RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/24/bright-spots-do-exist-in-american-higher-education-are-they-the-future/

On April 8, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, did something unusual: it found and showcased bright spots in American higher education. Such hidden gems are rare, so the event and its participants deserve attention and support.

Many Americans are painfully aware of academia’s current pathologies: soaring tuition resulting in unprecedented debt for students; leftward politicization with Democrat professors outnumbering Republicans 50 to 1; grievance studies such as Women’s Studies or Queer Studies displacing real learning; and, consequently, graduates who are ignorant, especially in American civics, world history, math, and finance, as the repeated schemes to cancel student loans attest.

The humanities were the first to go bad, though the sciences have certainly caught up as politically correct “diversity” and “equity” initiatives are now common in medical schools. The liberal arts used to focus on what was common to all of humanity—hence “the humanities.” They instructed us on our shared vices and virtues, our passions and reason, as depicted in the Great Books of Western Civilization, such as those by Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare.

But today’s campus identity politics inverts this and encourages a focus on self, one’s tribe, or one’s pet politics—the direct opposite of the word “education,” the root of which is the Latin ducare, meaning to bring forth or draw out. Traditionally, education was never a focus on one’s own problems but rather a means to broaden the mind and one’s world, to see universals, including human nature, not to fight today’s political battles. Alas, whether they know it or not, most colleges today instead subscribe to the Communist Manifesto line that, “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” Campus protests make the point.

But a few notable schools reject this Marxist norm. Presidents of four of them spoke at the Heritage panel, Reclaiming the Culture of Higher Education, introduced by Jonathan Pidluzny, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs in the Education Department.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/23/choosing-choice/

Texas is on the verge of becoming the latest state to embrace educational freedom. On April 17, the Texas House gave final approval to a bill that would create an Educational Savings Account program, bringing Gov. Greg Abbott’s top legislative priority very close to reality. The bill now heads to the state Senate, where it will most likely pass. With ESAs, money is deposited into a government-authorized savings account with restricted but multiple uses. Those funds can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses, and other approved customized learning services and materials.

While any student can apply, the Texas program prioritizes students with disabilities and those from lower-income families. House lawmakers also capped spending for students in families above 500% of the poverty level at 20% of program funds. With over five million students, the program can’t serve everyone at this time. The legislature, however, can appropriate more money for the program in future years.

Also new on the school choice scene is Tennessee, where parents can apply to participate in the state’s new ESA program in May. The program begins in the fall, and parents can access up to $7,295 a year. During the first year, half of the funding would be reserved for students whose families fall below an income limit that is set at 300% of the amount required to qualify for free or reduced-price meals, or $173,160 for a family of four. The other half would have no income restrictions.

Other states are also moving toward parental freedom. In South Carolina, negotiations are underway in the legislature for a program that will accept at least 15,000 students and can increase if the state’s General Assembly allocates additional money. To be eligible, families could earn no more than 300% of the federal poverty level in the first year. The income cap will rise to 500% of the federal poverty level in subsequent years.

Idaho and Wyoming also joined the movement earlier this year, and New Hampshire and North Dakota are taking steps to create universal school choice.

Nationally, 36 states now have some kind of private school choice. Patrick Wolf, a Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas who has studied school choice systems extensively, contrasted the rapid spread of choice over the last few years with the slower progress seen in the 2000s and 2010s. In particular, he said that ESAs stand out as having found their moment.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-columbia-university/

#2: Columbia University

More than any other university across the nation, Columbia has become a symbol for the lawless riot of Jew hatred and pro-terrorist sentiment that has overtaken our college campuses. And deservedly so.

During the spring of 2024, the Columbia campus became engulfed in chaos, as pro-Hamas students, aided by radical faculty and outside organizers, established an illegal encampment on the South East Lawn, calling it a “Gaza solidarity encampment” and a “liberated zone” and using violence and physical force to deny entry to anyone deemed a Zionist.

As the anti-Semitism watchdog organization, the Amcha Initiative, reports:

The protestors had defended their encampment by encircling it and chanting, “we don’t want no Zionists here,” called for an intifada, and physically intimidated Jewish students that were observing or recording. Professors spoke at a “faculty solidarity teach in,” where Professor Mahmood Mamdani stated, “The response to Zionist power is to criminalize anti-Zionism as antisemitism”… The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group praised and promoted support for the encampment online, even going so far as to illicit donations for the protestors violating university policy.

As Amcha has documented, “multiple Jewish students were assaulted” in the so-called “liberated zone” and elsewhere on campus: “Protestors off campus threw fake blood at Jewish students. According to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Workforce, a photographer wearing a ‘bring them home necklace’ had coffee thrown at him by a protester while simply standing nearby. A Jewish student was accosted when walking home wearing a Star of David necklace, and a hostage tag when a woman began screaming at the student, calling the Jewish student a Zionist and a murderer while banging what appeared to be a pot on the barricade, and after being told by a police officer to stop, accused Jewish students of ‘killing her people’ and said ‘We are Hamas’ which was caught on video. A Jewish Columbia student reported to the Committee that many Jewish students ‘who [live] right next to the campus couldn’t sleep due to screams of Intifada until 1AM.’”

The university response to these blatant acts of anti-Semitism and disruption was abysmal. Administrators pleaded and negotiated with the pro-Hamas agitators to disperse the encampment but refrained from taking hard line disciplinary tactics or banning the organizers from campus. As a result, the illegal demonstration persisted, eventually shutting down campus life entirely, forcing the cancellation of graduation ceremonies, and creating a rabidly hostile climate for Jewish and pro-Israel students at the university.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/21/do-elite-universities-really-wish-to-fight-the-federal-government/

Harvard has refused to accept the orders of a Trump administration commission concerning its chronic problems with anti-Semitism, campus violence, and racial tribalism, bias, and segregation.

Yet, unlike some conservative campuses that distrust an overbearing Washington, Harvard and most elite schools like it want it both ways. They do as they please on their own turf and yet still demand that the taxpayers send them multibillion-dollar checks in addition to their multibillion-dollar private incomes.

Aside from the issues of autonomy and free expression, there are lots of campus practices that higher education would prefer were not widely known to the public.

But soon they will be, and thus will become sources of public anger. Perhaps envision elite private colleges as mossy rocks, which seem outwardly picturesque—until you turn them over and see what crawls beneath.

So, if there are protracted standoffs, our elite campuses will be hard-pressed to defend the indefensible. This effort will be difficult because public confidence in higher education has already plummeted to historic lows in the most recent polls.

In Amerispeak public surveys, those expressing very little confidence or none at all in higher education have soared to about 30 percent of respondents, while those polling only “some” confidence rose to 40%.

Polls show that less than a third of Americans have quite a lot of confidence in our college campuses.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/17/will-harvard-go-full-hillsdale/

Harvard University has rejected various demands of a presidential commission on anti-Semitism.

The task force wants to persuade Harvard to ensure Jewish students on its campus are no longer harassed, or else lose its federal funding.

Harvard retorts that it won’t be bullied by Washington.

Among its other requirements, the Trump administration also warned Harvard to cease using race as a criterion in its admissions, hiring, and promotion, contrary to law.

And it also directed the campus to ban the use of masks that, in the post-COVID era of protests, have emboldened violent demonstrators with anonymity.

The administration’s order to stop race-based bias was in accordance with civil rights statutes, and a recent Supreme Court decision specifically banning affirmative action at Harvard and elsewhere.

No matter. Harvard claimed that the Trump administration infringed upon its First Amendment rights.

So, it has temporarily rejected the administration’s orders. At least for now, Harvard has lost its annual $2.2 billion grant of federal funds.

Former President Barack Obama, among others, lauded Harvard’s rejection of the demands of the administration’s anti-Semitism task force. He claimed the Trump administration’s efforts were ham-handed.

But what academic freedom are Harvard and Obama talking about? The freedom to discriminate and segregate by race in hiring, admissions, dorms, and graduations?

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/380765/the-nazi-skeletons-in-wesleyan-u-s-closet/

 The president of Wesleyan University claimed, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that the Trump administration and the Republican Party are teeming with secret or aspiring Nazis. But how did the Wesleyan administration relate to the actual Nazis and Nazi supporters on its Connecticut campus in the 1930s?

    In February 1934, Wesleyan invited Dr. Friedrich Auhagen, a representative of Nazi Germany’s consulate in New York City, to address the student body. That was more a year after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. A year of the Nazi regime boycotting Jewish-owned businesses, of nationwide book-burnings, of Nazi takeovers of German universities, of mass firings of Jews from most professions, and of sporadic anti-Jewish violence.  Yet none of that deterred the Wesleyan administration from inviting a Nazi official to campus.

    In his remarks to the Wesleyan students, Auhagen railed against “excessive Jewish control” in Germany, claimed that reports of antisemitism were “widely exaggerated,” and declared that Jews who did not like living under Nazism should “go settle in certain regions of Russia.”

    Hitler had some fans on the Wesleyan campus. The most enthusiastic was Paul H. Curts, a longtime professor of German. He was so sympathetic to the Nazis that he was cheering for them even before they rose to power. In a May 1932 speech, eight months before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Prof. Curts declared that supporters of the Nazi Party generally were “staid, sober Germans.”

    After Hitler and the Nazis became Germany’s rulers, Prof. Curts served as their lead apologist at Wesleyan. He made multiple trips to Germany in the 1930s, each time returning brimming with enthusiasm. After one such trip in 1934, Prof. Curts addressed the entire student body and told them Hitler was “the only man who could offer to Germany what it needed at present.”