RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/megadonors_should_fund_new_universities.html

The size and vitriol of the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas rallies on campus has been a game changer. Yes, everyone knew that college students tend to be ill-informed politically, but the seething hatred of Jews and the misinformation — labeling Israel an apartheid society — was beyond belief. Obviously, something is terribly wrong with American higher education.

What can be done? Though many prominent donors threaten to close their checkbooks, and top school administrators offer lukewarm apologies, the answer is, sadly: not much. The only solution is to create educational alternatives, a long-term strategy where today’s elite schools fade into obscurity and join the ranks of Transylvania University, a once prestigious university that still exists but is now more closely associated with Dracula than higher education,

The good news is that this mission can be accomplished and all the ingredients — mainly brains, organizational skill, and money — exist in abundance. This strategy will not produce overnight change, but it is the only alternative.

The necessary reform is impossible. The hatred of Western Civilization that encourages woke kids to champion homophobic, misogynist militant Islam has entered American higher education’s DNA. And this is in addition to all the nonsense about gender fluidity and Critical Race Theory. No school can screen applicants for gullibility nor impose a litmus test for prospective faculty. Nor would champions of Western Civilization demand schools to return to an era when universities were church-run sanctuaries for doctrinal orthodoxy. Yes, these donations from angry billionaires are large, but funding is also fungible so Middle East billionaires or radical foundations can easily replace the likes of Leslie Wexner or Ron Lauder.

Hope starts by recognizing that many contemporary elite schools began as educational nonentities. The world-famous California Institute of Technology was founded  in 1891 as an Throop College, an obscure vocational school, and did not began its march to excellence until later. Throop College shed its name in 1910 and became Cal-Tech in 1920 thanks to the efforts of leading scientists on the faculty, notably Robert A. Millikan and George E. Hale. Only in 1934 it officially joined the ranks of other major American universities.

https://worldisraelnews.com/california-university-offers-extra-credit-for-marching-against-israel

Controversy erupted when a teacher at UC Berkeley offered her students extra credit for participating in anti-Israel activities in support of terrorist-run Gaza.

The University of California Berkeley is under fire after the school approved an instructor’s plan to offer extra credit to students who participate in an anti-Israel march or watch an anti-Israel documentary.

Graduate student Victoria Huynh, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, sent an email to students enrolled in her course, “Asian American Communities and Race Relations,” about the anti-Israel extra-credit options.

The email promoted an event called the “National walkout against genocide, settler-colonialism, and the siege of Gaza,” and informed students that they had the option to participate in the national student walkout or watch a short documentary on Palestine and contact their local California representatives.

This participation would count as either a field trip or an extra five points in the field trip category of their course grade.

After students posted a screenshot of the assignment on social media, the school faced heavy backlash, including with a diversity and inclusion organization that Huynh had previously worked for, Model Expand.

The post about the assignment received more than 1.9 million views in less than a day.

UC Berkeley received extensive criticism on social media, with concerns raised about the safety of Jewish students on campus and the broader implications of such actions by a teacher.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/jewish_students_studying_in_cooper_union_library_barricaded_and_threatened_by_hamas_activists.html

What kind of barbarism in academia is this?

According to the New York Post:

A handful of Cooper Union’s Jewish students barricaded inside the university’s library Wednesday when pro-Palestinian protesters blew past security and aggressively pounded on the building’s doors.

A Jewish senior at the East Village institution recounted the terrifying moment she watched the demonstrators slam anti-Zionist posters against the window and shout “anti-Semitic rhetoric” just a few feet away.

“When they started banging on the door, my heart started pounding. I was crying. I think if the doors weren’t locked — I don’t know what would have happened,” the student, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post.

“I don’t want to speculate what would’ve happened. It just makes me too nervous. I was absolutely terrified in that moment.”

So you’re a Jewish kid. Maybe you are Orthodox and wear a yarmulke. You get into a good school. You study hard in a library, sometimes with your friends, because you know that schooling is important and you want to graduate. You aren’t out partying. You are doing the right thing.

And suddenly, a gang of goons from somewhere out on the streets, wielding Palestinian flags, takes a pivot from their plan to get to the president’s office, after seeing you, and then barricades you in and pounds on the doors, threatening you and flashing anti-Semitic signs through the library windows and bellowing about something happening several thousand miles away, blaming you for all of it, all because you are Jewish.

Obviously, this isn’t about Zionism, or the Israel government, or anything the Palestinian apologists claim. This is straight, naked Jew-hate. 

Worse still, it’s not thugs on the street doing thuggish anti-Semitic acts, it’s the university establishment condoning it from other thugs. The story says the protestors busted through the security guards who tried to block them. The kids called the cops. The cops got there but stood by twiddling their thumbs because the university told them not to get involved and they actully honored that, despite what they were seeing going on.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/universities-celebrate-the-mass-murder-of-jews/

Since Hamas initiated a brutal and barbaric terrorist attack against Israel and the Jewish people on October 7th, many Americans—Jewish and not—have mourned alongside the world’s only Jewish state and have understood the necessity of a swift and decisive military counterattack. But in the green quads and ivory towers of American academia, a very different reaction has been brewing. For the past two decades, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has shone a rare spotlight on the genocidal Jew hatred emanating from our college campuses. Student organizations like the Hamas-funded and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Students for Justice in Palestine have infiltrated our universities and turned them training grounds for the next generation of jihadists. In the wake of Hamas’s barbarism, its slaughter and mutilation of innocent Jews, its campaign of rape and torture and beheading, we can now bear witness to the effects that two decades of Jew-hating pro-terror propaganda have wrought in our institutions of higher learning.

At Harvard, arguably America’s most prestigious university, over 30 student organizations signed onto a statement declaring that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

Not to be outdone by Harvard, the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at Brown University released its own statement (co-signed by the Graduate Labor Organization and Teaching Assistant Labor Organization, as well as 25 additional organizations) stating that: “We, the undersigned, hold the Israeli regime and its allies unequivocally responsible for all suffering and loss of life, Palestinian or Israeli.”

At Cornell University, SJP held a rally to “Stop Israel’s Annihilation of Gaza.” History Professor Russell Rickford who spoke at the rally declared Hamas’s barbaric attack which included the rape of women, the beheading of babies, and the deaths of entire families as “exhilarating.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-do-so-many-young-people-support-hamas/

The monthly Harvard/Harris survey conducted in the wake of the Hamas-perpetrated massacre of over 1,400 Israelis on October 7 has good news and bad news for those who look upon this act of mass murder of Jews with horror and contempt. In the good news column, the overwhelming majority of respondents believe the U.S. is justified in branding Hamas a “terrorist group,” believe it is correct to call the attack “genocidal,” do not think the slaughter was justified, and side with Israel in its war against Hamas. The bad news is, however, impossible to dismiss as inconsequential.

Younger Americans, aged 18 to 24, disagree with their elders. This demographic is split almost down the middle when asked if the slaughter of senior citizens, the rape of young women, the murder of children, and the immolation of whole families in their homes was justified. Indeed, a slight majority of respondents in this age group said the butchery could be “justified by the grievance of Palestinians.” What’s more, only a bare majority of this demographic backs Israel in this conflict. Forty-eight percent said they side not with Palestinians but explicitly with “Hamas” in this war.

The first order of business is to heap scorn on a generation that has adopted this morally bankrupt perspective and the older adults in their lives who have so maliciously led them astray. The second task at hand is for us to understand what convinced the younger generation to sacrifice their humanity upon the altar of an intellectual fad. The answer can be found, at least in part, in one odious word that has claimed the benignity of this generation and so many before them: “framework.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/23/the-sickness-of-our-universities-and-the-cure/

The sheer madness that has gripped many elite universities since October 7 and the butchery, rape, torture, and mutilation of some 1,000 Israeli civilians by Hamas murderers have shocked the public at large.

Campus craziness is, of course, nothing new. But quite novel for campuses was the sudden jettisoning of prior campus pretenses. Universities have brazenly dropped their careful two-faced gymnastics to reveal at last–unapologetically, proudly, and defiantly–the moral decay that now characterizes American higher education.

Recent news stories have exposed this rot to the world, and will have grave repercussions for higher education in the next few years.

The Nazis once desecrated the tombstones of dead Jews. Our campuses have updated that hatred. Students now tear down pictures of Jewish captives kidnapped or murdered by Hamas. University presidents do not condemn the hate-filled rallies supporting the killing of Jews in Israel, even though, according to their own safety-first ideology and prior proclamations about systemic hatred, these rallies instill a “climate of fear” in some students.

An instructor at Stanford separated Jewish students from their belongings, ordered them to stand in the corner, boasted about denying the Holocaust, and singled them out for unhinged rantings. Screaming campus activists and professors openly support Hamas even after its brutal killing of hundreds of Israeli women, children, and infants. That for more than two weeks thousands of rockets—barrages initially designed to enhance the surprise mass murdering of October 7—daily continue to shower down upon Israeli cities is of zero concern to loud campus activists.

An even bolder Cornell history faculty member bragged that he was “exhilarated” on news that Jews were butchered on October 7. A UC Davis professor threatened to go after the children of “Zionist journalists.” “Savages”, “excrement” and “pigs” are the adjective and nouns one professor at the Art Institute of Chicago posted to describe Israelis.

At rallies and protests, hundreds shout about eliminating Israel altogether; students, faculty, and throngs in general occasionally wear masks or wrap their faces in keffiyehs, as if conceding that most would find anyone identifiably mouthing such advocacy despicable. In some sense, such campus haters have become the equivalent of anti-Semitic sheet-wearing Klansmen.