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EDUCATION

Can the Department of Education Be Used for Good? By Peter Wood

https://tomklingenstein.com/can-the-department-of-education-be-used-for-good/

Can the U.S. Department of Education be put to good use? Forty-six years of experience — it opened its doors in 1980 — have persuaded many Americans that we would be better off without this arm of government. But efforts to amputate it, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s attempt in 1981, have failed. It is a lot easier to persuade Congress to add to the national bureaucracy than to take away an entrenched instrument of state. 

Dislike of ED has many tributaries but one main source: the belief that education is something properly left to students, to families, and to local institutions — not the federal government. ED got much of its initial support from special interest groups representing teachers, and it continues to this day to favor programs that benefit teachers and educational bureaucrats over the needs of the citizenry. 

A concise summary of this indictment can be found in Lindsey Burke’s essay in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Supporters of Kamala Harris, of course, have excoriated Project 2025 and called out Burke’s essay in particular for calling for the abolition of ED. Donald Trump, moreover, has distanced himself from Project 2025 and never shown interest in uprooting ED.

This leaves open the possibility of attempting to put ED to good use if Trump manages to take back the White House. What might that look like? Can it be done? 

The guiding principle of such an effort must surely be that education serves a real national purpose. As soon as that door is cracked open, all manner of well-meaning (and some not so well-meaning) reformers come crowding in. Some say national purpose is now best defined as “anti-racism,” and ED does its part by advancing the DEI agenda. Others say our national purpose is the pursuit of “social justice,” and ED can advance this by dismantling the system that privileges the American middle class. 

Those are two of ways in which the national purpose of American education is subverted. There are plenty of others, but I want to focus on what I take to be the genuine national purpose of education, and that is to sustain the nation. We need our schools and our schooling (in whatever form it takes) to prepare young people to play positive and meaningful parts as citizens of our self-governing republic. 

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Russell Rickford at the Cornell University “[October 7th] was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing.” by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-russell-rickford-at-the-cornell-university/

#3: Russell Rickford, Cornell University

Cornell associate professor of history Russell Rickford made national headlines for his enthusiastic and boisterous approbation of Hamas’s barbaric October 7th massacre of Israeli civilians during which over 1200 were maimed, mutilated, and slaughtered, and hundreds more taken hostage.

At a rally hosted by the ironically-named group, Jewish Voice for Peace, in Ithaca, New York on October 15, 2023, barely a week after Hamas’s attack, Rickford lauded Hamas in the highest terms and celebrated the outright slaughter of Israel’s Jews.
“What has Hamas done?,” Rickford asked. “Hamas has shifted the balance of power. Hamas has punctured the illusion of [Israeli] invincibility. That’s what they’ve done…Hamas has changed the terms of debate.”
Rickford continued extolling the virtues of the terrorist group, saying that “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence” and that the Palestinians “were able to breathe for the first time in years” thanks to the bloody October 7th massacre.

“[I]t was exhilarating! It was exhilarating! It was energizing! And if they [Palestinians] weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated!” Rickford concluded, expressing sheer joy at the extent of Hamas’s slaughter.

Even in the highly anti-Semitic world of higher education, Rickford’s remarks praising the massacre were considered a step too far. The professor requested and was granted a leave of absence from the university but remained an employee and is still listed as a professor on the university’s website.

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Huda Fakhreddine at the University of Pennsylvania “While we were asleep [on October 7th], Palestine invented a new way of life.” by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-huda-fakhreddine-at-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

#4: Huda Fakhreddine, University of Pennsylvania

An associate professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Huda Fakhreddine has repeatedly voiced praise for the Jew-hating terrorist group Hamas and has specifically lauded their barbaric attack on innocent Israeli civilians  on October 7th during which over 1200 were slaughtered and many more raped, mutilated, and taken hostage.

On October 7, 2023, just hours after this massacre, Fakhreddine tweeted in Arabic, “While we were asleep, Palestine invented a new way of life,” clearly celebrating the brutal slaughter of Israeli innocents.

A few days later on October 12, Fakhreddine doubled down on her warped view of the conflict, posting a “Statement of Solidarity with Palestine”  which charged Israel with “sole responsibility” for Hamas’s October 7th massacre.  The statement claimed that “The Palestinian resistance efforts”—note the whitewashing of mass rape and baby-killing as acts of “resistance”—“are a response to 75 years of occupation, colonization, and apartheid by the Israeli settler colonial regime.”

In a Facebook post one week later, Fakhreddine added: “When we chant, ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ we are calling for a one state, one person=one vote, where everyone living between the river and the sea is free and treated as a human being with rights and dignity. If some see freedom and equal rights for all as an existential threat, then they are the problem. No country should require oppression and apartheid to exist.”

As the anti-Semitism watchdog site Canary Mission notes, “‘From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free’ is a chant calling to dismantle the State of Israel. It has also been employed by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal to call for the replacement of Israel with an Islamic state.” It is a genocidal call for the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of its entire Jewish population.

So extreme are Fakhreddine’s views that she rejects even the common pro-Palestine descriptor of Gaza as an “open-air prison,” tweeting  that, “Gaza is not an open-air prison. Prisoners receive visitors and aid is allowed to be passed to them. Gaza is a Nazi-style concentration camp, a concentration camp under bombardment.” Fakhreddine’s comparison of Israel’s conduct to Hitler’s Nazi regime is a common and widely-used form of Jew hatred.

The DEI scam destroying education and fomenting antisemitism must end An insightful case study of how it works at the University of Michigan demonstrates the danger of allowing woke ideological rule. The next administration can do something about it. Jonathan Tobin

https://www.jns.org/the-dei-scam-destroying-education-and-fomenting-antisemitism-must-end/?

Give credit where it’s due. In recent years, The New York Times has become an almost unreadable publication. Left-wing bias is present in nearly every article as a partisan agenda has been weaponized by a business plan in which the so-called “newspaper of record” has marketed itself almost exclusively to affluent liberal readers. This has resulted in a cascade of biased reporting and editing aimed at affirming those readers’ prejudices and pre-existing opinions about issues, candidates and lifestyle choices. Though other major papers, as well as broadcast and cable channels, have taken similar paths, no other news outlet better exemplifies the way legacy corporate mainstream media has discarded journalism for political activism.

Still, the organization is large enough that every once in a while, articles that are more in line with the traditional purpose of journalism—seeking the truth and exposing corrupt practices no matter who is the guilty party—seem to sneak into the Times. An example of such a piece was published in its Sunday magazine and written by veteran investigative reporter Nicholas Confessore.

The article ran under the headline, “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on D.E.I. What Went Wrong?” It took a deep dive into the way one of America’s elite public universities had embraced the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), and how this ideological commitment had not merely consumed a considerable portion of its budget but also transformed the institution into one in which students, faculty and staff have been pitted against each other in an endless racial war that serves only to exacerbate divisions and undermine academic freedom.

The story is far from perfect. It fails to adequately trace the origins of the woke catechism of DEI, and its progression from the radical left’s toxic neo-Marxist ideas of critical race theory and intersectionality. Instead, Confessore seeks to tie it to failed liberal attempts to deal with racial disparities in education like affirmative action. Anyone who wants to understand how and why DEI came to dominate education in the United States, in addition to the arts, corporate business culture and even the government, would do well to read Christopher Rufo’s brilliant 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything.

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Joseph Massad at Columbia University October 7th was “awesome,” “astonishing,” “astounding,” and “incredible.” by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-joseph-massad-at-columbia-university/

#5: Joseph Massad, Columbia University

During the more than two decades that he has been teaching students at Columbia University, Joseph Massad, a professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, has accumulated a reputation as a notorious Jew-hater and an ardent supporter of the terrorist group Hamas. Yet it was an essay describing Hamas’s barbaric October 7th massacre of innocent Israelis as “awesome,” “astonishing,” “astounding,” and “incredible” that finally forced the university to launch a half-hearted “investigation” into his behavior.

Massad’s long record of anti-Semitism is hardly up for debate. He denies the Jewish people’s historical connection to Israel, claiming absurdly that the very establishment of Israel as a Jewish homeland was anti-Semitic because it differentiated Jews from other “white Europeans.”  He has maliciously slandered Israel as a “racist settler colony” and has compared the Jews to Hitler’s Nazi party. In a speech given at Oxford University in 2002, Massad denied that Israel had a right to exist, claiming “The Jews are not a nation… The Jewish state is a racist state that does not have a right to exist.” This is the language of Nazism.

Massad’s comments on the October 7th terror attacks should not have come as a shock to the Columbia administration as he has repeatedly indicated his support for Palestinian terrorism against Israel, stating in a 2002 lecture that Israel is “a Jewish supremacist and racist state” and adding that “[e]very racist state should be destroyed.”

“It is only by making the costs of Jewish supremacy too high that Israeli Jews will give it up,” Massad said in another address, a clear endorsement of terrorism. The professor has also declared that the “resistance of Palestinians”—“resistance” is a well-known euphemism for terrorism among the pro-Hamas set— must extend to Israel’s “civil institutions” and he has referred to Palestinian terrorists as “anti-colonial resisters.”

In a 2006 article titled “Pinochet in Palestine,” Massad described the terrorist organization Hamas as the only group prepared to “defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation.”

YAF Calls Out UCLA AGAIN for Restricting the Speech of Patriotic Students When First Amendment rights died on an American Campus. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/yaf-calls-out-ucla-again-for-restricting-the-speech-of-patriotic-students/

Will UCLA and the other far-left indoctrination centers that call themselves our nation’s universities ever learn? Will they ever recall that Americans, including American students, have First Amendment rights? Will they ever admit that even those who dissent from the left’s agenda have a right to be heard and that university administrators, of all people, should respect that right?

Given the left’s consistent taste for authoritarianism, that’s unlikely, and UCLA has just shown this yet again. The intrepid warriors of the Young America’s Foundation (YAF), however, are not letting them get away with it.

Two weeks ago, I wrote an articleabout how YAF had filed suit against UCLA for blocking a lecture I was scheduled to give there on May 15, 2024, entitled “Everything You Know About Palestine Is Wrong.” UCLA officials canceled the event at the last minute and then disingenuously claimed that it had gone on as planned, as they allowed me to come onto campus (under heavy police guard) and speak for a few minutes with the courageous members of the YAF chapter.

That was not what had been agreed upon: I had been scheduled to give an address that was to have been open to the entire student body, and UCLA’s top dogs shut that down. They claimed security concerns, and certainly, the pro-Hamas crowd that was marching through campus would have torn me limb from limb if it had gotten half a chance. To cancel the event, however, was to submit to the heckler’s veto, as well as to reinforce the political proclivities of the UCLA administration and faculty.

That’s why YAF thus filed suit. Mountain States Legal Foundation Senior Counsel James Kerwin explained: “UCLA pretends it cares about freedom of expression, but when push comes to shove, it only allows one side to have its say. That is a violation of the First Amendment. This lawsuit will force UCLA to do what it should have done long ago: treat all viewpoints fairly and stop the campus shout-down mobs.” Yes. And one would think that with that suit in progress, UCLA would think twice about restricting the speech of patriotic students again. You would think wrong.

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Samer Alatout at UW-Madison Championing Hamas at an illegal campus encampment. by Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-samer-alatout-at-uw-madison/

#6: Samer Alatout, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Samer Alatout is a Palestinian associate professor of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison who has long been noted for his record of Jew hatred and his whitewashing of Hamas’s terrorist violence. In recent months, his promotion of Hamas has become even more explicit, praising the organizers of the barbaric October 7th attacks on Israeli civilians and participating in—and getting arrested—during an illegal anti-Israel demonstration on campus.

Just days after Hamas’s massacre of Israeli innocents, Alatout made his support for the terrorist organization clear, tweeting, that “Hamas fighters r precisely the kids & grandkids of those who were displaced from Palestine in 1948. They r the Palestinians if one comes to think of it. In refugee camps, they live legacies of that war and hold tight to the right of return (enshrined in international law).” While most leftist critics of Israel were attempting to draw a moral distinction between Hamas and the larger mass of Palestinian people, Alatout was doing precisely the opposite—and justifying the actions of Hamas.

In another tweet on October 13, 2023, Alatout attempted to absolve Hamas and blame Israel for the barbaric massacre of 1200 innocents and the kidnapping and maiming of many more. “…[I]t is not about Hamas, not about Gaza, and not about the recent attack by Hamas. Israel has been targeting Palestinians within Israel, in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in the Diaspora. The demand: Die silently, without a whimper,” he wrote.

Professor Alatout has repeatedly invoked the Holocaust in condemning Israel’s actions to defend itself from Hamas, a classic form of anti-Semitism. On November 15, 2023, Alatout tweeted, “#Israeli use of #Goebbels’s (the Nazi propaganda guy) approach of ‘lie, lie, and keep lying until people believe you,’ will not work in 2023.” Two days later, he compared Israelis to Holocaust deniers, tweeting, “Deniers of the ongoing #Genocide_of_Palestinians should be ashamed. They are made of the same moral depravity of which Holocaust deniers are made of.”

Hamas Loyalist Professor: Noura Erakat at Rutgers University Celebrating suicide bombers and demonizing Jews. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/hamas-loyalist-professor-noura-erakat-at-rutgers-university/

Editor’s note: American campuses are awash in a crisis of Jew hatred. Ineffectual college administrators have taken tentative steps to try and rein in the proponents of terror on their campuses, but they have yet to confront the most obvious source of this poisonous Jew hatred—their own radical faculty who have not only called for an end to Israel but have outright celebrated the barbaric bloodshed of the terror group Hamas.

The Freedom Center is exposing these radical, pro-terror faculty as the Top Ten Hamas Loyalist Professors. We will be publishing one school per day as a series on Frontpage. Noura Erakat, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, is #8 on our list.

#8: Noura Erakat, Rutgers University

As an associate professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Dr. Noura Erakat has repeatedly used her academic position and influence to promote the terrorist organization Hamas and to justify their barbaric massacre, mutilation, and rape of innocent Israeli Jews.

In a series of tweets issued on October 7th, a day of infamy in which Hamas terrorists slaughtered over 1200 Israel men, women and children, and brutalized and raped many others, taking hundreds of hostages, Dr. Erakat raised her voice to defend Hamas’s horrors.

“#Gaza has been under a naval blockade & land siege for 17 years & its 2 mil Palestinians subject to 4 large scale offensives,” Erakat tweeted. “Any shock in response to this multi scalar attack [by Hamas] reflects an expectation that those Palestinians die quietly and a complicity in their strangulation.”

On that same day of horrors, Erakat also tweeted: “Any condemnation of [Hamas] violence is vapid if it does not begin & end with a condemnation of Israeli apartheid, settler colonialism, and occupation. #Palestine #Gaza #Decolonize.”

Harvard’s Fundraising Crisis The president of America’s wealthiest university discovers that in the wake of its failure to defend its Jewish students, fundraising has been ‘disappointing.’

https://www.nysun.com/article/harvards-fundraising-crisis?lctg=1434403439&recognized_

“Disappointing” is the word being used by Harvard University’s president, Alan Garber, to describe the plunge in financial contributions that the school has recorded this year. His comment, during an interview with the Crimson last week, previews the release later this month of the University’s 2024 financial report, which is expected to show a collapse in funding as a result of Harvard’s pusillanimity in the wake of the war against Israel. 

Mr. Garber may be disappointed, but he can hardly be surprised. Harvard, in the words of six Jewish students suing the school, has become in the past year “a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment.” The university is in federal court fighting against, incredibly, these Jewish students over its failure to protect them from the “severe and pervasive” antisemitic discrimination that exploded on campus in the wake of October 7.

The university claims that it has taken “tangible steps” to address antisemitism and that the Jewish students’ “dissatisfaction with the strategy and speed” of the school’s efforts “does not state a legally cognizable claim.” The dismissal motion was denied by a district judge who ruled that Harvard had failed to respond to campus antisemitism. “In other words,” the judge wrote, “the facts as pled show that Harvard failed its Jewish students.” 

What’s so triggering about The Canterbury Tales? University students are being treated like oversensitive morons. Joanna Williams

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/10/15/whats-so-triggering-about-the-canterbury-tales/

Over the past decade, universities have slapped ‘trigger warnings’ on everything from children’s books to entire fields of law. They have warned archaeology students about bones, theology students about the crucifixion and forensic-science students about dead bodies. In 2022, it was reported that over 1,000 books on university reading lists – including classic works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare – warned students about everything from racism and sexism to murder and suicide. Now, The Canterbury Tales can be added to this list of shame.

The Mail on Sunday reported at the weekend that the University of Nottingham is warning students that Geoffrey Chaucer’s epic poem contains ‘expressions of Christian faith’. The Canterbury Tales – as anyone with even a passing knowledge of literature knows – follows a group of pilgrims as they entertain each other with stories on their way to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. In other words, the clue to this being an ‘expression of Christian faith’ is right there in the title. Nottingham’s English literature lecturers must think students are stupid.

How on Earth did our once learned institutions end up in such a ridiculous situation? Trigger warnings took off on American campuses a decade ago before quickly crossing the Atlantic. The idea behind them, proponents argued, was to give students a heads up about distressing content. Those who had experienced sexual assault, abuse or violence could then protect themselves from ‘triggering’ flashbacks by leaving class or employing coping strategies. In this way, trigger warnings came to be seen as compassionate. And if some compassion is good, the argument went, then more is clearly better. Warnings about every negative element of human existence soon came to be sprinkled liberally across reading lists and course guides. Indeed, even the word ‘trigger’ was removed from what became ‘content warnings’ for fear it might harm students who had witnessed gun violence.

Meanwhile, a growing number of psychologists questioned the use of such warnings. Some argued they simply did not work and that victims of assault were far more likely to experience flashbacks as a result of a random colour or smell than reading an academic text. Others went further and argued they ‘might exacerbate negative reactions or promote avoidance behaviours’.

These debates about the efficacy of trigger warnings take at face value that their purpose is to protect traumatised students. They miss the point that their use has long since morphed into something else altogether. Those issuing warnings today are likely to see all students as vulnerable and in need of protection – not so much from descriptions of assault, but mainly from politically dubious content. The warning Nottingham University has attached to The Canterbury Tales perfectly illustrates this trend.

If lecturers felt compelled to give a heads up to students who had experienced trauma, violent scenes abound in Chaucer’s work. There’s the grim pursuit of death in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’ that leads to one murder by stabbing and two by poisoning. ‘The Monk’s Tale’ goes one better. It features cannibalism, poisoning, hanging, beheading, suicide and children starving to death. The Wife of Bath – who was hit round the head by a former husband until she lost her hearing in one ear – tells of a young ‘mayde’ who was raped by a ‘lusty bacheler’ from King Arthur’s court. Meanwhile, the young wife in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ is forced to obey her husband, even when he convinces her he has had their children executed. Then there’s the Prioress who relays a story of blood libel. A young boy, she tells her fellow pilgrims, was wandering in a Jewish ghetto, innocently singing songs in praise of the Virgin Mary, when he had his throat cut, his entrails removed and his body thrown into a sewage pit. He reappears before his grieving mother in ghost-like form.