RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-big-university-fail

Forget Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, now in theaters: if you want to watch an epic drama of vanity and failed leadership that ends in catastrophe, just tune in to the hearing held this week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

Summoned to account for the surging anti-Semitism on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania delivered a masterclass in obfuscation. When New York representative Elise Stefanik asked them whether calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violated the codes of conduct of their respective institutions, for example, all three presidents responded by saying that—well, it’s complicated.

“It is a context-dependent decision,” Penn’s Liz Magill answered, driving Stefanik—and anyone else watching with half a heart and a brain—to wonder just what was so difficult or context-dependent about cheering for the murder of every Jewish man, woman, and child.

The hearing made headlines, and rightly so. But it would be a mistake to focus on the trio’s failure to sound remotely empathic when discussing the safety and wellbeing of their Jewish students. The problem with Harvard, Penn, MIT, and others isn’t merely that these previously august institutions condone, or at the very least tolerate, anti-Semitism. It goes much deeper, and you could sum it up in three letters: DEI—or diversity, equity, and inclusion, the ongoing effort to regulate a host of policies pertaining to race, sexual orientation, and other identity markers.

Consider Harvard. Our nation’s most lauded university is currently home to 7,240 undergraduate students and 7,024 administrators, or nearly one administrator for each young adult. Some of these officials, it’s possible, are doing important work. But if you’re wondering what the rest are up to, you needn’t look much further than the Crimson, the university’s long-running student newspaper. Recently, the Crimson reported on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, created on the recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. The Visual Culture and Signage task force’s 24 members, including nine administrators, toiled for months and interviewed more than 500 people before delivering a 26-page report that included recommendations like one urging Harvard to “clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage.” This farce ended the only way it could have—with the minting of a new administrative post, the FAS campus curator, and a new committee, the FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage, to help facilitate the curator’s all-important work.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/harvard-english-department-offers-a-course-on-taylor-swift/

Harvard’s English Department has just announced a new course, to be taught by Professor Stephanie Burt — né Stephen Burt — on the life and work and miracles of Taylor Swift, a pop country singer well known for her garish and skimpy costumes, her semi-obscene pelvic thrusts this way and that way, and her very public romance (it has already lasted two whole months) with tight end Travis Kelce, complete with air kisses thrown between them at his football games and her concerts, to the delight of tens of thousands present for these premeditated displays of true-blue love. Already, hundreds of Harvard students have signed up, hoping to be selected to take this course. It may be the most oversubscribed course in the history of Harvard’s English Department.

The English Department — or rather, Professor Stephanie L. Burt, who created the course and will be teaching it — describe the course here.

In 2009, you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me” on the radio, in grocery stores, and on TV. Harvard English professor Stephanie L. Burt ’94 still remembers the first time she heard it, describing it as so much “better” and “more compelling” than all the other pop songs that were playing at the time.

Fourteen years later, and Burt is still a diehard Swiftie. Her interest in Swift has followed her to the classroom. Next semester, Harvard’s English Department will debut the course “Taylor Swift and Her World,” taught by Burt. In this class, students will earn college credit for their deep dives into Swift’s lyrics, music, and influence, dissecting her catalog and reading a host of authors Burt finds relevant to understanding Swift’s artistry.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20195/hamas-students-for-justice-in-palestine

Many pro-Hamas demonstrations that have been taking place on US campuses since Hamas launched its war on Israel on October 7, when more than 3,000 Hamas terrorists invaded and raped, pillaged, murdered and kidnapped their way through the small communities of southern Israel, have reportedly been led by a radical organization known as National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP).

According to a 2018 monograph… NSJP was founded in 2010 by leaders of American Muslims for Palestine and the US Palestinian Community Network, two organizations linked to US-designated terror organizations.

The letter [to nearly 200 university presidents] cites the NSJP toolkit document: “The toolkit refers to the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel as ‘the resistance.’ This was followed by statements at campus events where students proudly declared ‘We are Hamas,’ and ‘We echo Hamas.'”

Material support for a terrorist organization is a serious matter, too dangerous to leave for university presidents to solve. They frequently appear more concerned about placating the radical elements on their campuses.

Many of these academic institutions receive federal funding. However, Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance.” Title IV also covers “violations based on religion.”

If a university allows material support for a terrorist organization, or discrimination against Jews, its federal financial assistance should be cancelled at once.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dei-drives-campus-antisemitism-harvard-ivy-ackman-israel-bds-b19ebd12?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Tuesday’s House hearing on campus antisemitism ratcheted up the pressure on American universities: counter the anti-Israel vitriol that exploded in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack or risk losing philanthropic and government support. The leading approach is sure to fail: doubling down on the ideologies and practices that led to the pro-Hamas fever in the first place.

Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager leading a Harvard donor revolt, told CNBC on Nov. 6 that he hadn’t previously read Harvard’s DEI statement. Though he had assumed DEI was “for all marginalized groups,” once he read the statement, he realized that “the DEI program at Harvard is limited to specific groups and exploits others.” Instead, Mr. Ackman suggested, DEI should cover all minorities, including Jews and Asians.

Jon Huntsman Jr. halted his contributions to the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 15 to protest its leaders’ silence in the face of “hate,” which higher ed was “built to obviate.” An open letter to Penn President Liz Magill initiated by alumnus Marc Rowan called for mandatory antisemitism awareness training across the university. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has demanded that Penn add modules on antisemitism to the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion trainings.

College leaders are happy to oblige. As Ms. Magill told lawmakers Tuesday, Penn has created an Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism and a University Task Force on Antisemitism. Since antisemitism is “interconnected” to “other forms of hate,” Ms. Magill explained in a Nov. 1 message, Penn is also rolling out a presidential commission on Islamophobia. The university must do better to “reject hate in all its forms,” she said on Nov. 1.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-next-battle-over-racial-preferences

Near the end of July, New York State assemblywoman and Brooklyn Democratic Party chair Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn took to the Daily News op-ed page to condemn the city’s eight specialized high schools, where a student’s score on a single standardized test determines who gets in—and the student bodies are disproportionately Asian. “New York City’s public specialized high schools are coveted as an equalizing springboard to success,” Bichotte Hermelyn wrote, “but in reality, they are overwhelmingly segregated, thanks to the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) being the sole admission factor.”

Of the more than 22,000 New York City students who took the SHSAT for the 2022–23 academic year, 31 percent were Asian American, 25.8 percent were Latino, 20.7 percent were black, and 17.1 percent were white. Yet just 3.2 percent of black test-takers and 5.7 percent of Latino test-takers received offers to attend the schools, compared with 52.5 percent of Asian American test-takers and 27.8 percent of white test-takers.

The racial imbalance among enrolled students is most pronounced at the three oldest and most elite of the schools—Stuyvesant High School (Stuyvesant), Bronx High School of Science (Bronx Science), and Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn Tech). For the 2021–22 academic year, Asian Americans accounted for 72 percent of Stuyvesant’s student body, 63 percent of Bronx Science’s, and 60 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s. Results from previous years tell a similar story. “I propose getting rid of the current test,” Bichotte Hermelyn wrote. “It’s time to rewrite the laws in New York City and change the paradigm to end segregation in high schools.”

The assemblywoman said nothing explicitly about Asian Americans, but many within Gotham’s Asian American community viewed her proposal as tacitly anti-Asian. One day after the Daily News op-ed, the assemblywoman’s photo, along with her comments about the selective schools, appeared on the front page of several local Chinese newspapers. “AM Bichotte resurrects anti Asian racism by using the end of AA as her excuse to attack admissions to NYC Specialized High Schools,” tweeted Yiatin Chu, founder of the New York political club Asian Wave Alliance. And several elected officials released statements backing the specialized high schools, the SHSAT, and their Asian constituents, who consider a child’s admission to one of the schools as a ticket to advancement.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/a_plague_of_college_student_dishonesty.html

This is not a good time for American higher education, but as bad as this may seem, matters are even worse.  The students themselves are part of the problem when they seek admission to top schools with tactics that are at best questionable and at worst dishonest.

Dishonesty is rampant.  Students will even misrepresent their race or ethnicity.  This is hardly a surprise in today’s academic world that prizes diversity, and admissions officers willingly lower standards to achieve it.  According to one study, some 34% of white students admitted lying about their ethnic identify for purposes of admission or financial aid, with “Native American” being the most popular subterfuge and 13% falsely claiming to be Latino.  Ten percent of these whites checked the African-American ancestry box.  The deceit generally worked: 77% of those lying were admitted.  

Deceit is further encouraged by “college admission counselors” to help youngsters whose families can afford to guide Junior into a school beyond his true academic abilities.  This industry includes independent tutors charging by the hour and firms belonging to the Independent Educational Consultants Association that expertly handle tasks like choosing the best high school courses, providing specialized summer programs, and deciding where to apply, plus tips to handle college interviews and obtaining outstanding letters of recommendation among multiple other services.  

Counselors will manage all the details — even rewrites of your college application essay.  The Varsity Blues scandal that resulted in criminal penalties exposed oft-hidden tactics such as bribes and hiring others to take your exams, but other exposed tactics, notably generous donations to the school, are perfectly legal.  Top-notch consultants can be expensive — as much as $15,260.

The current heightened competition for places at elite schools has, as expected, encouraged innovation.  The online Scholar Launch offers options that start at $3,500 to connect high school students with specialists who will help them write and then publish “a scholarly paper.”  This is not outright fraud, since the students paper will appear in a journal called Scholarly Review that boasts of its thorough review process conducted by “highly accomplished professors and academics,” with the final paper being “published” as a “preprint.”  Scholar Launch is only one of 20 such for-fee sites that help high-schoolers embellish their résumés.

https://thehill.com/opinion/4337687-justifying-hamass-barbarism-on-the-sly-at-georgetown-law/

On Halloween night, a few dozen Georgetown law students gathered stealthily to listen in rapt silence to a live-streamed defense of Hamas’s Oct. 7 mass slaughter of Jews.

The speaker, a fashionably scruffy, dark-haired 25-year-old named Mohammed El-Kurd, wore a tight black T and a leather jacket. He celebrated Hamas as a “liberation movement” and called its Oct. 7 orgy of rape, murder and torture a “resistance tactic.”

Outrage over Oct. 7, he said, was a “discursive crisis” created by “Zionist propaganda” to “disrupt” opposition to Zionist colonization of Palestine.

Hamas’s hostage-taking had good “political reasons,” he said. “Contrary to the western popular imagination,” he added, the hostages are “treated relatively well” — “giv[en] nice dresses and food.” Hostages have said so themselves, in Hamas-issued videos, he told his audience, but Western media aren’t reporting it.

Two years ago, Time Magazine named El-Kurd “one of the world’s 100 most influential people.” His Georgetown Law sponsor, “Students for Justice in Palestine” (which calls Israel a “settler colony”), billed him as a “journalist,” but he leaned in to more direct action. Condemning CNN and The New York Times for “aiding and abetting…genocide,” he urged students to “think of ways that we can tangibly destroy these organizations.” 

“We are at war,” he said, “and we have a duty to engage and participate in that war.”

I had learned about El-Kurd from his appearance at Georgetown Law a year and a half earlier. It set off a firestorm. He had previously written that “Zionists” are ”fascists” and “terrorists,” “harvest organs” from Palestinian “martyrs,” and have “an unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood.” Our dean, William Treanor, had allowed his appearance. Dozens of my colleagues joined in a statement calling out the dean for failing to condemn “the vilest of antisemitic hate.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/higher-ed-has-become-a-threat-to-america-antisemitism-dei-college-f52bb0b5?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.

Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.

Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”

Never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence. Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.

And there are other ways. Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage. Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.