate hearts.” The speech is reported here by The Daily Northwestern and Thrasher’s full text is here.

Thrasher, and far too many in prominent positions in journalism, have long rejected the traditional goal of reporting unbiased facts. Instead, they say, reporters should promote narratives about what they believe is social justice. It’s called “advocacy journalism,” or, to critics, “woke journalism.” Three years ago, nationally recognized law professor Jonathan Turley summarized the trend this way:

Thrasher’s view of journalism is spreading among top schools. We have been writing about the assault on foundational concepts of neutrality in journalism in academia. This includes academics rejecting the very concept of objectivity in journalism in favor of open advocacy. Columbia Journalism Dean and New Yorker writer Steve Coll has denounced how the First Amendment right to freedom of speech was being “weaponized” to protect disinformation. Likewise, the University of North Carolina recently offered an academic chair in Journalism to New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. While Hannah-Jones was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her writing on The 1619 Project, she has been criticized for her role in purging dissenting views from the New York Times pages and embracing absurd anti-police conspiracy theories.

Five Ways Campus Turmoil Hurts Democrats and America Charles Lipson

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.

Police at UNC Chapel Hill detain at least 30 anti-Israel protesters, crowds try to force into buildings Fox News Danielle Wallace

https://www.aol.com/news/police-unc-chapel-hill-detain-174055542.html

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill confirmed approximately 30 anti-Israel demonstrators were detained Tuesday morning for refusing to leave an encampment protest set up on campus.

At 5:30 a.m., UNC Chapel Hill administrators shared a statement from Interim Chancellor Lee Roberts and Provost Chris Clemens advising protesters to leave the area and remove tents, tables or other items by 6 a.m. or they may face arrest and other consequences, including suspension from campus and, “ultimately, expulsion from the university, which may prevent students from graduating.”

At 6 a.m., UNC Police “calmly approached the group and detained approximately 30 people who refused to leave. During that time, the protesters attempted to block the UNC Police vehicles by standing in front of them and throwing items at officers. Polk Place was cleared in approximately 45 minutes. Afterwards, UNC Facilities cleared the area of significant debris,” the university said in a statement. “After the area was cleared, the remaining protesters escalated their tactics, attempting to forcibly enter South Building by pushing officers and refusing to comply with requests from Facilities and UNC Police.”