RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2019/04/19/cowardice-at-columbia/

On Thursday 11 April, shortly after 11pm, a black Columbia student named Alexander McNab walked through the gates of Barnard college—the undergraduate all-women’s school at Columbia University—after ignoring a security guard’s request to show his student ID. In search of a midnight snack, McNab got all the way to the library canteen before a public safety officer confronted him and asked for his ID a second time, a request McNab once again refused.

Several more officers had arrived on the scene and were continuing to request ID when McNab began yelling. What happened next, depicted in the video below, has become the subject of a national scandal: two officers pushed McNab’s upper body onto the countertop, at which point McNab finally handed over his ID. Public safety proceeded to verify that he was indeed an active Columbia student, at which point they left him alone.

Administrators reacted to the incident by placing the six public safety officers involved on paid leave until outside investigators reach a conclusion about their conduct. In the meantime, administrators have already reached theirs: racism. College deans sent an email to the student body—with the subject line “Addressing Racism on Our Campus”—in which they noted the “continued legacy of anti-black racism” and lamented that “such incidents continue to occur so close to home.”

On the contrary, the McNab affair involved neither police nor brutality. Public safety officers (who don’t carry guns) used the minimum amount of force necessary to get McNab to comply with their request that he identify himself. They pushed him against a countertop for 20 seconds before letting him go. I challenge those who believe this was excessive to name an alternate course of action which would have compelled an unknown man to produce identification.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/anti-semitism-at-nyu-11555873457

‘I went to NYU so long ago, it was in the Bronx,” my conservative Midwestern father once joked. He wasn’t thrilled to send his left-wing daughter to New York University to study creative writing. My husband, a Tisch professor, and my prelaw niece Dara also love our school. Unfortunately, the recent anti-Semitism sweeping the campus is testing our affection.

Jewish students were assaulted at an Israeli Independence Day celebration last year in Washington Square Park, where two anti-Israel student agitators were arrested after desecrating Israeli flags. The NYU Jewish Center received threats; swastikas were found in a residence hall. The student government passed an anti-Israel BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—resolution. NYU activists confronted a pregnant Chelsea Clinton and insanely blamed her for the massacre at a New Zealand mosque because she criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitic slurs.

Most shocking, last week the university gave a President’s Service Award to Students for Justice in Palestine for its “positive impact on the community.” SJP is known for pushing BDS, demonizing Israel and leading a boycott of Zionist student clubs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273537/defense-canary-mission-harry-onickel

Jews have had a long history of engaging in wars with enemies who fight by rules that Jews find abhorrent. Rather than fight by those rules, Jews have held themselves to more humane standards. While this is morally admirable, it’s not always martially effective.

On his way to establishing control over the Arabian Peninsula, Mohammed’s armies fought and conquered the Jewish tribes that had lived there for centuries. Jews of the Nadir tribe, living around Medina, wouldn’t fight on the Sabbath. Even during wartime, due to a biblical injunction, they refused to cut down their enemy’s fruit trees. Mohammed had no such qualms. He had his soldiers cut down the Nadir’s date palms on which they depended for food and for trade. And he did it on the Sabbath. The Nadir surrendered and were exiled.

Israel has been battling the terrorists of Hamas ever since abandoning Gaza in a futile attempt at peaceful coexistence. The IDF is the most moral army in the world and fights as hard at avoiding civilian casualties as they do at fighting against Hamas. Hamas works hard at creating civilian casualties, its favorites being Gazan children that their media allies can blame Israel for. And so this war drags on.

On university campuses throughout North America, Israel and Jewish students are vilified and harassed by BDS supporters including Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and their allies.

https://www.city-journal.org/university-of-tulsa

A Harvard Business School professor recently predicted that up to half of all American colleges and universities will go bankrupt in the next ten to 15 years. While this may be a worst-case scenario, universities have for years been offering an increasingly inferior product at unsustainably high prices to an ever-more skeptical group of prospective students. Many institutions below the top tier are scrambling to respond to the collapse of the higher-education bubble by jettisoning the liberal arts and pumping up the practical ones: health care, computer science, business, and other technical fields that promise to yield jobs immediately after graduation. This approach has been employed in a particularly crude and short-sighted manner at the University of Tulsa, where a new administration has turned a once-vibrant academic institution with a $1.1 billion endowment and a national reputation in core liberal arts subjects into a glorified trade school with a social-justice agenda. Our story is worth telling, because we have been hit by a perfect storm of trends currently tearing through the American academy: the confident ignorance of administrators, the infantilization of students, the policing of faculty, the replacement of thinking with ideological jargon, and the corporatization of education.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/19/appeasement-in-the-academy/

At Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, a student club with the expressed purpose of “the preservation, dissemination and extension of the Western moral and philosophical Tradition” is currently struggling to achieve official recognition from the college administration. Why? Because for a small group of social terrorists on campus, Winston Churchill is a symbol of white supremacy. Also, because we live in hell.

The Churchill Institute is one of a few groups scattered across the American academy that sees Western Civilization under attack, by outsiders and insiders, and has organized itself around its preservation in response.

Trinity’s Churchill Institute (CI) was founded during the 2015 school year by Gregory Bruce Smith, a professor of political science and philosophy. For the past few years, the club has maintained a relatively low profile, operating for the most part as an off-campus organization.

The group occasionally brings speakers to campus, once in conjunction with Young Americans for Liberty, once the former governor of Massachusetts, Jane Swift, for lectures on the importance of free speech. CI publishes ​The​ ​Trinity Review​, a student newspaper offering an alternative perspective to the progressive status quo. The paper is open to ​all​ students and faculty for submission, just as the Churchill Institute itself is open to ​all​ students and faculty for participation and inquiry. This year, CI established its first student reading group; they are reading Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History.​

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cowardice-and-courage-at-middlebury-11555714489

Students at Middlebury College gave the school’s administrators a lesson this week in the difference between cowardice and courage when dealing with a controversial speaker.

Recall how in March 2017 protesters at the private Vermont liberal-arts college shut down a speech by Charles Murray, injuring professor Allison Stanger in the process. Partially in response to that fiasco, Middlebury’s political science department founded the Alexander Hamilton Forum, which promotes free speech. The forum planned to host a speech this week by Ryszard Legutko, a Polish member of the European Parliament.

Mr. Legutko has criticized multiculturalism and gay marriage and, following the usual pattern, some students launched a petition claiming he “has built his career off of homophobic, xenophobic, racist, misogynistic discourse.” They called for the political science department and Middlebury’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs to rescind co-sponsorship of the speech. They also planned to demonstrate.

But there was an unusual footnote to the protest. On a Facebook page to plan the demonstration, student organizer Taite Shomo wrote: “It is absolutely, unequivocally not the intent of this protest and those participating in this protest to prevent Legutko from speaking. Disruptive behavior of this nature will not be tolerated.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273523/high-school-students-assigned-tabulate-privilege-sara-dogan

Parents in the community of Saratoga Springs, New York are up in arms after a shocking assignment that asked students to tabulate their “privilege” by adding or subtracting points for their race, gender, religion, appearance, disability status, and other factors was given to students at a public high school.

The “Privilege Reflection Forms” were given to students in a business class at Saratoga Springs High School, apparently with the approval of school administrators who considered it a useful tool to enlighten students on their relative status in society. According to the worksheet provided, students were told to calculate how privileged they are by adding or subtracting sums for possessing different attributes.

For instance, Caucasian students completing the form are directed to add 25 points for being white, whereas African-American students are told to subtract 100 points for being black. Males are told to add 25 points whereas females are told to subtract 50 points. Nor does the lesson stop there. Straight students are told to add 20 points for the privilege they derive from that status, while gay students are told to subtract 150 points. And if a student identifies as transgender, they are supposed to deduct a whopping 500 points.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/extremely_nondisruptive_middlebury_college_students_disrupt_freespeech_speaker_.html

Ironically, the speaker they shut down really did risk his life in a communist country in the name of free speech.

On March 2, 2017, Vermont’s elite Middlebury College made national news when some of its students barred writer Charles Murray from speaking, because of a book (The Bell Curve) he’d written 23 years earlier. It was bad for public relations, and in response, the college initiated a new program in its political science department, “The Alexander Hamilton Forum” intended “to engage scholars and thinkers with diverse points of view, including points of view that are uncommon at elite colleges.”

On April 17, 2019, Middlebury College was compelled to cancel one of The Alexander Hamilton Forum’s premier events. This time, leftist opposition was directed at Polish author and politician Ryszard Legutko, and focused on his alleged “homophobic” comments from 2011 (though Legutko had been invited to address intolerance by the Left in liberal democracies, not homosexuality).

On the Middlebury protesters’ Facebook events page, remarks such as this were postedL “Ryszard Legutko is a f*cking homophobe (and racist and sexist),” the protest is advertised as “EXTREMELY NON-DISRUPTIVE.” Yet within minutes of the cancellation, those who silenced Legutko disingenuously posted: “We are reiterating that it was never our intention to shut this event down, nor prevent the speaker from speaking.” In an interview with local media, “Jason Duquette-Hoffman, assistant director of the Center for Community Engagement at Middlebury College, agreed. “I think [protesters] were very clear that that was not their intent….’ ”

https://quillette.com/2019/04/16/a-college-president-makes-a-stand-for-academic-freedom/

At Quillette we hope David Yager’s moral leadership becomes a turning point in the defence of free thought. We raise our glasses to him and to Philadelphia’s University of the Arts.

What happens when university students call on authority figures to censor students or staff at institutions of higher education? At Yale such students have been awarded prizes, at the University of Missouri they’ve been successful in forcing administrators to resign, at Claremont they were able to force their president to implement a long list of demands, and at Evergreen State College a throng of students were allowed to take control of the campus while harassed faculty sought refuge off-campus. At other colleges around America, and even on campuses in the U.K., Canada and Australia, university administrators have met illiberal student mobs with a parade of mealy-mouthed platitudes and prostrations. This pattern of weakness has been dismaying for all people who value academic freedom and open inquiry. This week, however, a line has been drawn by David Yager, President of Philadelphia’s University of Arts (UArts). In response to students calling for the censorship of Camille Paglia—one of the most admired humanities scholars in the world—he articulated a full-throated defence of intellectual freedom, showing administrators of supposedly superior universities what real leadership looks like.