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EDUCATION

The Nazi Skeletons in Wesleyan U.’s Closet by Rafael Medoff

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/380765/the-nazi-skeletons-in-wesleyan-u-s-closet/

 The president of Wesleyan University claimed, in a recent New York Times op-ed, that the Trump administration and the Republican Party are teeming with secret or aspiring Nazis. But how did the Wesleyan administration relate to the actual Nazis and Nazi supporters on its Connecticut campus in the 1930s?

    In February 1934, Wesleyan invited Dr. Friedrich Auhagen, a representative of Nazi Germany’s consulate in New York City, to address the student body. That was more a year after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. A year of the Nazi regime boycotting Jewish-owned businesses, of nationwide book-burnings, of Nazi takeovers of German universities, of mass firings of Jews from most professions, and of sporadic anti-Jewish violence.  Yet none of that deterred the Wesleyan administration from inviting a Nazi official to campus.

    In his remarks to the Wesleyan students, Auhagen railed against “excessive Jewish control” in Germany, claimed that reports of antisemitism were “widely exaggerated,” and declared that Jews who did not like living under Nazism should “go settle in certain regions of Russia.”

    Hitler had some fans on the Wesleyan campus. The most enthusiastic was Paul H. Curts, a longtime professor of German. He was so sympathetic to the Nazis that he was cheering for them even before they rose to power. In a May 1932 speech, eight months before Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Prof. Curts declared that supporters of the Nazi Party generally were “staid, sober Germans.”

    After Hitler and the Nazis became Germany’s rulers, Prof. Curts served as their lead apologist at Wesleyan. He made multiple trips to Germany in the 1930s, each time returning brimming with enthusiasm. After one such trip in 1934, Prof. Curts addressed the entire student body and told them Hitler was “the only man who could offer to Germany what it needed at present.” 

Multiplication, Biden-Style: School Bias Cases Doubled Trump moves to dismantle the Education Department’s civil rights arm, slashing investigations as critics warn it threatens protections for millions of U.S. students. By James Varney

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/16/multiplication-biden-style-school-bias-cases-doubled/

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

While limiting strings-attached grants and curbing federal regulation, President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education also take aim at a key tool bureaucrats use to oversee schools in all 50 states: civil rights investigations.

Probes handled by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against public schools, colleges, and universities roughly doubled during the Biden administration, topping 20,000 last year. Investigations by hundreds of OCR lawyers and staff members – and responses to them by untold numbers of school officials and administrators – touched on everything from allegations of sexual violence and disability accommodations to website compatibility.

Defenders of the office say it has been an invaluable protector of civil rights for America’s nearly 70 million students. They say eliminating or even downsizing the office, which has already begun, would kneecap thousands of ongoing investigations while abolishing a prime instrument of justice.

“This reckless action strips students of vital resources and tears down statutorily mandated functions that are essential to addressing racial and economic inequality in education,” the ACLU declared last month. Trump, it said, has put “millions of students’ education and civil rights at risk.”

Advocates for handicapped students, who until recent years accounted for half of all complaints, are concerned they might get the short shrift in the Trump administration and have gone to court to block cuts. “We have many members who file complaints, and it has left many of them in limbo, or distraught, thinking there will be no accountability,” said Selene A. Almazan, legal director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, plaintiffs in a suit filed March 14.

But backers of Trump’s effort to eliminate the Department of Education counter that the Office for Civil Rights is a symbol of how the federal government has expanded its reach into what they describe as chiefly local matters. They say its investigative arm has been designed to make it as easy as possible for the department to maximize its influence and oversight through investigations.

Ivory Tower Hypocrite: Wake Forest University Administrators coddle pro-Hamas demonstrators yet cancel IDF soldier’s speech. by Sara Dogan

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.

Christopher F. Rufo The Right Is Winning the Battle Over Higher Education President Trump has ensured that the civil-rights regime will no longer be a one-way lever to embed left-wing ideologies in elite institutions.

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.

Harvard’s ‘resistance’ to Trump isn’t about science or academic freedom The school would rather lose $9 billion in federal funding than offend the left and give up woke indoctrination policies that enable and encourage antisemitism. Jonathan Tobin

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.”

Harvard, Has $53B, Still Wants Billions in Fed Funding Americans are supposed to feel privileged to give Harvard their money. by Daniel Greenfield

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.”

Renu Mukherjee Why Did a Star Columbia Student Join an Anti-Semitic Mob? Yunseo Chung’s descent into pro-Hamas activism reveals a tragic outcome of higher education’s fixation with racial victimhood.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yunseo-chung-columbia-university-hamas-anti-semitic-protest

On March 27, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department had revoked the visas of at least 300 students for participating in violent anti-Israel protests. One of the first to face deportation was Mahmoud Khalil, a former master’s student at Columbia University. Given his background, Khalil quickly became the face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on non-citizen terror supporters. But last month, a new face emerged: Yunseo Chung, a junior at Columbia.

Like Khalil, Chung is a green-card holder—but the similarities end there. She immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea at age seven with her parents and a sibling. She was valedictorian of her high school class, holds a 3.99 GPA at Columbia, and is a member of both the university’s undergraduate law review and its literary magazine.

Why would a straight-A Korean immigrant who has lived in America for most of her life join a violent, pro-Hamas protest? One possible answer lies in a core tenet of modern progressivism: its rejection of the model-minority stereotype. Perhaps Chung—an otherwise exemplary student with no history of lawbreaking or violence prior to college—believed that protest activity would earn her validation from non-Asian peers at Columbia University.

Since at least the 2010s, the social order of highly selective universities has been strongly influenced by the principles of Critical Race Theory, the scholarly idea that racism is embedded in the social, political, and legal institutions of Western civilization. Chief among these is the perpetual victimhood of minority groups—“people of color,” women, the disabled, transgender individuals, and so on.

How Not to Deal with the Student Mob The line between free speech and violence is clear University leaders & public officials must uphold it; too few are trying Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/deal-student-mob-campus-protest/

Last week’s violent anti-Semitic protest at Stanford is yet another sign of a pernicious climate on many campuses. The immediate targets are Jews and Israel. The larger targets are many of the values we prize in the West.

At Stanford, students broke into the university president’s office using hammers and crowbars. They proceeded to barricade themselves inside, destroy the furnishings, and scrawl noxious graffiti there and on the building outside. Some estimates say they caused $700,000 in damages.

Twelve students were arrested by local police. The Santa Clara District attorney announced that the break-in had been carefully organized in advance, caused enormous damage and warranted criminal charges. But, he said, it did not warrant severe punishment.  “I don’t think this is a prison case,” he said.

The violent protests are Stanford are hardly the only ones on campus, and the spring protest season is just getting started. At Case Western University in Ohio, students caused over $400,000 in damage by smearing buildings with red paint. Expect more to come at universities where the violence goes unpunished and prosecutors are as weak-kneed as the one in Santa Clara.

Campus violence, destruction, harassment and intimidation are more than criminal. They are also direct attacks on the basic purpose of our educational institutions. They undermine our nation’s core value of free, non-violent speech and assembly, encoded in the First Amendment.

If university leaders and local law enforcement are unwilling to protect those rights, if they are unwilling to sanction those who violate them, then they are opening the door for others who will act to protect those values and those endangered students.

Northwestern Shows Universities How to Fight Jew-Hate An 88% drop in documented incidents of anti-Semitic discrimination. by Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/northwestern-shows-universities-how-to-fight-jew-hate/

Not all universities have been as lackadaisical or uncaring as Columbia and Harvard in fighting antisemitism on their campuses. Northwestern University President Michael Schill appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce for a hearing on antisemitism almost a year ago. This was the same committee that heard the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. Now, the university released a report in late March describing a decrease in antisemitic incidents.

More on this development, and how the Northwestern example deserves to be emulated, can be found here: “Northwestern touts 88% drop in reports of antisemitism,” by Duncan Agnew, Evanston Round Table, April 1, 2025:

Nearly a year after Northwestern University President Michael Schill appeared on Capitol Hill for a hearing on antisemitism, the university released a report Monday touting an 88% drop in documented incidents of antisemitic discrimination from November 2023 to November 2024.

NU, facing an active Trump administration investigation over alleged antisemitism on campus, said in the update that “like many universities across the nation, Northwestern was not prepared for the antisemitism that occurred last year.”

Among other things, since last summer, the university has revised its handbook and code of conduct, created a new Display and Solicitation Policy banning “unauthorized 3D installations including tents and structures” and updated the Demonstration Policy to limit how, when and where protests may be conducted.

In February, Northwestern also launched an antisemitism training module that is mandatory for all students and adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

Ivory Tower Hypocrite: University of Illinois-Chicago Hamas activists call for intifada while professor is suspended for law exam question. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-university-of-illinois-chicago/

During the weeks and months following Hamas’ horrific October 7th massacre of innocent Israeli Jews, the University of Illinois-Chicago, like many campuses across America, played host to pro-Hamas protests and riots that created a hostile climate for Jewish students on campus.

In March of 2024, campus demonstrators deliberately targeted the university’s Jewish population by holding a rally in front of the campus Chabad house and chanting genocidal slogans including “There is only one solution; Intifada, revolution” and “We don’t want no two states; we want all of [19]48.”

At another rally held the following month, pro-Hamas activists chanted “Resistance is justified”—an endorsement of terrorism—and held signs with the genocidal message “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call for the elimination of Israel and the slaughter of its Jewish population.

A third demonstration featured blatantly anti-Semitic signs accusing the Jews of blood libel and invoking one of their most sacred symbols to do it. “There is blood on your hands” read signs at the event with a Star of David replacing the “A” in “hands.”

Faculty and staff at UIC also promoted Jew hatred. Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) and the Arab American Cultural Center at UIC hosted an event titled “UIC Art and Love Fest for Palestine.”