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EDUCATION

Attacking Jews at Harvard Doesn’t Just Go Unpunished. It Gets Rewarded.By Johanna Berkman

https://www.thefp.com/p/attacking-jews-at-harvard-doesnt?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Instead of discipline, the students behind an attack that went viral got a fellowship, accolades—and a commencement spotlight.

In the year and a half since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, there have been so many alarming incidents on college campuses aimed at Jews. Many stick out for their grotesque imagery, for their outrageous slanders, and for their Soviet-style tactics. But the incident that I remember most vividly is the one that took place at Harvard University less than two weeks after Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 250 more.

No one was physically injured that day. But the fact remained that the incident was wildly beyond the pale: a group of Harvard students surrounding another student, an Israeli named Yoav Segev, repeatedly screaming “Shame!” in his face, blocking his path, and forcing him to leave a part of campus that he was entitled to be in just as much as they were.

Video of the confrontation quickly went viral. You can watch it here.

The incident might have just disappeared from the news, like so many other videos of post-October 7 antisemitism on campus, if not for another shocking fact. The two aggressors who were the easiest to identify, because they were not wearing masks or hoodies and did not have keffiyehs around their faces, were not just Harvard students. They were also Harvard employees.

Ibrahim Bharmal was a Harvard Law School student and an editor at the Harvard Law Review. He was also a law-school teaching fellow in a civil procedure class. Elom Tettey-Tamaklo was a student at Harvard Divinity School. He was also a residential Harvard proctor, someone who advised first-year Harvard College students and lived in their dorm.

In other words, these were not random outside agitators or foolish 18-year-old college students trying to prove their radical clout. They had been chosen by Harvard—Bharmal by its faculty, Tettey-Tamaklo by its administrators—to be leaders, role models, and part of the very fabric of the institution itself.

For those who wanted to simply wave off the outbreak of harassment against Jewish students on elite American college campuses as much ado being done by outsiders, the Harvard video proved otherwise. Yet Harvard’s president at the time, Claudine Gay, said nothing publicly about it until three weeks later.

Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe Harvard Researcher: the University Is “Totally Corrupted” Omar Sultan Haque condemns the school for abandoning truth in favor of racialism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-left-bias-trump-omar-sultan-haque

Omar Sultan Haque has spent 23 years at Harvard University. He is furious about what has happened within the school.

While the media have framed the recent fight between Harvard and President Donald Trump in partisan terms, Haque believes that the problem goes much deeper than political score-settling. As he rose through the ranks—from graduate student to postdoctoral fellow to medical researcher to faculty member at Harvard Medical School—Haque watched the university gradually abandon the pursuit of truth and replace it with left-wing racialism.

Rather than stay silent, Haque has spoken out. Last year, he wrote an essay about his experience and has continued to criticize the university throughout the recent campus turmoil. As Haque sees it, Harvard cannot be reformed from within. It’s an unconscious patient and requires CPR to survive.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites by Ilya Shapiro

In the past, Columbia Law School produced leaders like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now it produces window-smashing activists.

When protestors at Columbia broke into a build­ing and created illegal encampments, the student-led Columbia Law Review demanded that finals be canceled because of “distress.”

Law schools used to teach students how to think critically, advance logical arguments, and respect oppo­nents. Now those students cannot tolerate disagreement and reject the validity of the law itself. Rioting Ivy Leaguers are the same people who will soon:

Be America’s judges, DAs, and prosecutors
File and fight constitutional lawsuits
Advise Fortune 500 companies
Hire other left-wing diversity candidates to staff law firms and government offices
Run for higher office with an agenda of only enforcing laws that suit left-wing whims

In Lawless, Ilya Shapiro explains how we got here and what we can do about it. The problem is bigger than radical students and biased faculty—it’s institu­tional weakness. Shapiro met the mob firsthand when he posted a controversial tweet that led to calls for his firing from Georgetown Law. A four-month investi­gation eventually cleared him on a technicality but declared that if he offended anyone in the future, he’d create a “hostile educational environment” and be sub­ject to the inquisition again. Unable to do the job he was hired for, he resigned.

This cannot continue. In Lawless, Shapiro reveals how the illib­eral takeover of legal education is transforming our country. Unless we stop it now, the consequences will be with us for decades.

Heather Mac Donald The Battle Against Identity Politics on Campuses Has Only Begun Even as Trump targets Harvard over racial preferences, the university is offering a seminar, “Empowering Black Leaders,” steeped in racialist thinking.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-empowering-black-leaders-seminar-race-trump

The effort to extirpate identity politics from universities will be a slog. Even as the Trump administration scrutinizes Harvard University for its racial preferences and cuts another $450 million in federal grants, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is offering a three-day seminar called “Empowering Black Leaders: Strategies for Personal and Professional Success.” Topics include “Navigating bias in the workplace,” “Intersectionality in its various forms,” “Racial equity in policing,” and “Employee resource groups.”

That last phrase is a euphemism for affinity groups, those identity-based organizations in schools and businesses that came into vogue over a decade ago. Affinity groups allegedly allow intersectional individuals to collectively protect their identities against bias. Kennedy School organizers and other human-resources types are hoping that a new name will shake off the separatist associations from the original term.

Empowering Black Leaders is led by a diversity consultant, “one of the world’s leading experts,” as the program brochure puts it, on the “science underlying bias and racism in organizations.” Robert Livingston encapsulated his world-class expertise on institutional racism in a 2022 book, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations. Speaking the truth about racism in a corporate leadership seminar means addressing the topic “Racial equity in policing,” since racist police, one is to assume, impede black managers’ ability to climb the corporate ladder.

The Kennedy School has tried to Trump-proof Empowering Black Leaders by noting that a “person’s race/ethnicity is not a criterion for admission.” The program materials even posit a scenario where non-black allies (another academic coinage) enroll in the program so as to “allow them and the Black colleagues they are supporting to thrive.” Such allyship doesn’t come cheap. The course costs $6,900. Are businesses going to shell out close to $7,000 a head to send their black managers and their white allies to learn about the businesses’ alleged racism? In the pre-Trump world, quite possibly. Today, less so. Though the application deadline was April 29, 2025, as of May 14, the Kennedy School was still soliciting applications.

Despite the effort to be just sufficiently color-blind enough to pass muster from an anti-DEI federal funder, assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program. The seminar is designed for “mid-senior level leaders in North American, Europe, and similarly structured societies,” according to the program brochure. What “similar structure” might that be? Elite-dominated? Welfare-statist? Demographically self-cancelling? No, the common link between North American and European “societies” is their embrace of white supremacy. Thus, any black professionals living on those “similarly structured” continents need consultant-provided tools for overcoming what the program refers to as “commonly shared obstacles” to advancement.

Christopher F. Rufo, Ryan Thorpe Inside Harvard’s Discrimination Machine The university has adopted race-conscious hiring policies, potentially in violation of civil rights law.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-discrimination-dei-hiring-trump?skip=1

The Trump administration has escalated its battle with Harvard University, freezing all future grants and threatening to strip the school’s tax-exempt status. In response, Harvard has adopted some conciliatory measures— rebranding its DEI office and cancelling its racially segregated graduation ceremonies—but, behind the scenes, the university’s discrimination machine continues to operate at full capacity.

We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.

For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.”

In another hiring guide, “Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches,” the university recommends several discriminatory practices. At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to “ensure that the early lists include women and minorities” and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” The university counsels that committee chairs should “continually monitor” the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, “attend to all women and minorities on the long list.”

Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.

Trump admin cancels $450m in grants to Harvard, above $2.2b axed “Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” according to the federal task force on Jew-hatred.

https://www.jns.org/trump-admin-cancels-450m-in-grants-to-harvard-above-2-2b-axed/?

“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” according to the federal task force on Jew-hatred.

The federal Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism announced on Tuesday that it was canceling another $450 million in grants to Harvard University, beyond the $2.2 billion it terminated last week.

The task force, which includes the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services, as well as the U.S. General Services Administration, stated that “Harvard University has repeatedly failed to confront the pervasive race discrimination and antisemitic harassment plaguing its campus.”

The Cambridge, Mass., Ivy League school’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias has recognized its “shameful legacy” and exposed the reality that “Jewish students were subjected to pervasive insults, physical assault and intimidation, with no meaningful response from Harvard’s leadership.”

The task force noted recent reporting of a “pattern of endemic race discrimination” at Harvard Law Review, when the journal considered submissions.

“Even more troubling, the Harvard Law Review awarded a $65,000 fellowship—meant to ‘serve the public interest’—to a protester who faced criminal charges for assaulting a Jewish student on campus,” the task force stated. “The decision was reviewed and approved by a faculty committee, demonstrating just how radical Harvard has become.”

“Harvard’s campus, once a symbol of academic prestige, has become a breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination,” it added. “This is not leadership. It is cowardice. And it’s not academic freedom. It’s institutional disenfranchisement.”

INVESTIGATION: Uncovering Chinese Academic Espionage at Stanford

https://stanfordreview.org/investigation-uncovering-chinese-academic-espionage-at-stanford/

This summer, a CCP agent impersonated a Stanford student. Under the alias Charles Chen, he approached several students through social media. Anna*, a Stanford student conducting sensitive research on China, began receiving unexpected messages from Charles Chen. At first, Charles’s outreach seemed benign: he asked about networking opportunities. But soon, his messages took a strange turn.

Charles inquired whether Anna spoke Mandarin, then grew increasingly persistent and personal. He sent videos of Americans who had gained fame in China, encouraged Anna to visit Beijing, and offered to cover her travel expenses. He would send screenshots of a bank account balance to prove he could buy the plane tickets. Alarmingly, he referenced details about her that Anna had never disclosed to him.

He advised her to enter China for only 24 to 144 hours, short enough, he said, to avoid visa scrutiny by authorities, and urged her to communicate exclusively via the Chinese version of WeChat, a platform heavily monitored by the CCP. When Charles commented on one of her social media posts, asking her to delete screenshots of their conversations, she knew this was serious. 

Under the guidance of experts familiar with espionage tactics, Anna contacted authorities. Their investigation revealed that Charles Chen had no affiliation with Stanford. Instead, he had posed as a Stanford student for years, slightly altering his name and persona online, targeting multiple students, nearly all of them women researching China-related topics. According to the experts on China who assisted Anna, Charles Chen was likely an agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS), tasked with identifying sympathetic Stanford students and gathering intelligence.

Columbia Exposes the ‘Academic Freedom’ Hypocrites by Seth Mandel

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/columbia-exposes-the-academic-freedom-hypocrites/

There wasn’t much learning going on at Columbia  but the school provided an important lesson in hypocrisy for those paying attention. A key talking point from defenders of the universities against the Trump administration’s enforcement of civil-rights law has been: If the schools crack down on pro-Hamas protesters at the government’s behest, it will destroy academic freedom as we know it.

I’ve explained in the past why that argument is specious: The anti-Zionists have been erasing academic freedom on campus for decades and punishing the offenders will help to restore it. But honestly I couldn’t have made it much clearer than the fanatical tentifada mobs just did themselves when they stormed Butler Library and forced nearly a thousand students to stop studying for their final exams.

The first characteristic of yesterday’s chaos was that it was nothing new: It was far from the first time students, even at Columbia specifically, had taken over buildings. It was far from the first time these crowds had disrupted academic environments: Classes have been invaded and hijacked, students taking exams have been disrupted (try concentrating on your exam while a rabid mob outside your classroom window is psychotically chanting that you deserve to be murdered because you’re a Jew), libraries have been taken over by protesters, students have been blocked from attending class and moving freely about the campus.

What these groups did yesterday at Columbia is, simply, what these groups do. There was no escalation, in other words. This is just what defenders of the tentifada groups have been defending all along.

Here is how new Columbia President Claire Shipman described the scene she witnessed:

“I spent the late afternoon and evening at Butler Library, as events were unfolding, to understand the situation on the ground and to be able to make the best decisions possible. I arrived to see one of our Public Safety officers wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged. As I left hours later, I walked through the reading room, one of the many jewels of Butler Library, and I saw it defaced and damaged in disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans. Violence and vandalism, hijacking a library—none of that has any place on our campus.”

Probe the foreign influence behind these terror-loving, anti-Jew college agitators By Douglas Murray-

https://nypost.com/2025/05/08/opinion/probe-foreign-influence-behind-terror-loving-anti-jew-college-agitators/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

I wonder how Columbia University would behave in the following scenario. A bunch of students and outside agitators descend on their campus. They are dressed in the gear of the Ku Klux Klan, being careful to conceal their faces so as to avoid any personal criticism. They then enter the university’s library and other sacred spaces of learning and chant for the lynching of black Americans.

Would Columbia University sit by while this happened? Would Democrat prosecutors and left-wing activists claim that this was simply a case of people exercising their free-speech rights? And would conservative pundits wishing to appear as being “on the right side of history” insist that the hooligans should be allowed to continue their threatening actions with impunity?

I would guess that the answer to these questions would be “no,” “no” and “no” again.

So why do so many people think that a movement which dedicates itself to intimidating and threatening another minority group in America — specifically Jews — find itself so cosily protected?

The thought occurs after a friend at Columbia sent me footage from the university’s Butler library — the main library on campus — from earlier this week. The Butler library is a beautiful building, intended as a sacrosanct place of study and education. Which was what places like Columbia were once for.

But on Wednesday those students who did want to study had to put up with a mob of fascists descending on their place of learning. Scores of students and others came in dressed in their terrorist chic. Their heads were wrapped in Palestinian terrorist scarves and some of them — as ever — decided to mix this up with COVID-19 protective masks.

The Spoiled Brats of Academe “Democracy cannot thrive without a certain diet of truth.” by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spoiled-brats-of-academe/

President Trump’s campaign to restore Constitutional order and common sense to our government has rightly targeted our educational institutions, keeping the pledge he made on the campaign trail “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” These institutions, like a fish, rot from the head down, and so the corruption of our universities must be reduced by starting with their administrations and faculties.

That corruption became obvious during the campus protests celebrating Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The despicable anti-Semitism of the students and faculty of some of our most prestigious universities, as well as violence directed at Jewish students, replete with genocidal chants and rhetoric, were tolerated by campus authorities and met with shameful appeasement, if not encouragement, rather than arrests and expulsions.

Trump has responded by garnishing some of the billions of dollars that taxpayers provide to universities, which use these funds to finance politicized or dubious research, create anti-American programs, and graduate majors rife with leftwing curricula filled with postmodern “higher nonsense,” but lacking any prospects of employment other than political activism. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Wall Street Journal reports, “You have a higher chance of being unemployed these days if you go to college.”

In response, these institutions have been caterwauling like a spoiled, entitled brat whose rich father has reduced his exorbitant allowance. Typical are the comments of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who blustered, “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research . . . Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

So how did private universities with multi-billion-dollar, tax-free endowments get a “right” to taxpayer money? And how did the common-sense wisdom that “He who pays the piper calls the tune” disappear? Aren’t there conditions the feds impose on how public funds are spent? Are not politicized curricula, programs, and majors verboten?

But the left-wing’s “long march” to politicize universities is just one example of the left’s corruption of our schools. Postmodern and poststructuralist ideologies––the idiot children of Marx’s malign ideas such of “false consciousness” –– incorporate other sophistic ideas such as the simplistic, radical materialist determinism and relativism.