RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbia-is-beyond-reform

Last week, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, was called to testify before Congress and explain how Alexander Hamilton’s alma mater had become a hotbed of anti-Semitic vitriol. She delivered the Ivy League equivalent of the Bart Simpson defense: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove a thing. The smart set praised Shafik for her evasiveness—the presidents of Harvard and Penn were far less astute—and considered the case against Columbia closed.

The kids had other ideas.

No sooner had Shafik left Washington than hundreds of students—about 800, by the latest count, or one-fifth of the undergraduate student body—put up dozens of shiny new camping tents and renamed the Morningside Heights campus the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The American flag up the tentpole outside of what once was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office was taken down, replaced with the green flag of Hamas. Students with loudspeakers chanted slogans like “There’s no God but Allah, and Allah loves martyrs.” An Israeli-Arab who stopped by to explain, in Arabic, why cheering on murderous terrorists was a bad idea was punched in the face and left with his mouth dripping blood. Jewish students were told to “go back to Europe“ or were greeted by a kaffiyeh-clad classmate holding a sign saying “al-Qassam’s next targets,” a reference to Hamas’s military wing. Things eventually deteriorated so badly that the university had to cancel in-person classes. As of this writing, the situation is still unfolding, not only in Columbia but also at Yale, where a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye; in Michigan, where students are handing out pamphlets advocating “death to America”; and elsewhere.

Two urgent questions, both obvious, suggest themselves. The first: How did we get here? The second: What do we do now?

Answering the first question fully would require a comprehensive analysis, but for brevity’s sake, a simple reminder is in order: What we’re seeing on college campuses these days isn’t an aberration, some strange phenomenon that emerged, like a monster from the deep, with little or no warning. It’s the result of decades of deliberate planning by a complex network of administrators, lawmakers, NGOs, and media outlets, eager to convert our universities from seats of learning and inquiry to beachheads in the war for absolute political power.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/jew-hating-asian-american-studies-program-exposed-at-northwestern-university/

The Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern University has repeatedly used university resources and official communications channels to promote Jew hatred and condone Hamas’s actions against Israel and its Jewish citizens.

Roughly a week after the barbaric October 7th Hamas massacre of over 1200 Israeli civilians, the Asian American Studies Program (AASP) published a statement on the official department website and reproduced it on the official department Instagram page. Rather than condemning Hamas’s brutality and the innocent loss of Jewish lives in Israel, AASP instead decried “Islamophobia” on campus and chastised the Northwestern University administration for their “silence at the loss of life in Palestine.”

The statement blatantly whitewashed the atrocious actions of Hamas, claiming that “On October 7, 2023, Hamas, the political group that has controlled Gaza since 2006, attacked Israel. Israel subsequently declared war, marking the latest in a long line of armed struggles between the two nations since their formation in 1947-48.”  No mention was made of the sheer brutality of Hamas’s actions—raping women, slaughtering children, mutilating civilians both before and after death. In fact, AASP mocked reports that Hamas beheaded babies as “baseless claims [that] are meant to incite hate against Palestine and equate supporting Palestinian civilians with antisemitism.”

Showing almost no concern for the Israeli victims of October 7th, and the citizens of Israel threatened by Hamas’s intended genocide, AASP instead chose to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state, referring to Gaza as the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” and blaming the “civilian death toll” in Gaza solely on Israel—rather than on Hamas who started the war by attacking civilians and taking hostages and who then used Palestinian civilians as human shields.

The Asian American Studies Program also critiqued the “visible Islamophobia expressed in pro-Israel posters on NU’s campus falsely claiming that ‘Hamas is ISIS.’”  Notably, the Program did not explain why they felt that comparison to be inaccurate or Islamophobic. Both organizations are Islamist terrorist groups known for their brutal treatment of women and ethnic minorities. The comparison seems apt.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/wokester_correctness_lands_usc_in_a_pickle_over_its_pro_hamas

“Of all the candidates they had for valedictorian, they had to pick a pro-Hamas fanatic?”

With grade inflation, the University of Southern California had more than 100 applicants to choose from in its quest to find a valedictorian for its coming graduation ceremony in May.

They picked a pro-Hamas militant in a hijab, likely intending to show off their DEI cred. Not surprisingly, they drew protests.

How’d you like to be a Jewish parent of a young graduate at that huge ceremony attended by 65,000, and have to listen to pro-Hamas hectoring along with a heaping helping of antisemitism?

Of course it drew protests. They should have predicted it would draw protests.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-failed-experiment-with-ending-standardized-testing/

When Columbia University announced in March of 2023 that it would become the latest Ivy League school to no longer require applicants to submit SAT/ACT scores for admission, the editors of National Review criticized a move that not only seemed designed explicitly to skirt the Supreme Court’s anticipated decisions banning racial discrimination in college admissions, but threatened the academic quality of the institution as well.

We have been emphatically confirmed in our position by the subsequent course of events. Harvard University announced last Thursday that it would be reversing its “standardized testing-optional” policy for applicants to the Class of 2029. This change in course — Harvard dropped the SAT/ACT requirement for applicants four years ago — comes on the heels of announcements by fellow Ivy League schools Dartmouth and Yale in February that they would be doing the same. We hail Harvard’s decision as one long overdue, and note that — given their influence on elite academic trends as a whole — it represents a setback for the continuing effort by left-wing academics to redirect higher education away from the pursuit of excellence and toward the pursuit of an ideological agenda.

The trend is unmistakable and the timing extremely telling: Unlike Columbia — which only acted last year — Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth all dropped their testing requirements in June of 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 crisis. For each school, the proffered logic was identical, and facially plausible: The chaos and national variation in Covid-19 lockdown protocols made it incredibly difficult (and in certain lockdown-happy states functionally impossible) for high-school students to sit for these tests. The problem was that the testing-optional policy remained in place long after Covid had faded away, which suggested that the pandemic was a pretextual excuse, and ideological considerations rather than epidemiological ones had driven it all along. (The fact that Columbia jumped onto this bandwagon years later and without any Covid rationale underlines the point rather demonstratively.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/law-school-rot-hits-berkeley-dean-close-to-home-literally/

When students turned a party into a protest, Erwin Chemerinsky learned the hard way that coddling activists won’t save you when they become the mob.

The moral and behavioral rot at our elite law schools has hit close to home — literally — for the dean of Berkeley Law, Erwin Chemerinsky. On April 9, about 60 third-year students gathered in the dean’s backyard for a pre-graduation dinner. A few of the students co-opted the occasion to rant about their school’s supposed support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and Chemerinsky’s avowed Zionism. Chemerinsky and his wife, Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk, repeatedly pleaded with these students to leave. When Fisk tried to wrest a microphone from the student leading the demonstration, the student accused Fisk of assault and refused to move, insisting that she had a First Amendment right to continue.

In the days before the dinner, posters had gone up around campus that depicted the dean wielding a bloody knife and fork, with the message, “No dinner with Zionist Chem while Gaza starves.”

In his short official statement following the unsettling evening at his home, Chemerinsky used the words “sad” or “sadness” four times. He was “sad to hear” that students wanted him to cancel the dinner, as proclaimed on the posters, and that if he did not acquiesce, they would protest. And he was “enormously sad” that students would be “so rude” as to “use the social occasion for their political agenda.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-inevitable-result-of-intersectional-gender-studies/

Harvard University’s gender and sexuality department will offer a wide range of classes next semester: Gender as Technology; Gender and Sexuality in Korean Pop Culture; Feminism in the Age of Empire; Gender, Race and Poverty in the United States; Decolonization; Love’s Labors Found: Uncovering Histories of Emotional Labor; and more. Decolonization is as relevant to feminist theory as the songs of BTS are to Korean gender roles in Harvard’s gender studies department. As George Leef has written, gender studies is “not really an intellectual enterprise, but ideological posturing,” one that “is not about trying to understand the world, but is all about trying to change it in certain ways.”

Gender studies professors have taken the posture of supporting Palestinians since October 7, and opposing Israel since well before October 7. A recent panel held at Rutgers University, and sponsored by its gender studies department, is a good study of how mad the departments have become and a better example of their ideological ends.

The panel, called “Palestine Is a Queer Feminist Struggle against Imperialism,” was led by Maya Mikdashi, an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Nadine Naber, an associate professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Illinois. Mikdashi went viral for complaining that criticizing Hamas’s persecution of LGBTQ Palestinians is a “homophobic” tactic. Naber delivered a word salad against “settler-colonialism,” which is good enough to quote in full:

Any movement committed to a free Palestine must take seriously how the categorical dichotomization of gender and sexuality is made material — is corporealized through violence, punishment, murder, and disappearance, and that the gender binary is foundational to colonization. And also that the gender binary, like all borders, [is] made possible through state violence. . . .

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/please-harvard-dont-throw-conservatives-into-that-briar-patch/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Folks, I do not regret to inform you even in the slightest bit that Christopher Rufo is at it again. Or rather, he continues at it. After he and the journalistic team at the Washington Free Beacon combined to light a fire that ended up incinerating former Harvard president Claudine Gay — it was not her repulsive testimony before Congress that toppled her but the revelation that her already threadbare academic career had been stitched together in large part from the plagiarized work of other, better scholars — he has now pressed forward with an investigation and public rhetorical assault on others similarly situated in the woker spheres of academia. (“Alphabet-soup land,” as I’ve taken to calling it.) At the present moment, Rufo claims to have made embarrassing revelations about former Michigan State professor Lisa Cook (currently a Federal Reserve governor), and prior to this he had flagged the plagiaristic misdeeds of a Harvard Extension administrator and an assistant professor of sociology there.

And by gum, Harvard’s young and comically ingenuous students are not taking it lying down. They have noticed that each of these people is a black female — Rufo, loquaciously online as always, has been happy to point it out to them — and have begun to harbor suspicions that Rufo might be, well, you know . . . a racist. And almost certainly a misogynist, but no need to overdetermine things. (The fact that all of these people are pretty much nailed dead-to-rights on the merits is of course immaterial in this analysis, in exactly the same way that traffic cameras in Chicago were — this is not a joke — deemed “racist” by ProPublica and the city council because they kept disproportionately flagging the wrong demographic of driver. “Equity” in action, my friends.)

I therefore salute Harvard Crimson opinion columnist Maya Bodnick for standing up to Rufo’s transparently racist, reactionary agenda. She sounds the alarm in the title of her piece: “A Witch Hunt Is Targeting Black Harvard Faculty.” First they came for Claudine Gay, she says. Then the Free Beacon tossed the school’s chief DEI officer into the frying pan for a quick sizzle.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/10/featherbed-ed/

New data for the 2022-2023 academic year paints a disturbing picture. While students are slowly trickling back into public schools post-COVID-19, the same cannot be said for staff. The National Center for Education Statistics revealed an increase of 173,000 students in public schools, yet during the same period, a staggering 159,000 employees were hired, including 15,000 additional teachers.

Researcher Chad Aldeman provides specific examples of hiring trends in various districts across the country. He explains that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

About a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a 22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.

Another group of districts saw an increase in student enrollments, but their teacher count has risen even faster. The Katy Independent School District, near Houston, added 4,299 students last year, a gain of 4.9%. At the same time, it hired 366 teachers, a 6% gain. Over the period, its student body increased by 22%, while its teacher count grew by 29%.

But as Aldeman notes, the future is murky: “As districts spend down the last of their federal ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief ) dollars, they may have to lay off staff or close under-enrolled buildings.”

If teachers must be laid off, the typical union contract stipulates that it must be done by seniority, or the “last in, first out” (LIFO) regimen. This industrial style of dealing with teacher overstaffing is typified by Michigan’s Ann Arbor Public Schools system, where the teacher union contract states that after considering years of experience with the district, if two teachers have equal seniority, the last several digits of a teacher’s Social Security number would be the tiebreaker for a layoff.