RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some years ago, I conceived a business idea which I hereby make available free and for nothing to any enterprising soul who wishes to do a bit of good for the community. You know how there are services that store “cord blood” of newborns which, being rich in stem cells, could be used later in life to treat various diseases? My idea is somewhat similar. Here’s how it would work. Whenever an aspiring academic bureaucrat is appointed to the presidency of a college or university, this service would undertake, for a small recurring fee, to receive and safely store his testicles in a secure undisclosed location for the duration of his tenure. Upon proper certification indicating that an individual was no longer overseeing an educational institution, the testicles would be returned, intact, and fully functional. Studies have shown that disuse is injurious to this delicate organ, and since vanishingly few college presidents acknowledge their possession of what the vernacular denominates cojones, this innovative prophylactic approach to healthy living would benefit not only many individuals but also, by reducing the number of future claims on scarce resources, the larger health care network. Other obligations make it impossible for me to pursue this obvious money-maker, but I look forward to seeing it instituted very soon. If a pilot project is deemed advisable, I venture to suggest that a good start might be Yale University, whose ambulatory blancmange, Peter Salovey, is the proud winner of the 2015 Sheldon Award for Worst College President. Boola-boola.

Thus endeth my entrepreneurial spiel. But I am not quite done with awards. For Marvin Krislov, the president of Oberlin College (tuition, room, and board this year: $64,266), deserves a real award for providing a partial counter-example in extremis to my general proposition concerning the eunuch-like nature of the Confraternity of College and University Presidents. The example is only partial because Oberlin , under his watch, has distinguished itself as a poster-child for the weaponized PC-madness that has gripped college campuses with the ferocity of a medieval plague. Back in December, there was a flurry of well-deserved ridicule directed at Oberlin for the 14-page list of “demands” issued by members of the Black Student Union. The document is similar to, but possibly even more insane than, the lists propagated by black students at Yale, Amherst, the University of Missouri, Princeton, and other institutions. The gastronomic elements of the protests — the demand, for example, that fried chicken be made a permanent part of the dining hall menu — elicited the greatest hilarity. But the document was minatory as well as mad. Here’s a bit from the opening:

Some Jews did find refuge in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic, when the dictator Trujillo offered rescue to 100,000 Jews…at the Evian conference in 1938. He was alone among 32 nations that huffed and puffed but limited their offer to only handfuls of desperate Jews. Alas, only three thousand Jews made their way to Sosua in the north of the country, and about 1,000 remained to farm there. Agricultural experts from Palestine came to help them learn farming techniques. In 1985 I attended services in the synagogue with the handful of Jewish immigrants and their children who remained there. Dominicans are very proud of their effort and their early recognition of Israel. They have issued many stamps with portraits of Ben Gurion and the Israeli flags…rsk
With immigration matters of all kinds in the news, International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27 brings to mind the plight of Jewish refugees during World War II, when the world offered too little help. America’s record on this subject is often considered marred by the Roosevelt administration’s indifference, if not outright hostility, to the refugees, but some members of the American government stand out for efforts that could have put them in the company of Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and others who saved many innocent lives.

The honor-roll-that-might-have-been includes then-Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, whose wartime humanitarian efforts are fairly well known, and—less familiarly— Lawrence W. Cramer, the Columbia-educated academic who served as governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. The members of the archipelago’s legislature also deserve mention.

On Nov. 18, 1938, nine days after the attacks on Jews throughout Germany in what became known as Kristallnacht, Cramer proclaimed the bucolic island chain a refuge for those fleeing Hitler. The territory’s legislature in St. Thomas unanimously declared that refugee peoples “shall find surcease from misfortune in the Virgin Islands of the United States.”

The idea had originated in the late 1930s with Interior Secretary Ickes as a way to circumvent the notoriously anti-Semitic State Department’s opposition to accepting the refugees. Ickes resolved to provide a haven in the territories under his jurisdiction. The U.S. Virgin Islands—home to 25,000 people but covering more than 130 square miles—could easily accommodate tens of thousands of refugees.