RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.investigativeproject.org/9353/you-probably-beat-harvard-moral-iq

It’s never been easier to beat Harvard’s moral IQ, which has dropped to moronic levels since the Hamas massacre of October 7th. Thirty-one Harvard student groups promptly defended the Hamas atrocities, and the university came under fire for its tardy and weak response. When Harvard president Claudine Gay finally spoke with greater moral clarity, over 100 faculty members condemned her for it. Now Harvard will be federally investigated over claims of campus antisemitism.

The university’s president will have another opportunity to clarify Harvard’s position as she testifies tomorrow morning, December 5th, at 10:15am before the House committee on Education & the Workforce.

To see if you beat Harvard’s moral IQ, just take this quiz by indicating if one should PRAISE or CONDEMN the following (the correct answer appears after each question, so that you can score yourself).

1) 3,000 terrorists breach a sovereign border to murder over 1,000 people and abduct hundreds more, including countless elderly, women, and children (CONDEMN)

2) The terrorists incinerate babies, behead innumerable victims, burn entire communities, rape and murder women and then parade their mutilated bodies before cheering crowds (CONDEMN)

3) The above atrocities will cause even more civilian suffering because they will predictably provoke a justified and massive military response (CONDEMN)

Two “harder,” bonus questions:

1) Should any answer change if the victim is more privileged than the perpetrator? If you answer yes, then your wokeness has obliterated your moral IQ.

2) Should any answer change if the victim is Israeli and the perpetrator is Palestinian? If you answer yes, then you are an anti-Semite.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/01/university-quietly-abandons-dei-requirements-free-speech-activists-celebrate-victory/

The University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass) ended an application requirement that forced potential employees to pledge their support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Fox News reports that the decision, which had previously brought criticism to the university, was celebrated as a “victory” for freedom of speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), formerly known as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

“Public institutions like the University of Massachusetts Boston are bound by the First Amendment to make hiring decisions in a viewpoint-neutral manner,” said FIRE’s Program Officer Haley Gluhanich. “We’re glad the university eventually changed course. But maybe next time, it doesn’t need to take five months of advocacy.”

FIRE first discovered the existence of the requirement in June, where faculty applicants were ordered to submit statements expressing their “experience and commitment” to DEI. FIRE denounced these rules as a “clear violation of both prospective faculty’s academic freedom and the university’s obligation to uphold the First Amendment.

“UMass Boston tried dodging the issue for several months,” Gluhanich continued, noting that FIRE “recently discovered that the DEI requirements had finally been removed from the job listings we flagged and that newly posted job listings contained no similar requirements.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/pro-hamas-nazi-students-at-harvard-give-president-claudine-gay-a-deadline/

In the annals of campus presumption, this latest news takes some kind of cake. Various student groups at Harvard who are united in their hatred of Israel, and in their solidarity with those who wish to destroy the Jewish state and replace it with a twenty-third Arab state, have just issued an ultimatum to President Claudine Gay. She has until Monday, November 27 to respond. More on this absurdity can be found here: “‘Your Move’: Anti-Israel Harvard University Students Issue Demands to School President, Give Monday Deadline,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, November 24, 2023:

Dozens of anti-Israel student groups at Harvard University, along with several allied campus groups across the US, have issued a set of demands to Harvard President Claudine Gay and given her until Monday to respond, adding further fuel to what’s become an explosive situation at one of the world’s most elite universities over the Israel-Hamas war.

Earlier this week, students protested on campus and issued the list of demands, which included the reinstatement of a student proctor who three weeks ago participated in mobbing a Jewish student and screaming “Shame!” into his ears.

That proctor was part of a group that ganged up on a Jewish student, surrounding him and screaming “Shame! Shame!” — while he tried to get away. You can see the disturbing scene here.

According to The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, the university had suspended indefinitely Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, a second year student at the Harvard Divinity School, from his role as a proctor over his involvement in the incident, video of which went viral earlier this month. Tettey-Tamaklo reportedly has been ordered to vacate free housing he received as compensation for holding the position, which gives graduates the opportunity to mentor freshmen.

What kind of a “mentor” to freshmen can this Elom Tettey-Tamaklo possibly be, if he thinks ganging up on a lone Jewish student, surrounding him and preventing him from leaving is an acceptable way to behave? And he’s a student the Divinity School? His spirituality takes strange forms.

This week, the students also demanded that Gay commit to pursue no disciplinary or punitive actions against “pro-Palestinian students and workers engaging in non-violent protest.” The letter came as, according to The Harvard Crimson, eight undergraduate students had been summoned to hearings as part of disciplinary proceedings against students who last week occupied University Hall on campus for 24-hours.