RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/emerson-college-head-tries-to-appease-anti-israel-students/

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu on Tuesday defended the police against charges by student protesters at Emerson College that officers had engaged in extreme brutality while removing their anti-Israel tent encampment, which had commandeered a city street.

The mayor said a city review found no protesters had been hospitalized. They “wanted to get arrested,” she added.

She noted that the school had offered the protesters rooms to use 24 hours a day but the response of the student organizers was to “keep the tents up to get arrested.”

The mayor’s no-nonsense response contrasted sharply with that of Emerson College president Jay Bernhardt, who has assured the protesters he “could feel the pain.”

His approach has won him little love among the student population, judging from recent meetings.

Many students called on the president to resign at a town hall meeting held on April 29, which centered around events leading up to the April 25 arrest of 118 students by the Boston Police Department. Police acted after protesters at the “Popular University Encampment” at 2 Boylston Place Alley refused to vacate the public street.

Student calls for the president’s resignation echoed a Student Government Association general assembly meeting on April 26, when students unanimously voted no-confidence in Bernhardt, who is Jewish, demanding he resign.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-deal-with-campus-mayhem-caused-by-pro-hamas-mobs/

“This is the secret of propaganda:” the Nazis’ chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels explained. “Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.” He also emphasized that “Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.”

Goebbels would have been so proud of the pro-Hamas agitators immersed in anti-Semitic propaganda who have turned many campuses across the country into sites of pogroms against Jewish students who support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Left-wing faculty members’ indoctrination of their students have specified the targets of hate, which include the Jewish state of Israel and the Jews around the world who support Israel’s right to exist in its present form. For years, left-wing professors have been indoctrinating their students to believe that Western political and economic systems are oppressive, corrupt, colonialist, and hopelessly racist, which are deserving of destruction by whatever means necessary. The seeds of neo-Marxism that have been planted over time have sprouted into the demonstrations of anti-Semitic hate tinged with violence that we are witnessing today on the nation’s campuses.

The anti-Semitic mobs have inflicted collective punishment on entire college and university communities. The mobs have infringed on the rights and endangered the safety of students, faculty, and staff who do not share the mobs’ fanatical ideas and methods. All students, faculty, and staff should be able to go about their normal business, free of obstruction, harassment, and physical intimidation. But the pro-Hamas mobs have not let that happen. Moreover, the mobs’ disruptions have caused classes to be called off or moved online and graduations to be cancelled.

School administrators have taken different approaches to dealing with the resulting chaos on their campuses, which fall roughly into three categories. At one end of the spectrum are the more enlightened college and university administrations that have taken effective action to put a quick end to the mayhem. Take, for example, the University of Florida where the administration refused to coddle the mob of protesters.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-higher-educations-leadership-problem

Now that the tents have been cleared from Columbia University’s campus, now that the NYPD has liberated Hamilton Hall, now that arrests have been made and outside agitators named, it’s time to begin making sense of the Tentifada. Mysteries abound: Who paid for all that matching, high-end camping gear? How did the same violent playbook spread from one campus to the next overnight? And what must we do now that the young collegians have made it clear that there’s more mayhem coming?

Let’s hope that our more astute observers get answers to these questions. But we have a more pressing duty: that of observing how various men and women in positions of power and authority acted when the barbarians stormed the gates.

First up: Columbia president Minouche Shafik. If you knew nothing about Shafik, or Columbia, or modern universities, and wanted to ascertain how the president might meet the troubling moment, you wouldn’t have needed to look past one number: $13.64 billion. That’s the value of Columbia’s endowment as of last June; it’s also, more or less, the Gross Domestic Product of Moldova, Rwanda, and a host of other smallish nations. With so much money at stake, it’s likely that anyone in Shafik’s position would have reacted as she did, with a symphony of bluster, obfuscations, and half-truths designed to make sure that business proceeds as usual.

Testifying before Congress in April, for example, Shafik delivered sweeping, emotive statements, such as saying that “for me, personally, any discrimination against people for their Jewish faith is anti-Semitism.” But when asked whether she intended to discipline Professor Joseph Massad, who celebrated the massacre of more than a thousand Israelis on October 7 as “awesome,” Shafik merely said that the errant teacher was “spoken to.” When pressed further about Massad’s employment status, the president replied that she just wasn’t sure.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/05/useful_idiots_for_hamas.html

Current campus disturbances outwardly resemble past protests. It would be as if they all shared a common script—righteous indignation, yelling and screaming slogans, lists of non-negotiable demands, going limp when police try to remove them, piles of trash, and all the rest.  Don’t be fooled.  Today’s protestors are profoundly different despite the superficial resemblances, and these differences make them particularly dangerous.

Current disturbances lack this rational: self-interested elements and many participants are clueless when asked to explain their action.  In a nutshell, while anti-war protestors wanted to end the draft and avoid Vietnam, and blacks demanded more educational resources, today’s protestors want to eradicate a country of nine million people possessing the most powerful, nuclear-equipped army in the Middle East. Moreover, this mission is to be accomplished by shouting “Death to America” and disrupting classes.  Brilliant, and one can only ask, “Are these the smartest of the smart?”  Ironically, perhaps the only rational participants in these disturbances are the non-student professional agitators bedecked in their balaclavas whose mission is just to create violent chaos.  They at least have a chance of succeeding.

Stupidity abounds.  Why, for example, are so many of these pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrators women who drape themselves in Muslim style headscarves, embracing a religion so antithetical to feminism? They surely know how women are treated in Muslim-dominated nations.  Are these female demonstrators demanding an intifada so they can now obey their husbands unconditionally?

Similarly, what if protesting students holding a “Queers for Palestine” sign or wearing a sweatshirt proclaiming “Fags for Palestine” were magically transported to Iran, a theocracy that executes homosexuals?  Are those American blacks rallying for Islam aware that African Muslims are slaughtering blacks in West Darfur?  Or that Arabs once dominated the slave trade?  Where on the planet do Muslims help blacks?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/will-scotus-revisit-discriminatory-admissions-policies

n February, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board, a case that concerned a change in admissions policy at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Alexandria, Virginia. After the new policy took effect, the share of Asian students admitted to TJ, one of the nation’s top public high schools, dropped by nearly 20 percentage points from the previous year. The share of white, black, and Hispanic students, by contrast, increased. As it turns out, this had been the goal of education officials in Fairfax County all along. At an October 2020 meeting, TJ’s own principal revealed that she wanted a “student body that more closely aligns with the representation in Fairfax County Public Schools.”

Justice Samuel Alito described the majority’s refusal to hear the case as “hard to understand.” In 2007’s Parents Involved v. Seattle School District, the Supreme Court held that a school district’s interest in racial balancing could not justify the district’s use of race in selecting students for admission to public high schools. In 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the court struck down the use of racial preferences in college admissions. Neither decision, however, addressed admissions policies that—like TJ’s—are race-neutral on their face but race-conscious in aim and effect. Thus, “TJ offers a roadmap,” Alito warned, “for other selective schools to skirt the Equal Protection Clause.”

The Supreme Court has a second chance to remind education officials that “eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it,” as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Students for Fair Admissions. Last month, the Boston Parent Coalition for Academic Excellence—a group of parents and students who support merit-based admissions and improving K–6 education—asked the justices to examine the 2021–22 admissions policy for Boston’s three selective public high schools. This policy, while facially race-neutral, diminished the share of white students (from 33 percent to 24 percent) and Asian students (from 21 percent to 16 percent) at Boston Latin School (BLS), Boston Latin Academy (BLA), and John O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science (O’Bryant). As in Fairfax County, the Boston School Committee adopted the new admissions policy because it believed Asians (and whites) were “overrepresented.”

https://www.jns.org/protesters-at-penn-seek-clash-police-refuse-to-clear-encampment/

As tensions escalate at a Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the University of Pennsylvania, administrators are taking a dialogue and de-escalation approach, possibly because they have no choice.

U. Penn asked the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) to dismantle the encampment, but the police refused, the student-run Daily Pennsylvanian claimed on May 2.

Police asked that the university first provide proof that the encampment “presents an imminent danger,” reported the paper, citing a source familiar with the matter.

If accurate (and the Philadelphia police refused to confirm or deny the report), it suggests the PPD is creating a new standard for enforcing the law. As the university points out, “The encampment itself violates the university’s facilities policies.”

In response to JNS requests for clarification, the police said, “We do not publicly discuss specific planning or engagement strategies related to ongoing situations. Our response will be based on the specific circumstances of each situation.”

The office of the interim university president was also vague, telling JNS, “We have reached out to the City of Philadelphia to ensure we have the necessary resources to keep our community safe. The Mayor’s Office has asked for more information, and we are providing it.”

The protesters may have sympathy among senior public officials. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a George Soros-funded DA sharply criticized for his soft-on-crime policies, visited the protesters three times, saying the purpose of his third visit on May 2 was “to find out what the truth is.”

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.