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EDUCATION

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

A.J. Caschetta: Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies: Ramallah on the Hudson Welcome to the PLO’s American academic wing.

By on November 24th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272033/columbia-universitys-center-palestine-studies-aj-caschetta

http://www.thetower.org/6865-columbia-universitys-center-for-palestine-studies-ramallah-on-the-hudson/

The Trump administration may have closed the PLO’s Mission in Washington, D.C., but its Morningside Heights Mission is open for business. I refer to Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), an Ivy League clearinghouse for PLO propaganda and the demonization of Israel. Call it the PLO’s American academic wing.

When the CPS opened more than eight years ago, founding co-director Rashid Khalidi promised that it would avoid doing “anything that’s directly related to any political activism.” This is laughable. What Khalidi meant is that the CSP would not participate in anti-Israel activism, but this is a lie. The faculty members who comprise the center’s experts are rivaled only by the faculty of Birzeit University for their anti-Israel advocacy.

It might, in fact, take a Center for Palestine Studies to examine thoroughly the history of Palestinian organizations devoted to political violence. But instead, Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for “the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.” Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

In addition to being a professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the CPS, Khalidi also happens to be a former member of the PLO, as Martin Kramer has shown. Not since Columbia hired former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudinat its School of Social Work has it given a platform to “reformed” terrorists. At least Boudin expressed remorse, even if it was insincere. Not so Khalidi, a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS ) advocate whose views have remained consistent since his PLO days, though they are now masked in the academic patois of post-colonialism.

Brinkley Messick, the CPS’s other founding co-director, hyped it as the first academic center devoted to the study of Palestinian Arabs. “Very simply,” he gushed, “there’s never been a dedicated space … for this kind of research.” He was partly right. Columbia already had one called the Middle East Institute, which has an anti-Israel bent, but the CPS brought together faculty from beyond Middle East Studies, all dedicated to delegitimizing Israel and whitewashing Palestinian violence. Several of them have even been immortalized in The David Project’s documentary Columbia Unbecoming (2004) where their purported reluctance to be political is exposed as fraudulent.

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Jews Revolutionized the Universities. Will Asians Do the Same? written by Barbara Kay

By on November 23rd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/23/jews-revolutionized-the

In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for student admission, a blind test that favored intelligent applicants even if they lacked poise or polish. By 1908, Jews—most the children of immigrants—constituted 7% of the school’s student population—double the percentage of Jews in the U.S. general population. By 1916, Jewish enrolment was 15%, and by 1922 it was more than 21%.

Harvard’s president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, became alarmed by what he perceived as a serious problem. This was not because (or not only because ) Lowell harbored anti-Semitic views. As he wrote to a colleague in 1922, “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles.” (His observation was not incorrect—although he was wrong to assume that Jews in universities would have the same off-putting effect as in hotels.)

Today, we are watching what may well be a reprise of this scenario, with Asian-Americans as the targeted group: Harvard stands accused of “racial balancing” by keeping Asian-American admissions at or under a 20% threshold, and of using a bogus “personal rating” as a back-door method of keeping out Asian applicants who are stereotyped as bland workaholics.

For its part, Harvard does not deny that it weighs its entrance scales to favor groups it considers more disadvantaged than whites or Asian-Americans—namely blacks and Hispanics—but defends such measures on the grounds that “colleges and universities must have the freedom and flexibility to create the diverse communities that are vital to the learning experience of every student.”

The historical parallel between Jews and Asians is striking for a number of reasons—including the fact that both cases involve an explicit rejection of the idea that academic merit alone could be a tenable basis for admission. Like today’s affirmative-action supporters at Harvard, the gentiles of a century ago also started poking into applicants’ personal lives to discover what their “character” might be. And what a weasel word that turned out to be.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Reviving Due Process on Campus DeVos restores the right to cross-examination. Democrats are outraged.

By on November 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/reviving-due-process-on-campus-1542758809

For those awaiting a restoration of rational discourse in American politics, well, you’ll have to keep waiting. No other conclusion is possible after seeing the reaction to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s long-awaited regulatory proposals last week on handling accusations of sexual abuse on campus.

From California Democrat Maxine Waters: “Betsy DeVos, you won’t get away with what you are doing. We are organizing to put an end to your destruction of civil rights protections for students.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden said on Facebook that the proposal “would return us to the days when schools swept rape and assault under the rug and survivors were shamed into silence.”

The centerpiece of the proposed regulations is—hold your fire—restoring the right of cross-examination, one of the oldest and most hallowed elements of due process.

The Obama Department of Education, responding to legitimate concerns about sexual abuse on campus, issued guidelines that went overboard, casting away many basic protections for the accused. The result has subjected victims and the accused to a system of campus justice often controlled by amateurs and political activists.

For more than four decades the Department of Education has set Title IX policy by issuing “guidance,” which circumvents the normal rule-making process. The Obama-era sexual abuse guidance was essentially an administrative diktat. The public had no chance to comment, and universities, which understood federal funding was at risk, opted to dilute standard legal protections for accused students.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Radicalization of Bedtime Stories More and more parents are buying picture books with politically progressive messages for their young children. Joe Pinsker

By on November 19th, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/childrens-book-storytime-political/575506/

More than 200 years ago, when books for children first became common, they delivered simple moral lessons about, for instance, cleanliness and the importance of prayer. Today, story time is still propelled by moral forces, but the issues have gotten a good deal more sophisticated.

In recent years, publishers have put out children’s books with political undertones and activist calls to action on topics ranging from Islamophobia to race to gender identity to feminism. “The trend has definitely exploded in recent years with the social-justice books and the activism books,” says Claire Kirch, a senior correspondent at Publishers Weekly who has been covering the book industry for 15 years.

For children of all ages, books about such charged topics are, in the words of one publishing executive, coming to be seen as more “retail-friendly.” This development applies all the way down to picture books—a category for which the intended audience and the buyers are two very different groups. In this sense, “woke” picture books can be thought of as products for parents, helping them distill some of the day’s most fraught cultural issues into little narrative lessons for their kids.

The wave of politicized children’s books has come more from the left than from the right. Kirch told me that “of the three publishers that are the most well known for publishing conservative books”—Center Street, Sentinel, and Regnery Publishing—“only one really has a kids’-book line.” That one is Regnery, which has put out titles such as Donald Drains the Swamp!, Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride (by Newt Gingrich’s wife, Callista), The Remarkable Ronald Reagan, and The Night Santa Got Lost: How NORAD Saved Christmas.

It seems there is more of an appetite for liberal-minded kids’ books: Kirch noted that another Regnery title—Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, by Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte and told from the perspective of the family’s pet rabbit—was far outsold by a parody of the book overseen by John Oliver’s HBO show that imagined the titular bunny to be gay.

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Five Takeaways From Mike Rowe’s Speech About Work In America Nicole Russell

By on November 19th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/19/five-takeaways-from-mike-rowes-speech-about-work-in-america/

The former host of the Discovery channel’s “Dirty Jobs” received the Independent Women’s Forum “Distinguished Gentleman” award over the weekend. MikeRowe inspired the audience with tales demonstrating both the commonplace and the extraordinary in his acceptance speech, including on the role of moms, taking risks, perception, and work ethic.

Whether you’re a pediatrician or a plumber, an avid fan of the show or not, the speech is well worth your time.
1. Never underestimate the power of motivation and humble beginnings.

While most of America might recognize Rowe’s tanned face and rugged good looks from “Dirty Jobs,” which ran for eight seasons, few know of the show’s humble beginnings. During his speech, Rowe described how it all started.

He was “impersonating a host” for a local network’s show called “Evening Magazine” in 2001. It was an entertainment segment that ran after the news. Rowe went to wineries, restaurants and swanky events, profiling the glitz and glamour of San Francisco. Hardly satisfied with his work, but unsure of what to do about it, his mother — whom he referenced positively at least a dozen times in his speech — phoned him and reminded him of his grandfather, who was aging.

Rowe’s grandfather wasn’t anyone famous, wealthy, or reputable by any means, but the kind of man many of us who have any kind of blue collar roots can recognize. Even though he had the education of a 7th grader, he had learned valuables trades and could do the work, at any given time, of an electrical contractor, plumber, steamfitter, welder, and more. Rowe said he could build a house without a blueprint and could repair almost anything.

“He was heroic in his day,” he said. “Today, sadly, he would be overlooked.”

When his mother called, she simply said, “Wouldn’t it be terrific if your grandfather turned on the television and saw you doing something that looked like work?” That was all the motivation Rowe needed.
2. Risk taking and persistence will pay off.

In that phone call, Rowe said he had “what the Greeks called a peripeteia” — a reversal of fortune or a sudden change in circumstances. “I realized everything I thought I knew about my job was wrong.” Rowe went to his boss and said, “Why do we always have to film ‘Evening Magazine’ at wineries? Why not the sewer?”

The boss didn’t think enough people were even tuning in to care, so he gave Rowe the green light. While Rowe was in the sewer, threatening to get eaten by cockroaches and overcome by the stench, he determined this kind of gruesome and gross, yet vital, work would be the focus of his show.

“I put together a segment that I knew would get me fired. It’s okay, it got me here,” he said to applause. Without risk and focused insight, Rowe’s idea never would have seen a television channel.

After he got fired, Rowe pitched his idea to everyone in the news industry. “Everyone said no except Discovery,” he said. In 2003, they took him on, tweaked the title, and when the show wrapped in 2012, he had done 300 dirty jobs over the course of ten years, filming half a dozen times in every state.

“In my role as a quasi-host I really functioned as an apprentice doing the kind of jobs that make civilized life possible,” he said, quoting the show’s tagline. The show enjoyed tremendous success. So many Americans loved it that in 2008, it was the number one show on cable.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Free Speech Crisis on Campus Is Worse than People Think by Bradley Campbell

By on November 16th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/14/the-free-speech-

Last month Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” Abrams, who describes himself as conservative leaning, pointed to the titles of some recent events put on by his campus’s Office of Student Affairs: “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Understanding White Privilege,” and “Microaggressions.” He described these events as politically lopsided and noted that this kind of highly politicized socialization of college students is occurring throughout the country. A lot of campus critics have pointed to the left-wing political skew of faculty, he said, and have worried about indoctrination in the classroom. But indoctrination is much more likely at campus events outside the classroom, and the political skew of administrators in charge of student life is even greater than that of faculty. (He surveyed a representative sample of 900 “student-facing administrators” and found a ratio of 12 liberals for every conservative, compared to 6 to 1 for academic faculty.)

Remember, Abrams is a tenured professor commenting about a widely discussed issue and writing about his research in the New York Times—America’s pre-eminent newspaper, hardly some right-wing rag. And what was the reaction at Sarah Lawrence College? Campus activists, after apparently trying to break into Abrams’s office, vandalized the office door, taking away the items he had put up, including a picture of his newborn son, and putting up signs with statements such as “Quit” and “Our Right to Exist Is Not ‘Ideological’ Asshole.” The student senate held an emergency meeting to discuss the offending op-ed, and the college president, Cristle Collins Judd, suggested to Abrams that he had created a hostile work environment and asked him whether he thought it was acceptable to write op-eds without her approval. She also asked him if he was on the job market, perhaps as a suggestion that he should be.

A new moral culture

If you were a time traveler from 10 years ago—maybe even five years ago—you’d probably have trouble following some of that. What’s a microaggression? What’s woke? And how could a New York Times op-ed lead to that kind of uproar on campus? But if you’ve been around, and if you’ve been following the happenings on American college campuses, you’re familiar by now with conflicts like this and the new moral terminology guiding the campus activists. In the last few years we’ve seen professors such as Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State College surrounded by angry, cursing students, with Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, soon leaving their positions as the masters of one of Yale’s residential colleges and Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, leaving Evergreen entirely. We’ve heard about microaggressions, said to be small slights that over time do great harm to disadvantaged groups; trigger warnings, which some students demand before they are exposed to course material that might be disturbing; and safe spaces, where people can go to be free of ideas that challenge leftist identity politics. We’ve heard claims that speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we’ve seen activists use actual violence to stop it —and to defend this as self-defense—when administrators fail to do so.

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Fight the Denigration of American History By Michael Finch

By on November 16th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/16/fight-the-denigration

American history is everywhere under attack. The recent skirmishes started with the campaign to remove Confederate statues, but it surely won’t end there. As our betters in America’s universities want us to know, the whole of American history is suspect. In our media, in the popular culture, and in our schools, we’re subject to an unending drumbeat of how America was founded to promote imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and genocide—unimpeachable facts, we’re told, for which all Americans must forever share the burden of collective guilt and shame.

For America to atone for her sins, her history must be denounced and then purged.

This assault on America’s past is hardly news to the Right; the Left has been waging war against American history for well over a half a century. But given this ongoing and unceasing hostility, the response of so many conservatives to recent events is terribly disturbing. While it is perhaps it is to be expected given our predilection to fight amongst ourselves (e.g., the Trump debate on the Right), it is extremely ill-advised and destructive to the things we still share in common.

One thing we should have learned is that the Left never stops; there is no end to their relentless pursuit of destructive hate. There is no room for reasonable adjudication of their claims. We are hopelessly naïve if we believe that once the Robert E. Lee statues come down, the Left will be satisfied. We all know what will follow; indeed it has already started.

The nation was founded, in large part, by slaveholders, from the author of the Declaration of Independence, to the Father of our Country, to the prime author of our Constitution. Jefferson, Washington and Madison were slave owners and the list goes on. They will need to be removed just as swiftly and lustily as the statues of General Lee.

There was a time when conservatives defended the remembrances of our past. What happened? In just the past few years we have watched as conservatives—attempting, one assumes, to act in good faith and build good will—have gone along with (or at least not objected to) utterances such as John C. Calhoun was a precursor to Adolf Hitler and that the removal of statues of Confederate icons such as Robert E. Lee, and certainly Nathan Bedford Forrest, is necessary or at least, understandable. These fought for slavery and against the Union, after all. Beyond Lee and his lieutenants, the other true American hero that has come under attack from so many on the right is Andrew Jackson. Again, we hear the ridiculous comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany. This isn’t just sloppy history, it is disgraceful to the memory of the man who, whatever his flaws, did so much to solidify this nation.

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The Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror Aiding the Hamas terror campaign to thrive on campus. Sara Dogan

By on November 16th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271974/top-ten-university-leaders-who-are-supporters-sara-dogan

Editor’s note: In a report released today, the David Horowitz Freedom Center named university leaders from prestigious American campuses including UCLA, Columbia University, Kent State University, Tufts University, and the University of Chicago to the list of the “Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror.”

These university leaders provide organizational and monetary support to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus organization which functions as an arm of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas and which has repeatedly acted to terrorize Jewish students on campus. They also imbue SJP with a false veneer of legitimacy by permitting it to benefit from its association with the university’s academic prestige. Even when SJP chapters repeatedly violate campus rules prohibiting the disruption of campus events (usually pro-Israel events) or when its members chant genocidal slogans, use hateful slurs, and commit violence against Jewish students on campus, university presidents and administrations repeatedly ignore or forgive these hostile, discriminatory, and unlawful acts.

This report exposes ten presidents and chancellors of prominent American universities who have renounced their duty to protect the welfare of all students on their campus by allowing the hateful, pro-terrorist rhetoric and actions of Students for Justice in Palestine to proceed unchecked.

Read the full report below.

The Top Ten University Leaders Who Are Supporters of Terror

Introduction:

For nearly two decades, the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has established a beachhead of support for anti-Israel terrorists on American campuses, resulting in a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incidents and the harassment of Jewish students. After many years of denial, the American and Jewish press have finally begun to take notice of this epidemic of hostility towards Jews and supporters of Israel, but the true depravity of SJP still escapes their notice. While most of the press coverage debates whether SJP’s anti-Zionism has crossed the line into anti-Semitism, this discussion misses the larger and far more sinister truth that SJP is not just the leading promoter of Jew hatred on American college campuses, nor does it content itself to spread anti-Semitic lies and propaganda defaming Israel, the only liberal democracy in the Middle East as an “apartheid state”—though assuredly it does these things. The media posturing misses the truth that SJP is a full-fledged arm of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas, which is using American campuses as a launching pad to gain more widespread support for its goal of eliminating the Jewish state.

SJP receives substantial funding and organizational support from Hamas, through a network of Islamic “charities” and front groups. SJP’s propaganda activities are orchestrated and funded by a Hamas front group, American Muslims for Palestine, whose chairman is Hatem Bazian—a cofounder of SJP and a professor at the University of California-Berkeley—and whose principals are former officers of the Holy Land Foundation and other Islamic “charities” previously convicted of funneling money to Hamas. Hamas is a State Department-designated terrorist organization whose explicit goals, as stated in its charter, are the destruction of the Jewish state, and the extermination of its Jews.

In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Jonathan Schanzer, an expert who previously worked as a terrorism finance analyst for the United States Department of the Treasury, described how Hamas funnels large sums of money and provides material assistance to Students for Justice in Palestine through AMP for the purpose of promoting BDS campaigns and disseminating Hamas propaganda on American campuses.

Schanzer explained, “At its 2014 annual conference, AMP invited participants to ‘come and navigate the fine line between legal activism and material support for terrorism.’” He proceeded to describe AMP as “arguably the most important sponsor and organizer for Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which is the most visible arm of the BDS campaign on campuses in the United States.” He revealed that AMP “provides speakers, training, printed materials, a so-called ‘Apartheid Wall,’ and grants to SJP activists” and “even has a campus coordinator on staff whose job is to work directly with SJP and other pro-BDS campus groups across the country.” Furthermore, “according to an email it sent to subscribers, AMP spent $100,000 on campus activities in 2014 alone.”

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Dartmouth Lawsuit Says School Allowed ‘Animal House’ Culture Among Professors, Students Seven women allege psychology department was rife with leering, groping and sexual assault By Douglas Belkin

By on November 15th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dartmouth-lawsuit-says-school-allowed-animal-house-culture-among-professors-students-1542311799?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

Seven current and former Dartmouth College students filed a lawsuit in federal court against the Ivy League school on Thursday, alleging it ignored an “Animal House” atmosphere created by three professors in the school’s department of psychology and brain sciences.

The lawsuit, which seeks $70 million in damages, claims the professors “leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated and raped female students.” It alleges the professors conducted meetings at bars, invited students to late-night hot tub parties in their homes and invited undergraduate students to use cocaine during class.

The professors involved resigned from the Hanover, N.H., school last summer at Dartmouth’s request. The New Hampshire Attorney General is conducting a separate investigation.

In a press release, Dartmouth said it applauded the women’s courage for coming forward but disagreed with the characterizations of the school’s actions and will respond through court filings.

Due to the misconduct it found earlier this year by the three faculty members, the school said Thursday it took “unprecedented steps toward revoking their tenure and terminating their employment.” The professors “are no longer at Dartmouth and remain banned from our campus and from attending all Dartmouth-sponsored events, no matter where the events are held.”

The suit alleges the behavior started as far back as 2002 and the school “did nothing and ignored” students’ complaints. In April of 2017, a group of female graduate students contacted Dartmouth’s Title IX office and reported in detail the behavior of the professors. The suit alleges the school again did nothing and the sexual harassment continued. Over the next several months, at least 27 complainants came forward, the suit says.

“This lawsuit is the only means these women have to remedy the College’s past wrongs and ensure the institution implements meaningful reforms,” said Deborah Marcuse, an attorney representing the women.

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UW Institutes ‘Diversity’ Training After Professor’s Op-Ed on Sex Differences By Toni Airaksinen

By on November 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/uw-institutes-diversity-training-after-professors-op-ed-on-sex-differences/

The University of Washington-Seattle has caved to student demands culminating after a computer science professor pointed out why efforts to close the “gender gap” in computer science may be futile.

The controversy began in June, when UW-Seattle Professor Stuart Reges published “Why Women Don’t Code” for Quillette, in which he articulated why women are less interested in computer science than men. (Hint, hint: men and women are different).

Though Reges admits the title was hyperbolic — as he has taught hundreds of women to code during his career — UW students didn’t see it as such. They circulated an internal memo of concern ad lobbied UW against his “gender harassment.”

Roughly five months later, a group of graduate students have announced that they’ve negotiated with senior officials at the UW computer science school to ensure that “more will be done to address gender harassment at the Allen School.”

While it’s unclear exactly how many “grievance demands” students filed, the school agreed to at least three.

From now on, UW will provide “intersectional diversity and sexual harassment training to both [student employees] and [the professors who supervise them]” which all students and professors will be highly encouraged to attend.

Additionally, going forward, “a group of mostly senior faculty will review the introductory programming courses to ensure that they are inclusive of students from all backgrounds.” To be fair, it’s unclear what this means.

How will professors make coding classes more “inclusive of students from all backgrounds”? Will they mandate textbooks feature more racial and gender minorities? CONTINUE AT SITE

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