RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2024/01/08/the_root_cause_of_academic_groupthink_1003644.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The shroud is coming off elite academia and America is not pleased with what it’s seeing. Its leaders have told us that genocidal antisemitism is too complex to recognize and that plagiarism is a problem for students, perhaps for junior faculty, but not for the president of Harvard. DEI policies elevated demographic considerations far above merit at our most prestigious institutions.

How did this happen? What can be done to fix it?

Those are tough questions. Major institutions don’t become corrupt overnight. The process is long, slow, and methodical. The solutions go far beyond the removal of a few high-profile officials. In academia, the egregious examples that gain sudden visibility are merely manifestations of a corrupt core.

That corrupt core stems from the inherent difficulty of assessing the quality of knowledge work. Suppose that there are multiple competing theories to explain some phenomenon—freakish weather, persistent crime, disparate outcomes, reactions to a vaccine, the variance of election results from poll predictions, etc. How can anyone know which theory to believe?

Most people turn to one of two heuristics. The first is personal, and few people like to admit it openly: They accept whichever theory comes closest to what they’d like to believe. The second is societal, and most people who advocate it do so with pride: They ask the experts.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/rashid-khalidis-happy-dhimmi-jews/

“The idea that Jews in the Arab countries have always been subject to persecution culminating in their being forced to flee from the Arab countries is fundamentally false,” stated Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi in a December 14 webinar. Thus, this Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies and former Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) propagandist whitewashed historic Islamic antisemitic doctrines that continue to threaten Jews to this day.

Khalidi spoke to the anti-Israel website Jadaliyya’s as part of its “Gaza in Context: Collaborative Teach-In Series” in an episode on “Colonial Narratives (Part 2).” Jadaliyya’s moderator was Bassam Haddad, director of George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

Khalidi propagated the well-worn trope, discredited as the “Happy Dhimmi” myth, that Jews, a subjugated non-Muslim minority, “lived in relative security and with relative prosperity” in Muslim countries across the centuries. Rather, “Europe was the source of antisemitism. Christian doctrine was the source of antisemitism,” he simplistically stated. Jews with backgrounds in the Mizrachi (Hebrew: Eastern) diaspora in the Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) vigorously refute such one-sided assertions.

Nonetheless, Khalidi superficially claimed that the “situation of Jews in Europe was infinitely worse than in any other part of the world.” Therefore, Jews after 1492 “took refuge as a result when they were expelled in particular from Spain and Portugal in Morocco, in North Africa, in other parts of the Ottoman Empire,” he stated. Sultan Bayezid II’s supposed response to this influx of enterprising Jews into his empire prompted by Spanish royal intolerance has become historic. “Can such a king be called wise and intelligent—one who impoverishes his country and enriches my kingdom?” Bayezid II is recorded as saying.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/smartphones-dumb-kids/

A survey by Common Sense Census reveals that as of 2021, 43% of 8-to-12-year-olds own a smartphone, as do 88% of teens 13 to 18. The analysis also informs us that:

the average teen spends a mind-boggling 8 hours and 39 minutes each day using electronic media.
half of teenagers feel addicted to their phones.
78% check them hourly or more.
Of those who have cellphones, 97% of teens report using them during the school day, mostly for nonacademic purposes.

This is anything but a new problem, however. The nation’s teachers have been competing with smartphones for years. A 2010 Pew Research Center study found that 90% of U.S. schools had some sort of smartphone ban. Of the teens surveyed,

62% said they could have their phones in school but not in class.
24% were not allowed to have phones on school grounds.
Of those who attended a school with a total ban, 65% brought their phones to school anyway.
While in class, 64% of teens said they had texted, and 25% had made or received a call.

The Damage

The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in almost 80 countries every three years, tests 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. The scores have been sinking over the years for a variety of reasons. Of late, COVID was a big factor. However, PISA has found a more ominous reason for the decline in scores: student smartphone usage.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/07/claudine-gays-tyranny-of-dei/

With her ousting this week, Claudine Gay has the dubious honour of being both the shortest-lived president of Harvard University and its most notorious. As significant as America’s most prestigious university is to the rest of the world, producing the future leaders who will rule over the nation that we are all both privileged and cursed to live downstream of, few outside the American elites pay much attention to it, or notice when the deckchairs are shuffled among its leadership team. Not so for Gay. Her resignation – following her woeful response to anti-Semitism on campus and revelations about rampant plagiarism in her academic work – made headlines the world over. For it was a pivotal moment in the clash of values that has been raging in American academia, and spilling out across the West.

This clash centres on DEI, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ – an ideology that, like so many of the most malignant ideologies today, is presented as something only a monster could oppose. In truth, while dolled up in the language of anti-racism, DEI represents a divisive, racialised worldview – and a corresponding set of policies – that has taken hold in higher education, corporate capitalism and the state. Roughly speaking, it amounts to the institutionalisation of left identity politics and all the ugly things that come with it: concepts of permanent black victimhood and permanent white guilt; racial discrimination revived in ‘progressive’ garb; and an authoritarian bureaucracy to punish wrong-think and ‘protect’ minorities from anything that might offend their allegedly delicate sensibilities. Even at a university, where merit and free speech are supposed to reign.

At Harvard, Gay was its totem. She became president two days after the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial preferences in higher education, euphemistically referred to as ‘affirmative action’. Harvard was a key focus of the case. Its policies were found to have discriminated against Asians to free up places for blacks and Hispanics. The policy had been exposed as an immoral failure. Not only were students – including non-white students – being discriminated against, but the most well-to-do black Americans – many of them the children of wealthy black immigrants – had long been affirmative action’s primary beneficiaries. Gay vowed to respect the ruling, while hinting that Harvard would find a way around it. ‘We will comply with the court’s decision, but it does not change our values’, she said. Harvard would ‘continue opening doors’.

This was pure doublespeak. Gay, who was dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences before she ascended to the presidency, presided over policies and initiatives aimed at closing minds and carving students up according to race. Christopher Rufo, the conservative crusader who helped expose Gay’s rampant plagiarism, has catalogued the materials pushed on Harvard students by Gay’s diversitycrats. They propagandised that America is marred by ‘systemic racism’ and ‘weaponised whiteness’. Students, Rufo notes, were encouraged to ‘unpack’ their ‘white privilege’, ‘male privilege’ and ‘white fragility’ – a word, popularised by author Robin DiAngelo, used to demonise those who dare push back against the lectures of race experts.

How DEI fuels anti-Semitism

https://victorhanson.com/harvard-out-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire/

Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.

Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism—without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly anti-Semitic in speech and action.

But Gay’s removal is not the end of Harvard’s dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning.

In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal.

Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop anti-Semitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism.

Yet playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons.

One, Gay’s meager publication record—a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own—had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.

Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant anti-Semitism on their campuses.

Instead, both plead “free speech” and “context” considerations.

Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities—except apparently white males and Jews.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/unrepentant-dei-at-mit

MIT president Sally Kornbluth announced on Wednesday that the university would soon reveal its inaugural Vice President for Equity and Inclusion (VPEI). If one wanted evidence of the disconnect between university culture and the outside world, Kornbluth’s announcement provides it.

Since October 7, universities have been the focus of nearly unprecedented public attention, triggered by student and faculty support for the Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Alumni from schools like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania charged their universities with complicity in anti-Semitism and demanded that Jews be included in the roster of “marginalized” groups protected by the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy.

Eventually, however, it dawned on the rebellious donors that the DEI complex was not the solution to perceived anti-Semitism but part of the problem, since the DEI apparatus enforces the progressive world view that the West (now embodied by Israel) is unremittingly racist, colonialist, and oppressive.  The alumni demand for adding “anti-Semitism training” to the DEI portfolio of “anti-hate trainings” turned into its opposite: a demand that the DEI apparatus be shut down entirely. (Harvard donor Bill Ackman’s conversion in this regard has been unusually public.)

It’s been hard to miss this new consensus among university critics. National and state legislators, governors, and other public figures have called for the elimination of DEI administrations. Denunciation of the equity and inclusion bureaucracy is now part of every call to reform of the post–October 7 university—to the point that left-wing defenders of the university are railing against what they view as conservatives’ exploitation of the Hamas campus crisis to defund essential diversity initiatives.

https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-ackman-how-to-fix-harvard?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Claudine Gay’s ouster won’t change things. The college needs a complete overhaul, starting with a resignation of the board and the removal of DEI from every corner of the institution…

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw then-president Claudine Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. 

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-presses-on-with-inclusiveness

In her parting shot at Harvard, newly resigned president Claudine Gay has provided a reminder of why she never should have been made president in the first place. Gay stepped down today following months of turmoil caused by her reaction to the Hamas October 7 terror attacks on Israel and by accusations of plagiarism.

Gay got her job because of her race. No white professor, even a female one, would have been elevated to the premier college presidency in the United States on so meager a research record. It is fitting, then, that Gay plays the race card to the end. She lauds her abortive presidency as giving hope to those around the world who saw in it a “vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging.” In other words, without a black president, students “of color” would not be certain of belonging at Harvard. Never mind that for decades Harvard has so enthusiastically sought out black students that it admitted many of them with academic credentials that would have been all but disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians. Now, without a black president, that vision is apparently threatened, even as Gay concedes that Harvard’s “doors remain open.”

Gay’s sense of self-worth is breathtaking. She already has a legacy in mind for her five-month long presidency, the shortest in Harvard’s history. She hopes that her tenure is remembered “as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity.” Before her presidency, in other words, Harvard was deficient in the striving-for-common-humanity department. Never mind that Gay had auditioned for the presidency with a call to infuse the hunt for racism throughout every corner of the university, an academic agenda based on the idea that America remains a perennially white supremacist country.  As president, she was true to her word, introducing what the Corporation euphemistically calls “ambitious new academic initiatives” in “inequality.” 

The mission of a university, however, is the transmission of a civilizational inheritance and the testing of new knowledge. The goal of “finding a common humanity” (or, even worse, of combatting “bias and hate,” as Gay also puts it) serves as a pretext for the therapeutic diversity infrastructure.