RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/is-cornell-next-schools-wealthy-donors-call-for-presidents-ouster-13ab9c4d?mod=hp_lead_pos11

Wealthy alumni activists enraged at the leadership of their Ivy League alma maters have helped push out the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Now, a new group of donors are pulling out the same playbook at Cornell University.

Jon Lindseth, a Cornell alumnus, donor and former trustee, asked the school’s Board of Trustees to dismiss university President Martha Pollack and provost Michael Kotlikoff for allegedly stifling open debate and rational argument. Alumni who support the call for the pair’s ouster also are upset about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the school as well as what they see as growing antisemitism on campus.

“Cornell is no longer concerned with discovering and disseminating knowledge, but rather with adhering to DEI groupthink policies and racialization,” wrote Lindseth, 89 years old, a retired mechanical engineer and entrepreneur, in a five-page letter to the board’s chair.

Trustees for the university in upstate New York are scheduled to meet Friday. In Lindseth’s letter, he calls for the school to eliminate DEI staffing and programming and adopt principles of free inquiry and open debate.

The push is supported by the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, a two-year-old group formed to support free expression and viewpoint diversity on campus. Some alumni members of the group who are also wealthy donors have indicated they would withhold donations if college administrators didn’t do a better job of protecting those ideals. Others want to see Pollack removed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-academic-bill-of-rights-to-restore-diversity-of-thought-on-college-campuses/

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were held accountable for the “rampant antisemitism” on their campuses. During the December congressional investigation of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, the sharp line of questioning by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik exposed the evil and moral rot on the campuses of these elite universities and ultimately two of the presidents resigned. Their pathetic answers on whether calling for “genocide of Jews” constituted bullying and harassment in their campus codes of conduct, exposed their utter lack of concern and arrogance, and it’s a good thing they were forced out.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The intellectual and moral rot on our college campuses is much more deep seated than college presidents or boards of directors. The faculty are the real villains. It’s the professors who destroyed higher education in America as a place of free thought and turned these institutions into centers of indoctrination. They are the ones who must be held accountable for suppressing free speech and diversity of opinion, in the pursuit of social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Twenty years ago, academic freedom was essentially sacrosanct. But not today. There’s no more respect for academic freedom. Today professors, mainly in Humanities and Social Sciences, have become radicalized and practice indoctrination in the classroom for political and social change. Their mission is to produce social justice warriors. Israel is now designated the settler-colonialist oppressor in the social justice playbook, and the Palestinians are the oppressed victims. In their playbook they must stand in solidarity with the oppressed and join the crusade to overthrow the oppressor, which is why antisemitism now is raging out-of-control on campus. We saw it in the antisemitic riot at Hillcrest High School where a student mob attacked a Jewish teacher who was seen on social media attending a pro-Israel rally. We saw it in the pro-Hamas protests blocking traffic and cursing Israel, where many of the protestors were college students and faculty. We see it in the rise of antisemitic incidents on college campuses where Jewish students worry about their personal safety. We see the erasure of Israel from Middle Eastern maps in the classroom. It’s not just Jewish students – it’s Republicans, it’s patriotic Americans, it’s anyone who becomes the target of leftist indoctrination.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/inflated-grades-increasing-graduation-rates-and-deflated-test-scores/

“But when you are obsessed with equity, quality is an afterthought. We may be raising a nation of illiterates and innumerates, but they will all be equally brainless.At this time, the American Medical Association is embracing equity, and perhaps exams to enter the medical profession will soon cease to exist.God help us.”

Grade inflation is rampant and has been so for many years. Back in 2011, an in-depth study by three Ivy League economists looked at how the quality of individual teachers affects their students over the long term. The paper, by Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia, tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and, using a value added approach, found that teachers who help students raise their standardized test scores have a lasting positive effect on those students’ lives beyond academics, including lower teenage-pregnancy rates, greater college matriculation, and higher adult earnings. The authors of the study define “value added” as the average test-score gain for a teacher’s students “…adjusted for differences across classrooms in student characteristics such as prior scores.”

But to those who believe in equity über alles, quality is an afterthought, and many states are ditching any objective criteria for entry into the teaching field. In California, teachers traditionally have had to pass the ridiculously easy California Basic Educational Skills Test (CBEST) to gain entry into the profession, but the test is now under fire.

Is it because the test is a snap and needs to become more rigorous? Hardly.

Christopher Davis, a member of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, claims that standardized testing causes “disproportionate harm to people of color.” In an equity-driven statement, John Affeldt, managing attorney at Public Advocates, agrees, saying, “CBEST is a barrier for educators of color,” and thinks the test should be eliminated.

https://www.commentary.org/articles/ruth-wisse/harvard-lawrence-summers-claudine-gay/

Forgive me for quoting myself, but there’s no other way to begin: “History rarely issues us a red alert. But the surrender by America’s premier university to its anti-intellectual assailants marked a point of no return. Responsibility was so equally distributed among the administration, Board of Governors, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the main players that I saw no way the damage could be repaired.”

This was my verdict on Harvard when I retired from the university a decade ago after having witnessed the ambush and dismissal in 2006 of Lawrence Summers, whose appointment as president five years earlier had given me hope that the decline I had tracked would now be reversed. From the moment Summers arrived, he showed bold leadership, addressing the main areas of my concern. But his every initiative also alerted his ideological opponents, who proved so skilled in cultural combat that they were able to damage him almost immediately and to bring him down in record time.

There was no inquiry at the time into the factions that mobilized against the president, leaving them free to further influence policy and squelch opposition. Now by curious inversion, we see that Claudine Gay, recently installed as 30th president of Harvard, has been upended by the very crisis in education Summers had tried to avert. Although opinion will vary over what led to Gay’s resignation, several of those controversies—over the university’s role in society, anti-Semitism, academic standards, and affirmative action or “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”—were precisely the ones that were “weaponized” against Summers, but for opposite ends.

Currently, at least four groups from inside and outside the university—alumni, faculty, administration, and government—are looking into what has gone wrong at Harvard. While the aborted Gay presidency is but a symptom of that damage, and the resignation itself brings no necessary change, anyone hoping to understand what is at stake in higher education would do well to study the defenestration of Lawrence Summers. He has personally transcended that debacle, but Harvard has not.

_____________

In submitting this testimony, let me clarify my role as participatory witness. Soon after I came to Harvard in 1993 as first occupant of the Martin Peretz Chair in Yiddish Literature, I was made director of the Center for Jewish Studies, which required my presence at faculty meetings I had seldom attended during my previous tenure.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/first-plagiarism-now-lying-whats-happening-to-americas-universities/

Here’s another good reason not to plunk down $126,584 (that’s the total for four years of tuition unless it goes up between now and 2027) to send your kid to Rutgers. Long considered to be one of America’s premier universities, the beloved alma mater of Mr. Magoo is now a sinkhole of woke indoctrination, with academic standards sinking lower than Old Joe Biden’s ethics. A professor at Rutgers Law School has lied openly in an academic paper and has refused to back down, knowing that she will face no consequences from an administration that is as corrupt and compromised as she is.

In this, of course, Rutgers is like virtually every other university in America today. First, there was the remarkable public self-immolation of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania during a congressional hearing; then Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign after her repeated plagiarism was revealed, although she claimed that her resignation was due to “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” and many in the academic establishment and elsewhere bought her nonsense.

These incidents, however, were just the latest and highest-profile manifestations of an intellectual and spiritual rot that is everywhere. One small example of it came in a recent pseudo-scholarly study from Rutgers University Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights, entitled “Presumptively Antisemitic: Islamophobic Tropes In the Palestine–Israel Discourse.”

This “study” is 65 pages of Marxist agitprop, woke psychobabble, and pure fantasy, all thrown together in a thick propaganda stew that’s designed to show “how race and racism infect foreign policy and the treatment of minority communities who espouse unpopular views or dissent from the political orthodoxy, including the defense of human rights for all.” If the authors of this twaddle, Mitchell Plitnick, President of ReThinking Foreign Policy, and Sahar Aziz, Distinguished Professor of Law and Executive Director of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School, were remotely honest, they would say that “race and racism” affect the treatment of minority communities by getting them coddled, treated with kid gloves, and accorded all manner of special perks.

https://www.thefp.com/p/carole-hooven-why-i-left-harvard

Since early December, the end of my 20-year career teaching at Harvard has been the subject of articles, op-eds, tweets from a billionaire, and even a congressional hearing. I have become a poster child for how the growing campus DEI—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—bureaucracies strangle free speech. My ordeal has been used to illustrate the hypocrisy of the assertions by Harvard’s leaders that they honor the robust exchange of challenging ideas. 

What happened to me, and others, strongly suggests that these assertions aren’t true—at least, if those ideas oppose campus orthodoxy. 

To be a central example of what has gone wrong in higher education feels surreal. If there is any silver lining to losing the career that I found so fulfilling, perhaps it’s that my story will help explain the fear that stalks campuses, a fear that spreads every time someone is punished for their speech.

The December 5, 2023, congressional hearing on the rise of antisemitism at colleges did not go well for the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. They were accused of failing to condemn the public antisemitic statements made on their campuses. Their defense, as asserted by then-Harvard president Claudine Gay, was that their administrations were “deeply committed to free expression.” 

That’s where I came in. 

As Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said at the hearing, “Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist, was forced to resign, because she stated that a person’s sex is biological and binary. . . . and so, President Gay, in what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20303/equity-grade-inflation

Diversity equity and inclusion require that groups – rather than individuals – be treated “equitably”, and that preferred groups be advantaged in hiring, admissions and other benefits.

This is all part of the DEI attack on meritocracy. DEI demands that individuals be judged by the color of their skin and their identity rather than the content of their character — or their grades.

DEI now demands that schools begin with the goal of achieving equity grading by any means, including non-blind grading, grade inflation or grade abolition. Anything to undercut the equality of meritocratic blind grading that didn’t achieve the goals of DEI.

The negative impact of equity grading is incalculable. It stifles learning, hard work and creativity. It fails to prepare students for the competitive world they will inevitably face after they finish being coddled by universities. It will destroy the competitive advantages American universities used to have.

A recent study showed that grade inflation has become rampant at American universities. What used to be C+ has now become an A-, as more than 3/4 of students in elite universities get grades of A or A-.

This grade inflation is a direct result of the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies and their twin concept of intersectionality. DEI requires that groups – rather than individuals – be treated “equitably”, and that preferred groups be advantaged in hiring, admissions and other benefits.

https://thejewishvoice.com/2024/01/examining-the-incessant-flow-of-qatari-money-into-american-academia-unintended-consequences-on-campus/

Until recently, the issue of foreign donations influencing American academia remained unnoticed. However, a study published in 2022 by the National Association of Academics in the United States sheds light on a significant flow of Qatari money to universities in the country, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. According to an in depth report that appeared on the Calcalistech.com web site in October 2023,the study reveals that between 2001 and 2021, Qatar donated a staggering $4.7 billion to American universities, making it the largest foreign donor during this period. What initially seemed like harmless financial support has sparked a series of events, raising concerns about the influence on academic institutions.

The study highlights that a considerable portion of the funds received by American universities from Qatar went unreported, violating legal requirements, according to the Calcalisteceh.com report.  This revelation adds a layer of complexity to the already controversial issue. The Qatari financial support, ostensibly meant to foster academic growth, has now come under scrutiny for potential undisclosed motives.