RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2023/11/20/can-we-save-our-universities/

It took the widely reported, repellent, and exempt wave of anti-Semitism and violent pro-Hamas protestors harassing Jews, finally to convince Americans that their own hallmark universities are illiberal centers of mediocrity and intolerance—and increasingly unsafe.

Of course, Americans had long known that something had gone wrong at their colleges. They had increasingly encountered college graduates who were poorly educated in basic skills and lacked general knowledge—and yet highly politicized, and intolerant of different views and opinions. Ignorant but arrogant is a sad way to start an adult life.

College, the public knew, has certainly eroded from our cherished idea of a four-year idealized respite from adult employment. It once was intended to be a place where youth learned to be open-minded, tolerant, skilled, and eager to learn the nature and traditions of Western civilization, art, literature, languages, philosophy, and history.

Instead, all too often “college” has now descended into a six-to-seven-year misadventure that nationwide often results in only half those enrolled ever receiving degrees. Nearly all sink deeply in student debt. And yet for all the borrowed tuition money, few prove capable of writing analytically, speaking articulately, or knowing the general referents, past and present, of their very civilization.

Students, especially at the elite campuses, learn to mouth monotonously accusations of “genocide.” “apartheid,” “colonialism,” or “imperialism.” But they lack the ability to define these nouns. As a result, they so often name drop empty slogans in the context of supposed Western sins.

Again, October 7 brought these sorry facts to national attention. Adolescent screamers on video showed no awareness that dropping leaflets and sending texts to avoid collateral deaths is not “genocide.” Most chant the “river to the sea” with no clue that it resonates the very ethos of mass murdering, mutilation, and dehumanization of Jewish elderly, women, children, and infants in the most savage fashion on October 7.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/equity-equality-and-hamas/

How did we end up with Hamas rallies on college campuses across America? Start with ‘equity’.

America started out with the idea of ‘equality’ that all people should be treated equally so that regardless of where they started out, everyone had the same rights and their lives had the same value. Advocates for ‘equity’ argue that this was unjust because different people were starting out in different places. What they really needed was a level playing field by imposing ‘equity’.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion disposed of equality. Its equity agenda dismissed the idea that people would be treated equally. The only way to achieve equality was through an indefinite period of inequality: raising up some people and pushing down others. Organizations, from the White House to Corporate America, vowed to ”embed equity” into everything that they did.

The moral DNA of society was completely rewritten so that everything from freedom of expression to the value of human life had to be weighed in terms of identity politics. Even the most basic moral questions came down to the paradigms of oppressor and oppressed. Right and wrong were determined purely in terms of ‘punching up’ or ‘punching down’.

“Is it wrong to murder, rape and kidnap people?” was a question to which the answer was no longer “yes”, but “were the victims or the killers members of an oppressed group?”

What matters is not so much that Hamas raped, killed and kidnapped kids, but that it appears to be the weaker party in the conflict, the one with backing from leftist figures in good standing, and the one that has the revolutionary vibe that bourgeois radicals love so much.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/the_new_elite_learning_curve_descent_into_ignorance.html

A generation of students have been taught that they don’t need to actually study facts or consider ethics so long as they learn how to shriek at the appropriate trigger points.

Between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, I lived for several months on kibbutz Hagoshrim, on the border of Israel with Lebanon under the shadow of the Golan Heights. Hagoshrim was referenced in a recent Wall Street Journal article about war preparations along the northern border, which reported that although the nearby town of Kiryat Shmona had been evacuated, the residents of Hagoshrim, the kibbutzniks, had decided not to evacuate but to stay in support of the army. I was not the least surprised, for I knew the kind of sturdy people who lived there.

One of my early jobs as a volunteer laborer on the kibbutz was to dig a grave. It was a Sabbath, and I was the only Gentile who could handle a shovel and pick so I worked alone. The ground was rock hard, and the job took most of the day. As visitors wandered into the cemetery, I learned that the grave was for one of the elderly kibbutzniks who had a line of tattooed numbers on his wrist, marking him as a Nazi death camp survivor. The news made my work even more somber and as I dug, I reflected on the horrors he must have endured. Eventually I became aware of a white-haired man sitting on a nearby bench, another of those battered souls bearing a wrist tattoo. When I took a break, he gestured me to rest on the bench beside him. I thought I should say something but had no idea what would be appropriate, or even if he spoke English. Finally, I just awkwardly offered “he survived all that hatred.” I didn’t think he heard, or understood, for he said nothing for a long minute. Then, forlornly staring at the grave. he just murmured “all that stupidity” and spoke no more.

I took the comment to be just a bitter offhand reply and thought no more of it as I resumed digging. But through the years the words returned to me. I had mentioned hate to one seasoned in hate, who had known it in its most savage, ruthless forms, had endured the 20th century’s vortex of death, and he had seemed to correct me. It wasn’t hatred that was the essential cause of Jewish persecution, he was saying, it was stupidity, the ignorance that allowed the hate to take root.

Any doubt I had about that conclusion has been eradicated by events on certain college campuses since the October 7 Hamas attacks. Mobs of students scream about the apartheid state of Israel without understanding Israel or what apartheid is. They shout about a history of oppression without bothering to understand the actual history. They rant about the need to return to a Palestinian state without knowing there never was such a state. They gleefully celebrate reports of unspeakable atrocities and call for more. The most extreme of these demonstrations have occurred on the campuses of our top-ranked schools. The more elite a university is, it seems, the more ignorant and intolerant its students have become. I doubt any of these protesting students at Harvard, for example, are aware that in the school’s early days graduates were required to learn Hebrew, because of the wisdom found in ancient Jewish writings.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/11/17/let_the_donor_revolution_begin_150070.html

The donor revolts at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and elsewhere are the long-overdue wake up calls that their faculty and administrators needed. The overwhelming majority of politically progressive faculty and administrators have long guarded their right to advance their cherished political causes inside and outside the classroom, while punishment has awaited those who challenge the shibboleths. Instead of the free exchange of ideas and the intellectual capaciousness that ultimately advance social justice, it is now clearer than ever that it is not social justice they have fostered but mindless ideology and hate.

In stunning irony, the leadership of so many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, initially unable to give a full-throated condemnation of a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians of monstrous savagery, miraculously discovered institutional neutrality and murmured effetely instead. In response to the backlash, they appeal to free expression, but their campuses have only what Penn donor and alumnus Clifford Asness has called “asymmetrical free speech where some have it and some don’t.”

While Penn Carey Law School’s eminent Professor Amy Wax is placed under investigation with serious threat of termination for alleged racial insensitivity, a professor who posted the logo of the military wing of Hamas on Facebook days after that terrorist organization’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians receives nothing more than an email.

Roger Waters, a notorious antisemite, is allowed to speak on Penn’s campus, but young women forced to share a locker room with a biological male are told, “Don’t talk to the media. You will regret it.”

At Harvard, the same President Claudine Gay who was instrumental in punishing gifted African American economist Roland Fryer, who dared to advance a data-driven challenge to the meme of racist policing, says pro-Hamas students will neither be punished nor sanctioned. Carole Hooven, who was canceled for stating a biological fact, might disagree with President Gay’s claim that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hamass-barbarity-heightens-the-crisis-in-higher-education-free-speech-anti-semitism-0eb27bd9?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The barbaric attack by Hamas against Israel—the intentional slaughter of defenseless civilians, including children and babies, and the taking of hostages—should have been a unifying moment for America. Shamefully, it has become something else: a wake-up call about a crisis in higher education.

It has been painful to watch students at elite colleges implicitly or explicitly endorse Hamas’s attack. They aren’t old enough to remember 9/11, and it’s clear they never learned its lesson: Intentionally targeting civilians for slaughter is inexcusable no matter the political circumstances.

For Americans, this isn’t a matter of defending Israel but of defending our nation’s most sacred values. One can support the Palestinian people and still denounce the intentional slaughter of civilians.

Why have so many students failed to do so? The answer begins where the buck stops—with college presidents. For years, they have allowed their campuses to become bastions of intolerance, by permitting students to shout down the voices of others. They have condoned “trigger warnings” that shield students from difficult ideas. They have refused to defend faculty who run afoul of student sentiment. And they have created “safe spaces” that discourage or exclude opposing views.

College presidents have also allowed campuses to become institutions of conformity. In a 2014 commencement speech at Harvard, I warned that many of America’s top colleges had become Soviet-like in their lack of viewpoint diversity. As I noted, 96% of donations from Ivy League faculty and staff in the 2012 presidential election went to Barack Obama, while only 4% went to another Harvard alumnus, Mitt Romney.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/more-federal-contractor-than-educator-universities-allowing-antisemitism-on-campus-rake-in-taxpayer-dollars/

Several candidates in the 2024 Republican presidential primaries have threatened to enforce consequences for colleges and universities that allow antisemitism on their campuses. Former president Donald Trump said he would revoke visas of international students celebrating Hamas. North Dakota governor Doug Burgum said he would “fully enforce” Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which mandates that institutions receiving federal assistance refrain from allowing discrimination “on the ground of race, color, or national origin.”

Florida governor Ron DeSantis directed public universities in his state to “deactivate” Students for Justice in Palestine chapters (though he is now facing pushback from state education officials). Former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley vowed to revoke tax-exempt status for colleges and universities that are ignoring antisemitism.

A new report from Open the Books, a nonprofit organization focused on transparency in government spending, demonstrates how much money these elite educational institutions receive from American taxpayers.

During the past five years, ten universities — the Ivy League, plus Northwestern and Stanford universities — received $33 billion in federal contracts and grants. These universities are subject only to an excessive endowment tax, which has them pay 1.4% of their net investment income on endowment assets exceeding $500,000 per student. Of the ten, Stanford came in with the highest total since 2018 at just over $7 billion, while only Dartmouth, with about $755 million, was under the billion-dollar mark.

Open the Books CEO and Founder Adam Andrzejewski told National Review the tax code and federal aid have been distorted beyond their initial purpose.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/profiles-in-cowardice-at-harvard/

The sometimes violent anti-Israel/pro-Hamas protests on many US campuses are the outcome of failed educational policies going back decades. The failure is no more pronounced than at Harvard.

I read last night that Hamas fans blocked Jewish students from entering their classes at MIT. That kind of behavior, which included disrupting classes taught by Jewish professors, sounds a lot like Germany circa 1938. Many US campuses are overrun with antisemites demanding genocide of Jews minimally in Israel and ostensibly everywhere. An unholy alliance of Islamists and liberal women to whom they would deny education and the homosexuals whom they would eagerly throw off of the nearest rooftop march together because their common enemy—the Jew—is at the apex of the intersectional bad guy hierarchy. I don’t know how a Jewish student who holed up in her dorm room goes back in a few weeks or months to the dining hall to eat with her “friends” who marched by her window with a sign demanding her death and the death of her family.

Below is one of several letters I have written to the president of my alma mater, Harvard. President Gay answered one letter but no more. President Gay was chosen to do what Harvard presidents do: raise billions and avoid controversy. She was not chosen, nor is she prepared for Harvard in crisis, where Jewish students are physically threatened, and Palestinian students and their supporters have moved beyond free speech to demanding genocide of the Jewish people. She needs to take decisive action, which she appears incapable of doing. Instead, she appointed a committee whose report will undoubtedly come well after the news cycle has moved to another subject. Her failure is not just for the students at Harvard. If she had acted decisively from day one, she could have significantly reduced campus protests throughout the US. She is like the lead pilot of the Blue Angels: college presidents look to her to know what their next move will be. She is not a leader but someone who filled in the right boxes when the time came to replace her undistinguished predecessor. She is the most recent figurehead to run what was once America’s greatest university. In the 1940s, then-President James Conant was essential in getting the Manhattan Project to its successful conclusion by ensuring that General Leslie Groves had everything he needed. The days of great Harvard presidents are long gone, ending with Derek Bok in the early 1990’s.