RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s note: The University of California-Berkeley is the latest school to be named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” It joins the campuses of Brooklyn College (CUNY), Tufts University, Brandeis University, UCLA, and Vassar College on the list. These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech exposing the truth about Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States.

The Berkeley administration has shown great hostility to speech critical of Hamas and SJP. When the Freedom Center previously placed posters on the Berkeley campus exposing the links between Hamas and SJP, Berkeley Associate Chancellor Nils Gilman labeled them “a tactic of harassment and intimidation.” Last night, the Freedom Center again placed posters critical of Hamas and SJP on the Berkeley campus. These posters disrupt the anti-Israel narrative that dominates on campus and serve as a challenge to the Berkeley administration to uphold its constitutional obligation to honor the First Amendment on campus.

University of California-Berkeley: Nils Gilman, Associate Chancellor

The University of California-Berkeley has a well-deserved reputation for stigmatizing ideas which don’t fit the extreme left-wing, anti-Israel campus culture. Berkeley Associate Chancellor Nils Gilman has epitomized this double-standard by failing to condemn outright calls for terrorism and genocide against the Jews from campus anti-Israel groups while denouncing posters putting forth factual information about Students for Justice in Palestine and its links to Hamas.

In a letter sent to the entire campus community in April 2016, Gilman denounced anti-SJP posters hung on campus by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as “a tactic of harassment and intimidation.” He claimed that UC Berkeley “remains committed to combating all forms of bias and discrimination” and asked the campus community to “use this opportunity to reinforce our values as a campus, and to report any further incidents”—in other words, urging Berkeley’s students and faculty to report any speech that challenges the leftist thought control enforced at Berkeley.

When the Freedom Center again hung posters exposing the truth about SJP at Berkeley in October of 2016, Gilman issued another letter stating that the language in the posters “violates our Principles of Community” and ordered them to be taken down.

The UC-Berkeley Principles of Community which he references state, in part, “We affirm the dignity of all individuals and strive to uphold a just community in which discrimination and hate are not tolerated” and “We are committed to ensuring freedom of expression and dialogue that elicits the full spectrum of views held by our varied communities.”

But by failing to uphold free speech and intellectual diversity, Gilman’s comments in his letters to the Berkeley community violate these Principles. They also degrade the spirit of open discourse and the exploration of all sides of crucial issues which lie at the heart of the mission of the modern liberal arts university.

Last Tuesday, eight Yale graduate students began an indefinite hunger strike on Beinecke Plaza, just a stone’s throw away from the university’s administrative offices. The graduate students’ union, Local 33, which organized this “protest fast,” said in a statement that they would not leave until Yale initiates contract negotiations with the union.

Or until they start to feel light-headed.

According to the New Haven Independent, “if not eating endangers a student’s health, that individual will sub out and another union member will assume their place in renouncing meals.” And should low blood sugar cloud the strikers’ judgment, a team of medical professionals is standing by to monitor the fast’s progress. Such safeguards were of little comfort to Robin Canavan, who compared the physical toll of the strike to that ghastly feeling of “exhaustion after pulling an all-nighter.” An all-nighter without any coffee.

But even this crippling fatigue won’t deter Local 33 chairman Aaron Greenberg, a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s political-science department and a self-styled civil-rights activist. In his recent op-ed in the New Haven Independent, Greenberg invoked the words of Martin Luther King to condemn Yale’s abhorrent treatment of its graduate students:

King explained that his campaign sought “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.” This is what we did yesterday in Local 33 when we began our fast.

He goes on:

So let’s not have any mistakes about what Yale means when they say they “respect the process” of the law. . . . It’s the dynamic Dr. King described when he wrote, “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”

Yale should up its admissions standards. Greenberg’s civil-rights analogy displays an astonishing level of historical amnesia, which trivializes the struggles of King and other black leaders. But more than that, it reflects a new and worrying trend: the corporatization of higher education.

To characterize Yale’s unwillingness to begin contract negotiations as an assault on human dignity is to reduce the relationship of students and administrators to that of employers and employees. On this view, Yale’s obligations to its graduate students are just like a company’s obligations to its workers. In forestalling collective bargaining and, by extension, in opposing Local 33, the administration functions as an oppressive corporate entity, more than willing to sacrifice the welfare of its employees to maximize profit. Indeed, the concept of graduate unionization makes sense only when it is presented as a response to precisely this sort of dynamic — the proletariat against the plutocrat.

Greenberg’s views thus rest on a grave category error, in that they apply the framework of labor relations to what is fundamentally not a labor-relations issue. When Bernie Sanders said that American workers were burnt out, I somehow doubt that Yale graduate students were the people he had in mind.

When Bernie Sanders said that American workers were burnt out, I somehow doubt that Yale graduate students were the people he had in mind.

When Anne Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, or Charles Murray is blocked from a speaking engagement at a liberal university due to a riot, the incident makes headlines.

But these protests aren’t the only cases of intimidation being used to silence non-Leftist speech on campus, however. Not by a long shot. Steven Glick, editor-in-chief of the student newspaper Claremont Independent, shares his experiences:

I began writing for the Claremont Independent — a student-run conservative paper at the Claremont Colleges — and became a vocal opponent of political correctness.

My classmates — as well as my former employer on campus — grew upset with my coverage of the over-the-top PC-policing and began to think up ways to silence me. I was frequently reported to the deans, and a petition even circulated asking the administration to expel me and my staff.

Part of what makes this culture so troubling is the number of double standards it engenders. “Marginalized” students perversely pursue “equality” by pulling groups perceived as privileged down. “Privileged” students are chastised for committing “microaggressions” against their marginalized peers, while marginalized students are free to commit blatant acts of racial or gender bias against those they deem privileged.

…

That’s true both outside and inside the classroom. The faculty at Pomona is incredibly unbalanced ideologically. Unsurprisingly, the curriculums are severely biased with dissenting views unwelcome. The number of class offerings shrinks dramatically for anyone unwilling to fully toe the progressive line. Several of my friends and I decide which classes to take based not on the course content or reading material, but instead based solely on which professors seem least likely to let political or racial biases affect classroom discussion and grading.

Two weeks ago, I tried to produce a video in which my peers would explain their opposition to Heather Mac Donald and describe the reasons they did not believe she should be allowed to speak on campus.

I stayed at the protest for nearly an hour, talking to as many students as I could. But students involved in the protest refused to answer any of my questions. Instead, they blocked my camera, pushed me and formed a wall around me to restrict my movement.

That is only a small sampling of Glick’s experiences, but it’s a glimpse into the fascist opposition to vocal right-leaning students on American college campuses.

Despite claims of “tolerance,” of wanting to have a “conversation” about race, sexuality, income inequality, or any number of issues, their behavior shows they want the precise opposite.

For most Americans, we can step away from that. We can spend time with like-minded friends, or just step away from politics completely for a time.

But for students like Glick looking to develop skills required for a journalism career, there is no escape. The mistreatment is a driving force in their lives, something they have to plan everything around in order to get a fair shake from their college experience. CONTINUE AT SITE