RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/22/persistence_and_political_correctness_at_amherst.html

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.
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What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273539/federal-grant-financed-anti-semitic-song-u-no-daniel-greenfield

“This is my anti-Semitic song,” Tamer Nafar declared.

The setting was the UNC-Chapel Hill. And this was the moment that, “Conflict over Gaza: People, Politics, and Possibilities”, a conference of UNC and Duke University’s notoriously pro-terrorist Middle East departments went, beyond its expected implicit anti-Semitism to explicit anti-Semitism.

The Gaza conference, with a roster of speakers from anti-Israel groups, at least one of which has been accused of funneling money to Hamas institutions, was true to form. The BDS speaker disagreed only over how much to boycott Israel. The conference was full of posters glamorizing violence. And the books on sale were even more explicit in their defense of anti-Semitic Islamic terrorism against Jews.

A journalist for The Tower picked up a copy of “Hamas: A Beginner’s Guide” and read its claim that, “Intrinsically and religiously Hamas could not be anti-Jewish.”

But Nafar’s “anti-Semitic song” was the moment that put the Gaza conference on the map of hate.

UNC Chapel Hill and Duke’s Middle East Studies departments were already notoriously hives of hatred. In February, UNC’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies brought in Linda Sarsour, who has frequently clashed with the Jewish community and is a supporter of the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader, to speak. In April, Duke’s Israel Apartheid Week had featured support for the PFLP, an anti-Semitic terrorist group responsible for the murders of Jews, and calls for the destruction of Israel.

And Steven Salaita, who had declared that, Zionism was “transforming anti-Semitism from something horrible into something honorable”, had spoken at UNC Chapel Hill.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273527/academia-and-false-advertising-jack-kerwick

When famous and affluent Hollywood celebrities were exposed recently for bribing their children’s way into some of America’s most prestigious academic institutions, far too many observers seemed to have missed the fact that this episode is but a symptom of a cancer that has metastasized throughout the entire academic world.

To put it in its simplest terms, “the College Admissions Scandal” revealed that colleges and universities are guilty of false advertising insofar as they would have Americans believe that applicants are admitted as students on the basis of their qualifications—not the size of their parents’ bank accounts.

But these same colleges and universities have been engaged in false advertising for decades insofar as they have been deceiving the American public into thinking that they are educational institutions that, as such, provide an open market place of ideas.

They are no such thing, sadly.

A recent illustration from my home state of New Jersey is representative of both the ideological fervor and historical illiteracy that pervades the academy. Brittany Cooper, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, has discovered a new villain in her campaign against “racism.” This academic who once characterized Jesus as “potentially queer,” blasted black politicians with whom she had disagreements as “white supremacists in Blackface,” and launched a profanity-ridden tirade after the Supreme Court recognized religious-based exemptions to the Obamacare mandate, now declares as racist none other than…time.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fix-free-speech-or-no-higher-ed-act-reauthorization/

Today, the National Association of Scholars released a statement signed by over 100 prominent educators and public figures concerned with higher education. That statement calls on Congress to include protections for campus free speech in the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Only by doing so, says the statement, can Congress “cease subsidizing unlawful behavior by public colleges and universities.” In other words, Congress needs to stop funneling money to colleges and universities that promulgate unconstitutional speech codes and so-called free-speech zones.

The Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965 must periodically be reauthorized and updated by Congress. This is important because Title IV of the Act sets the ground-rules by which institutions become eligible for federal student loans and grants. You can’t get a Pell Grant or a federal student loan unless you attend a Title IV eligible school. Today, many or most Title IV eligible schools fail to protect, and even flagrantly violate, the free-speech rights of their students. HEA must not be reauthorized without fixing this. Public universities that stifle free speech should lose their eligibility for federal financial assistance, while private colleges must at minimum make their free-speech policies clear and open (with the implication that they will thereby become contractually obligated to stick by them).

The NAS statement calling on Congress to include free-speech protections in its coming reauthorization of the Higher Education Act has been signed by prominent educators and writers such as Emory’s Mark Bauerlein, the University of Chicago’s Rachel Fulton Brown, George Mason’s F. H. Buckley, Chapman Law School’s John Eastman, Claremont McKenna’s Charles Kesler, UT Austin’s Robert Koons, the University of Oklahoma’s Wilfred McClay, Hillsdale’s Paul Rahe, and Ohio University’s Richard Vedder. Figures such as president of the Leadership Institute Morton Blackwell, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Charlie Copeland, president of the Independent Women’s Voice Heather Higgens, and president of the Independent Women’s Forum Carrie Lukas have signed as well. Think-tankers with education expertise such as the Hudson Institute’s John Fonte and the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Tom Lindsay have also signed on. (I was a signatory as well. And note that organizational affiliations are included for identification purposes only.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/henry-kissinger-shouted-down-at-nyu-addresses-yales-wfb-society/

There’s one encouraging point to emerge from the frenzy on the nation’s campuses.

Every year, the William F. Buckley Jr. Society at Yale, founded by Lauren Noble, honors a public figure who was “disinvited” from a college campus. The speaker might have been shouted down at the podium, or his invitation might have been rescinded before carnage could ensue.

Past honorees include George Will, Charles Murray, Raymond Kelly, and Peter Thiel, each of whom has been kicked off at least one campus. Will had suggested in a column that colleges were making their students hypersensitive and inclined to feel like victims. (What could have given him that idea?) Murray had written in a book that racial differences in intelligence might to some extent be hereditary. Former NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly supported the “racist” stop-and-frisk policy. And Peter Thiel was forced to leave a 2014 speech at UC Berkeley by students shouting “No police state!” and “Black lives matter!” But it’s not clear what the students thought Mr. Thiel had to do with any of that.

This year, the honoree was Henry Kissinger, shouted down at NYU by students who called him a war criminal and a Nazi. Which is ironic, considering that in the days of the actual Nazis, Kissinger was serving in the 84th Infantry Division and receiving the Bronze Star for tracking down Gestapo officers. Ho hum.

And while there is something predictable in students’ childish glee at expunging popular conservative writers from their campi, an attack on the 95-year-old Kissinger seems like an attack on learning history — they might as well throw their textbooks out the window.

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.