RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Wake Forest University, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, waxes eloquently about the importance of freedom of expression in its policies and promotional materials.  But the prestigious university is guilty of a double standard when it comes to deciding who truly deserves free speech on campus.

In late April of 2024, a student group calling itself Free Palestine established an illegal 3-day encampment on Hearn Plaza on campus. Demonstrators chalked genocidal and Jew-hating messages on the sidewalk reading “From the river to the sea” (a call to destroy the totality of Israel as a Jewish homeland) and “F*** Israel.” The Amcha Institute, an anti-Semitism watchdog group, reports that “several university faculty and staff members volunteered to watch over the protesters in shifts” and that “one faculty member tried to prevent a student from pouring water out on the antisemitic chalk messages, while another confronted students for taking videos of the huddled group.”  When “One student said that they were bothered by the protesters’ presence on their campus…a faculty member replied that the student could go back to their room.”

Instead of immediately shutting down this illegal pro-Hamas rally, Wake Forest administrators instead negotiated with the agitators. “Throughout the evening, our shared goal was to keep everyone safe and avoid disruption of our academic mission and planned campus activities. It was a priority to seek a peaceful outcome. Administrators and the organizers of the demonstration remained in dialogue throughout the evening, night and early morning, and reached an agreement shortly after 9 a.m. that led to students agreeing to take down the tents in the encampment,” explained a statement from administrators that was emailed to the full university community.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-education-ivy-league-universities-funding-trump-civil-rights

Several years ago, the author Christopher Caldwell changed the conversation with his book The Age of Entitlement. The book argued that the civil-rights regime established in the 1960s marked a fundamental departure from America’s constitutional tradition. Though launched with the noble intention of stopping racial discrimination, Caldwell argued, the Civil Rights Act–and the bureaucracy it spawned–gradually consumed core American freedoms and became a vehicle for entrenching left-wing racialist ideology throughout American institutions.

In the decades that followed, the Right’s response was marked by ambivalence. Some libertarians called for repealing the Civil Rights Act, but—like many libertarian proposals—this was never a political possibility, given the Act’s broad public support. The establishment Right, meanwhile, largely suppressed its private misgivings. Republicans repeatedly voted to expand the civil-rights regime, further embedding dubious concepts like disparate-impact theory into law.

Now, all of this has changed. After mounting a successful fight against DEI, the political Right has come to accept that if there must be a civil-rights regime, it should be one of its own making. Rather than continue to defer to left-wing interpretations of civil-rights law, the Right can now advance a framework grounded in colorblind equality, not racialist ideology.

The first field of battle is higher education. The Trump administration has set its sights on the Ivy League universities, which have not only advanced the ideologies of left-wing racialism but made them administrative policy.

https://www.jns.org/harvards-resistance-to-trump-isnt-about-science-or-academic-freedom/?utm_campaign=

It’s nice to know that the school that is widely considered to be the most prestigious institution of higher education in the United States is willing to stand up for its principles. Unfortunately, the main principle for which Harvard University is standing up—and earning deafening applause from liberal elites in politics and the media—is the right to go on enabling and encouraging the hatred of Jews.

Of course, that’s not the way the political left is spinning the announcement that Harvard would defy the demands of the Trump administration to cease its tacit support of the surge of antisemitism since the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

For Trump’s “progressive” opponents who have acquired near-total control of higher education in the United States, the demands are unacceptable. They would rather lose federal funding, which is crucial to their survival, than end discrimination in admissions and hiring rooted in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that creates viewpoint uniformity that excludes conservatives and supporters of Israel. They also refuse to adopt disciplinary policies against those who advocate for Jewish genocide and harass Jewish students, or prevent the pro-Hamas mobs on their campuses from wearing masks while they commit their acts of intimidation and violence.

For the far left, their refusal to treat antisemites the way they would bigots who threatened African-Americans or Hispanics is a heroic act of “resistance.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvard-has-53b-still-wants-billions-in-fed-funding/

Harvard has an endowment of over $53 billion. Despite that it’s fighting Trump administration demands for reform in order to extract around $9 billion in federal funding.

The Trump administration had asked Harvard for such things as merit-based hiring, promotion and admission, empowering tenured faculty over activist groups, and viewpoint diversity. It also called for an end to DEI and antisemitism.

It warned that “Harvard must adopt a new policy on student groups or clubs that forbids the recognition and funding of, or provision of accommodations to, any student group or club that endorses or promotes criminal activity, illegal violence, or illegal harassment” and “permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student”.

Finally, Harvard “must also, to the satisfaction of the federal government, disclose the source and purpose of all foreign funds”.

Harvard predictably said “no”. President Alan Garber declared that “no government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

The trouble is that governments have been doing this for quite a while. And if Harvard doesn’t like it, it can stop taking federal money.

Instead, the Harvard president argues that “for three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations.”