RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/381799/harvards-double-standard-on-racism/

(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.)

    Harvard University has shown appropriate sensitivity to the African American community by agreeing to relinquish seven photographs of half-naked Black slaves, which a professor commissioned in 1850 because he believed their physique proved they were racially inferior.

    This follows other steps Harvard has taken in recent years to make amends with African Americans, including acknowledging that it once owned slaves, promising reparations to their descendants, and changing its official seal because it included the crest of a slaveowner.

    But when will Harvard finally acknowledge other racist stains on its record—such as the friendly relations it pursued with Nazi Germany in the 1930s?

    Adolf Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, was given the red carpet treatment when he visited Harvard in 1934 for his 25th class reunion. Harvard maintained strong ties to Nazi-controlled German universities, especially the University of Heidelberg—even though Heidelberg fired its Jewish faculty members, instituted a Nazified curriculum, and hosted a mass book-burning. Harvard also participated in student exchange programs with Nazi universities, even though a German official said publicly that the students who were being sent to the United States would serve as “political soldiers of the Reich.”

    Harvard also hosted the officers and crew of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it docked in the Boston harbor in 1934. And Harvard allowed the Nazi consul-general in Boston to place a swastika wreath in the university’s chapel (in honor of Harvard alumni who fought for Germany).

    All this was exposed by Prof. Stephen Norwood in his book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, back in 2009. Sixteen years have passed, yet Harvard still has not apologized for the pro-Nazi skeletons in its closet, even as it has been acknowledging its racist actions against Blacks. Why the double standard?

    Harvard is not the only example of an American university that has belatedly come to grips with some of its past racism, while refusing to face up to its friendliness to the racist Nazi regime.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2025/05/29/will_floridas_leaders_green_light_a_dei_radical_1113423.html

Say this about the DEI radicals who have run higher education into the ground: They’re shameless.

A case in point is Santa Ono, the president of the University of Michigan and a current finalist for president of the University of Florida. Ono has spent his entire career building DEI bureaucracies, pushing climate radicalism, and injecting left-wing politics into the universities he’s led. As the Florida Board of Governors prepares to vote on his appointment on June 3, Ono has tried to fool them into believing he’s the second coming of Ron DeSantis. With a $15 million, five-year contract on offer—which would make him the highest-paid public university president in the country—Ono is rebranding himself as a reformer. He brings to mind the Groucho Marx quip: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like ‘em… well, I’ve got others.” But the University of Florida needs a principled leader—someone who will continue its trajectory of reform with conviction.

On Tuesday, the mask slipped many times as Ono appeared before the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees. The most significant moment came when the board’s vice chair publicly admitted that Ono began conversations about UF’s presidency in February. That matters because Ono closed Michigan’s DEI department in March—one month later. This move against DEI has been touted as proof of his reform credentials, but the timing suggests that Ono ended DEI at Michigan as part of his live audition for the UF presidency, not out of principled courage. He was also a holdout on so-called “diversity statements,” banning them a full six months after Harvard. Ono took that action only after being criticized for DEI radicalism by—of all sources—the New York Times, and only after President Trump was elected.

Make no mistake: Ono is a DEI radical, having embraced that divisive and discriminatory ideology for years. Before arriving at Michigan, Ono served as president of the University of British Columbia. In 2021, he appointed a President’s Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence, later bragging he was “really proud” of the task force’s strategic plan, which had become “a standard that is emulated around the world.” What exactly was Mr. Ono so proud of? The task force’s report is littered with racism. It concludes, “Whiteness is an obstacle to achieving inclusive excellence.” But take heart: “UBC is also lucky to have a good number of White students, faculty, staff, and administrators who readily recognize how problematic Whiteness is.” The task force promised that “expanding Whiteness in strategic hires will not be tolerated.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/28/americas-dead-ed/

On May 15, the Manhattan Institute published a brief on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Also known as the Nation’s Report Card, it is the gold standard assessment for measuring American students’ proficiency in various subjects. As a former middle school testing coordinator, I helped administer the exam once and saw the test delivered with the utmost professionalism. Students are randomly selected without cherry-picking, and the test is handled with great attention to detail.

Unfortunately, the 2024 scores reveal that American schoolchildren are on a downward slope. Only about a third of 4th- and 8th-grade students are proficient in reading or mathematics. A few of the key findings from the Manhattan Institute report include:

Student proficiency levels have stagnated or declined since the early 1990s, with 4th- and 8th-grade reading proficiency at an average of 30%–31%. Math proficiency for both grades peaked in 2013 (42% for 4th grade and 35% for 8th grade) but has declined to 39% (4th grade) and 28% (8th grade).
Between 2013 and 2024, the lowest-performing public school students (25th percentile) lost an average of 12 points, compared with an 8-point decline among charter school students. Among average-performing students (50th percentile), public schools declined by 5 points, while charter schools remained stable. Charter schools provided more stability across all student performance levels.
States with collective bargaining laws for educators saw steeper declines in reading (–3.7% in 4th grade, –4.9% in 8th grade) and math (–2.7% in 4th grade, –4.4% in 8th grade) compared with smaller declines in non-collective bargaining states. While non-collective bargaining states started with lower scores, their rate of decline was smaller, suggesting that greater flexibility in adapting instructional practices is beneficial.
Even with record-high education spending per student in some states, such as New York, student achievement remains low, demonstrating that funding alone does not drive academic success.

“Our lowest-performing students are reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused to right this ship.”

When test scores show that the system is failing, the typical response is that we must spend more money. However, as noted in the Manhattan Institute paper, this argument is flawed. New York, for example, spends $36,293 per student—more than any other state. Yet its 4th-graders rank 32nd and 46th nationally on reading and math NAEP exams.

https://lizpeek.com/daily-rant/graduation-hijacked-columbia-ceremony-marred-by-antisemitic-protests-parents-left-outraged/

Imagine being a parent who scrimped and saved to put your kid through college, only to have Graduation Day, a day that should be a joyous celebration of achievement, turned wretched by ill-informed antisemites railing about Palestine and disrupting the proceedings. That happened yesterday at Columbia University, of course, with students showily burning their diplomas and otherwise wrecking the festivities.

There have long been student protests, of course, but anti-Jew and anti-Israel protests are something new. To have antisemitism increasing across our country, and across the world, is hideous, and far too little has been done to stop it.

The acting president of the school, Claire Shipman, could barely get through her address as students booed her appearance, shouted “free Palestine” and also called for the freeing of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student who was arrested by ICE and is now cooling his heels in a detention center in Louisiana awaiting deportation. Khalil led some of the school’s ugliest protests; the Trump administration claims he has allegiance to Hamas, which they have designated a terrorist organization. It was Khalil’s group CUAD, which demands divestment from Israel, that called for agitators to disrupt graduation.

Notwithstanding the interruptions to her speech, and the intentional undermining of the festivities, Shipman chose to reward the agitators by saying, “I know many in our community are mourning the absence of our graduate, Mahmoud Khalil”, infuriating Jewish students in the audience and, undoubtedly, their parents.

But this is the time of year when college presidents can make headlines through commencement speeches that blast President Trump, or glorify Hamas, or otherwise appeal to the New York Times. Parents be damned.

What do parents actually think about what’s going on in our schools? A conservative group called Defending Education recently did a poll to find out. Turns out, most parents don’t want either admissions or hiring based on DEI, they don’t want biological men in women’s sports or bathrooms, and – guess what – over two-thirds think schools should introduce antisemitism bias training for faculty and staff. No surprise, parents are a voice of common sense.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-left-bias-trump-omar-sultan-haque

Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-empowering-black-leaders-seminar-race-trump

The effort to extirpate identity politics from universities will be a slog. Even as the Trump administration scrutinizes Harvard University for its racial preferences and cuts another $450 million in federal grants, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is offering a three-day seminar called “Empowering Black Leaders: Strategies for Personal and Professional Success.” Topics include “Navigating bias in the workplace,” “Intersectionality in its various forms,” “Racial equity in policing,” and “Employee resource groups.”

That last phrase is a euphemism for affinity groups, those identity-based organizations in schools and businesses that came into vogue over a decade ago. Affinity groups allegedly allow intersectional individuals to collectively protect their identities against bias. Kennedy School organizers and other human-resources types are hoping that a new name will shake off the separatist associations from the original term.

Empowering Black Leaders is led by a diversity consultant, “one of the world’s leading experts,” as the program brochure puts it, on the “science underlying bias and racism in organizations.” Robert Livingston encapsulated his world-class expertise on institutional racism in a 2022 book, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations. Speaking the truth about racism in a corporate leadership seminar means addressing the topic “Racial equity in policing,” since racist police, one is to assume, impede black managers’ ability to climb the corporate ladder.

The Kennedy School has tried to Trump-proof Empowering Black Leaders by noting that a “person’s race/ethnicity is not a criterion for admission.” The program materials even posit a scenario where non-black allies (another academic coinage) enroll in the program so as to “allow them and the Black colleagues they are supporting to thrive.” Such allyship doesn’t come cheap. The course costs $6,900. Are businesses going to shell out close to $7,000 a head to send their black managers and their white allies to learn about the businesses’ alleged racism? In the pre-Trump world, quite possibly. Today, less so. Though the application deadline was April 29, 2025, as of May 14, the Kennedy School was still soliciting applications.

Despite the effort to be just sufficiently color-blind enough to pass muster from an anti-DEI federal funder, assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program. The seminar is designed for “mid-senior level leaders in North American, Europe, and similarly structured societies,” according to the program brochure. What “similar structure” might that be? Elite-dominated? Welfare-statist? Demographically self-cancelling? No, the common link between North American and European “societies” is their embrace of white supremacy. Thus, any black professionals living on those “similarly structured” continents need consultant-provided tools for overcoming what the program refers to as “commonly shared obstacles” to advancement.