MIT Scraps Diversity Statements in Faculty-Hiring Process after Discovering ‘They Don’t Work’: James Lynch

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/mit-scraps-diversity-statements-in-faculty-hiring-process-after-discovering-they-dont-work/

MIT will no longer require diversity statements in its faculty-hiring process, making it the first elite university to abandon the practice.

The decision was made by MIT president Sally Kornbluth, with support from the school’s provost and six academic deans, a spokesperson told National Review on Sunday afternoon.

“My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here,” Kornbluth said in a statement provided to NR. “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Higher-education writer and researcher John Sailer first reported Kornbluth’s statement for UnHerd on Sunday. MIT previously required diversity statements across its academic disciplines, including its nuclear-science and engineering department.

The campus climate at MIT and Korbluth herself came under intense scrutiny when she testified before Congress last year and struggled to say definitively if calls for genocide against Jews violated campus policies. She testified alongside former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and former Harvard University president Claudine Gay about the explosion of campus antisemitism following Hamas’s civilian massacre in Israel.

During her testimony, Kornbluth said she does not believe “speech codes” work to promote an environment of free expression on campus.

Magill resigned shortly after she gave similar testimony to Kornbluth’s regarding campus antisemitism. Similarly, Claudine Gay resigned in disgrace after her congressional testimony on antisemitism and a plagiarism scandal that implicated much of Gay’s academic output.

The End of Old Left-wing Mythologies The one-eyed Jack American Left has been flipped over, and what turned up proved frightening. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/06/the-end-of-old-left-wing-mythologies/

The current radical and often violent protests on mostly blue-state, supposedly elite campuses have exposed in toxic fashion what the left has become. And yet, in a paradoxical fashion, the campus insanity has offered the nation some moral clarity.

What’s surprising is not that the demonstrators are violent and nihilist, but that they are, on the one hand, so openly and crudely anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American, and yet on the other hand, so passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and weepy.

Nevertheless, the antics of the campus cry-bullies have exploded myths that were for so long foisted on the American people by politicos and the media.

#1. Anti-Israel/Anti-Semitic: We have been lectured ad nauseam that hating Israel has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. The last month has blown up that old shibboleth for good. The left makes no distinction in their eliminationist chants between Israel and Jews. “Go back to Poland” is a homonym for “From the River to the Sea.” Both are shorthand for eliminating Jews—aside from the explicit threats to kill Jews and occasional praise for Hitler and the Final Solution.

When pro-Hamas thugs chase Jews into libraries, block their entrances on campus, and scream “beat the Jew” as they hit piñatas, they do not first ask Jews whether they support Israel—because they could care less. For the Islamist Middle Easterner on a student visa or green card and his useful American student, it is enough that their targets are Jewish—period.

Remember, the protests started on October 7, not on October 27, when the IDF went into Gaza. At that point, campus and street protests merely changed from euphoric triumphalism on the news that Hamas had slaughtered, decapitated, mutilated, raped, or kidnapped hundreds of Jews (“exhilarated,” a Cornell professor gushed of the carnage), to furor and violence. So after three weeks of celebrating dead Jews, the street protests grew furious only when the IDF finally began fighting back and destroying Hamas, even as its terrorists cowardly hid beneath mosques, hospitals, and schools to ensure enough collateral damage to incite pro-Hamas Western throngs.

Our University ‘Elites’ May Have Met Their Match Iranian universities offer exciting opportunities to America’s woke youth.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-university-elites-may-have-met-their-match/

Every now and then you see a headline that makes you smile. This one made me laugh out loud:

“Iranian university offers scholarships to US students expelled over protests.”

The president of Shiraz University, a major religious center in Iran, is offering all-expenses paid scholarships to U.S. students expelled for anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist protests, so they can “pursue their studies” in Iran. The Shirazis are so generous they are offering similar stipends to college professors fired for taking part in the same protests.

So now those students and professors who have been chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” can go home to the regime that invented the slogans.

What a wonderful opportunity for all those screaming and incoherent female pro-Hamas supporters to go home again to the birthplace of female liberty. I bet they must be lining up right now.

I imagine every gay, lesbian, and trans pro-Hamas individual is scouring the Internet, trying to find out where they can get their free ticket to the Iran. This great new offer from Shiraz University comes as a relief to my fellow conservatives who have been offering free tickets to Iran to these folks in recent weeks.

And now two other universities in Iran are offering similar opportunities to our woke youth.

Going to Iran shouldn’t be much of a culture shock, either. They will just have to trade the masks they have been wearing to hide from the police and their tactical gear for the full-length Islamic hijab. (Sorry, ladies: you can’t wear a face mask with the hijab in Iran, because the regime wants to track your movements).

We learned recently from the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal that George Soros’s Open Society Foundation has been funneling millions of dollars to pro-Palestinian groups in the United States, both directly and through the Tides Foundation of Teresa Heinz-Kerry.

Bill Maher Rips Biden Student Loan Forgiveness: ‘My Tax Dollars Are Supporting This Jew Hating?’ “Colleges constantly raise tuition, then the kids take out more loans, then the government comes by and pays those loans. Okay, so my tax dollars are supporting this Jew hating? I don’t think so.”Posted by Mike LaChance

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/05/bill-maher-rips-biden-student-loan-forgiveness-my-tax-dollars-are-supporting-this-jew-hating/

This weekend, Bill Maher tore into the Biden administration over Joe’s student loan debt ‘forgiveness’ plan, citing the antisemitic displays we have seen on campus for months as a reason to object. Bill also noted the fact that colleges keep raising tuition based on the fact that they know the government will keep supporting the loans.

Former Trump adviser Kelleyanne Conway was on the panel and she pointed out that this is nothing more than a political move to shore up votes.

You Heard It Here First: Biden Has Dumped ‘Bidenomics’

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/06/you-heard-it-here-first-biden-has-dumped-bidenomics/

On March 27, Axios ran a story with the headline: “Biden, Democrats (mostly) ditch ‘Bidenomics.’”

Axios reported that President Joe “Biden gradually had been ditching the term. Last June and July, he referred to ‘Bidenomics’ about 50 times. In December and January, he used it just six times.”

USA Today ran basically the same story on the same day — headlined: “President Biden scraps ‘Bidenomics’ after slogan falls flat” — crediting Axios.

Biden said ‘Bidenomics’ 15 times in his June 28 speech in Chicago that debuted his new slogan to the nation. He mentioned ‘Bidenomics’ another 77 times in speeches through October, including as many as six or seven times in single speeches.

Yet Biden touted ‘Bidenomics’ only four more times in both November and December, and he has said it only three times total this year.

The Daily Mail followed up with a story citing Axios and ran its own chart. Then, just this Thursday, a USA Today columnist hit Biden over the head for abandoning the term, citing the paper’s previous coverage.

Iran’s Dangerous New Terror Proxy: Sudan Iran’s Encirclement of Israel, Control of Red Sea, Almost Complete by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20619/iran-proxy-sudan

“What makes the future in this case darker is Sudan’s history of hosting extremists and jihadists from the far right and far left. During the previous regime, Sudan hosted Osama bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Carlos the Jackal. This warm embrace of violent extremists earned Sudan a spot on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.”— Areej Elhag, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 31, 2024.
The bottom line for America and Europe is that the strategy of engaging and appeasing Iran has failed miserably.
The U.S. and Europe must step up now to counter Iran’s efforts in the Middle East and Sudan.
We cannot allow new “proxies of terror” for Iran.

While the Biden administration is preoccupied trying to win re-election this November, as well as putting out a series of fires it helped start in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific, a new area of urgent concern, largely flying under the public’s radar, has been brewing: Iran’s increasing penetration of Sudan.

Pocketing Sudan would provide Iran with more oil, gold and rare minerals, as well as another port on Red Sea from which to continue blocking maritime commercial passage. Sudan would also provide Iran with proximity to Israel, and serve as an additional launching pad from which to swarm Israel with more lethal drone attacks – at least until its nuclear weapons program is complete.

Iran could also add Sudan to the list of the four other countries it already effectively controls in the region: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.

Sudan, with Iran’s backing, would then be well on its way to being another Hamas, al-Qaeda or Taliban, and spreading its inclinations to the rest of the African continent.

Areej Elhag recently wrote for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

“What makes the future in this case darker is Sudan’s history of hosting extremists and jihadists from the far right and far left. During the previous regime, Sudan hosted Osama bin Laden, leader of Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Carlos the Jackal. This warm embrace of violent extremists earned Sudan a spot on the list of state sponsors of terrorism.”

FOUR MIDDLE EAST COUNTRIES GAVE $10.3 BILLION TO U.S. COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES!

https://mailchi.mp/ce08f02dce35/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59968?e=0c8ccf8e98

The civil unrest playing out at America’s elite universities continues to headline the news. And OpenTheBooks is here to follow the money. 

Previously, our reporting broke down the massive taxpayer subsidy of America’s elite universities. This week, we continued to highlight it in national media.
 
We found that foreign countries also are providing immense subsidy of the U.S. university.

In fact, more than $44 billion in FOREIGN gifts have been disclosed under the Higher Education Reporting Act since 1986.

Here’s what Mark Tapscott, at PJ Media noted:

“If you aren’t already familiar with OpenTheBooks, you are missing one of the crown jewels of the transparency in government movement…

The facts are front and center, including the reality that the total amount in checks written by the U.S. Treasury and sent to these elite campuses exceeds the income the schools receive in tuition payments.”
Here are some media highlights from the week:  

Yesterday FOX News aired segments of my interview across daytime programming including FOX & Friends and Varney & Co. 

Economist Larry Kudlow at FOX Business showcased our oversight of the elite universities on the air and in his column.
 
My interview on The National Desk by Sinclair Broadcast, owners of nearly 200 ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX local stations across America, broke down all the numbers:

INTERVIEW: AMERICAN COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES MUST BE UNABASHEDLY “AMERICAN!”

CHAPTER 17: Cultural Terrorism Comes to America Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release June 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27763/chapter-17-cultural-terrorism-comes-to-america

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

The upward mobility provided by the capitalist system and meritocracy in the United States created a vibrant middle class. In a land of opportunity, working-class people were no longer reliable revolutionaries. Scott S. Powell, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and writer for The American Spectator, explains the shift in Marxist strategy with a bit of history about Vladimir Lenin. From Powell’s August 15, 2015, article, “The Quiet Revolution: How the New Left Took Over the Democratic Party”:[i]

The proletariat never did revolt successfully en masse in any advanced industrialized state. Instead, Marx’s political and economic revolution was first staged in the largely agrarian nation of Russia, carried out by Marxist revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. Lenin made major contributions to Marx’s theories, so much so that Marxism-Leninism became the dominant theoretical paradigm for advancing national liberation movements, communism, and socialism wherever in the world radical revolutionary movements arose.

Among Lenin’s contributions was the theory of the vanguard. Since it was apparent that the proletariat masses were unlikely to rise up, Lenin argued that it was necessary for a relatively small number of vanguard leaders—professional revolutionaries—to advance the revolutionary cause by working themselves into positions of influence. By taking over the commanding heights of labor unions, the press, the universities, and professional and religious organizations, a relatively small number of revolutionaries could multiply their influence and exercise political leverage over their unwitting constituents and society at large.

It was Lenin who introduced the concept of the “popular front” and coined the phrase “useful idiots” in describing the masses who could be manipulated into mob action of marches and protests for an ostensibly narrow cause of the popular front, which the communist vanguard was using as a means for a greater revolutionary political end.

The Marxists needed to identify a new cohort of rebels to collapse American society from within. They chose academia and anointed its graduating student population of useful idiots to be vanguard leaders for changing hearts and minds in America. What Bolshevik George Lukács was unable to impose in Catholic Hungary, cultural terrorism, has been wildly successful in America; it just needed a different strategy in order to succeed.

The 1969 Woodstock Festival was a watershed event for the counterculture movement in music, drugs, and sexual permissiveness. The sexual revolution was a social and cultural movement advocating sexual liberation and acceptance of public nudity, premarital sex, extramarital sex, alternative forms of sexuality, contraception, pornography, homosexuality, masturbation, and abortion. Significantly absent from any discussion of sexual liberation were love, loyalty, commitment, and respect.

The foundation for the sexual revolution that challenged and defied America’s traditional Judeo-Christian standards of sexual behavior in the 1960s and 1970s had its roots in Alfred Kinsey’s twin books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)[ii] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).[iii] Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Institute were supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and protected by the U.S. government. Kinsey’s fraudulent research was presented as scientific, factual, and normative. Its catastrophic consequences continue to reverberate in America, advancing Marxism’s intent to collapse from within America’s cultural norms and family infrastructure.

Never again? Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/never-again-3/

In an announcement on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi reminded the troops of their mission.

Referring to the siren during which the entire country stands in silence for two minutes to honor the “six million who were murdered in the ghettos and extermination camps, in the killing fields and the death marches,” he wrote: “For a moment, we will bow our heads and connect with the memory of our people who were persecuted and murdered simply because they were Jews. Then we will raise our heads, proudly carrying on their sacred legacy, and continue to take action to ensure that the national home that they longed for, but did not attain, will stand forever.”

The latter, he stressed, “is our duty, our mission, our promise.”

Given the current circumstances, crafting the otherwise standard annual message must have been cringe-inducing for Halevi. Under his watch, the military not only was caught off guard by the Oct. 7 massacre, but didn’t arrive on the scene of the carnage for at least eight hours.

By the end of that Black Sabbath, more than 1,200 corpses—sexually abused, shot, burned, beheaded and mutilated—were left strewn across southern Israel and another 250 were abducted to Gaza. The desperate cries for help from those who ended up losing their lives still echo, haunting the surviving witnesses and shaking the rest of the country’s confidence.  

While penning the announcement to “IDF servicemen, soldiers, commanders and civilian employees,” did Halevi’s thoughts stray to last year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day—the theme of which was the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—when he assured us that the IDF was “strong and will continue to maintain Israel’s security”? After all, less than six months later, thousands of Hamas terrorists stormed the Gaza border fence and subjected Israelis to atrocities that would have made the Nazis envious.

Faced with no choice but to mention the above, he stated, “These days, we are in a war where, at its onset, we failed in our mission and lost many—civilians, soldiers, civilian rapid-response-team members and security and rescue personnel. Entire lives were cut short in their prime in a war that was also thrust upon us by a wicked enemy who rose up to destroy us.”

The lost narrative of Israel’s history By Ruth King

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/05/the_lost_narrative_of_israel_s_history.html

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”― George Orwell

The lamentable success and proliferation of the pro-Hamas rallies, excluding the Muslim participants who are faith-driven, is the outcome of fake history perpetuated in academia and media.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 deeded the entire land mass of the Palestine Mandate to the Jews with the proviso that the rights of local Arabs would not be violated by the Jews who lived there since Biblical times.

In 1922, the infamous British White Paper bowing to Arab pressure ceded 76 percent — all the land east of the Jordan River — to the Hashemites with no historical claim to the land, which was named Trans-Jordan and subsequently the Palestinian state named Jordan, closed to all Jewish settlement. The remaining land west of the Jordan River was to become the Jewish state controlled by the duplicitous British, with ensuing White Papers that limited the immigration of Jews.

The British justified their efforts by the following statement: “England … does not want Palestine to become ‘as Jewish as England is English,’ but, rather, should become ‘a center in which Jewish people as a whole may take, on grounds of religion and race, an interest and a pride.’ 

The bitter irony is that Israel is more Jewish than England is England, now Muslems are well on the way to achieve majority status in that nation.

The resident Jews of Palestine reluctantly accepted the division in spite of murders and terrorist attacks and massacres in 1929 and in the 1936-1939 “Arab Revolt” punctuated by Jihadist, blood thirsty fulminations by all the Arab nations which coincided with increased harassment and oppression of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in those nations.

By 1939, another White Paper clamped shut the gates of Palestine, effectively trapping Europe’s desperate Jews and igniting a sustained and vigorous effort for Jewish independence, which culminated with Britain’s announcement of intent to leave Palestine and refer the issue to the United Nations in 1947.