RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/open-letter-editorial-board-harvard-crimson-richard-l-cravatts/

“In short, you have given credence to Bertrand Russell’s observation that “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

On April 29th, in a breathtaking display of tendentiousness and a misreading of history and fact, you published an editorial in the Harvard Crimson entitled, “In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanction and a Free Palestine,” an outrageous column replete with slanders against the Jewish state that called for the Harvard community to commit itself to the corrosive BDS campaign against Israel.

You suggested that the editorial was inspired by the April demonstrations and programming of the Harvard College Palestine Solidarity Committee (HCPSC) which, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week, “installed a colorful, multi-panel ‘Wall of Resistance’ in favor of Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.” Additionally, you heaped praise on the childish mock wall and suggested that “art is a potent form of resistance” and that you were “humbled by our peers’ passion and skill” in creating such an activist masterpiece.

Even more importantly, you contended, fallaciously, “The admittedly controversial panels dare the viewer to contend with well-established, if rarely stated, facts [emphasis added].” What are examples of those “well-established facts” you alluded to? One panel announced in capital letters, for example, that “Zionism is: Racism – Settler Colonialism – White Supremacy – Apartheid,” mendacious slurs that echo the UN’s notorious 1975 Resolution 3379 that proclaimed that Zionism is racism.

Framing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a matter of race, as this foolish display did, and accusing Israel of maintaining a system of apartheid, is something that Israel-haters are fond of doing, even when the charge is patently false. The accusation of apartheid was given even more support last year with the publication of reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both obsessive, perennial critics of Israel, that redefined apartheid in a way that it could be used to slander Israel—reports that you, in fact, alluded to in your editorial. The puerile accusation of white supremacy against Israel is as grotesque and unhinged as is the oft-repeated claim that Israelis are the new Nazis, committing genocide against the Palestinians, and both are not only counter-factual but are also forms of anti-Semitic expression described in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism.

Of course, your claim that the “facts” on the HCPSC mock wall are “well-established” is only true inasmuch as these are facts that live in the minds of progressives and anti-Semites who promiscuously and carelessly throw around words without attention to their actual meaning and import. Progressive thought, such as is apparent in this editorial, involves allowing emotions to define things instead of facts.

https://www.nysun.com/article/antisemitism-comes-to-harvard-in-both-intent-and-effect?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun

During my presidency of Harvard 20 years ago I warned that “serious and thoughtful people are advocating measures that would be antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.” 

In light of the recent exhibition by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee in Harvard Yard and the resounding endorsement of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions by the Harvard Crimson, it is clear to me that antisemitism is being practiced in both intent and effect.

To be clear at the outset, free expression must be sacrosanct in an academic community. The PSC and the Crimson have every right to express their view no matter how upsetting it may be to others. Academic freedom, though, does not mean freedom from criticism or the right to have contemptible views treated with respect. It is no shield against moral bankruptcy.  

This has long been recognized at Harvard as, say, when Drew Faust was president and deemed a student-led Black Mass — a ritual performed by satanic cults to parody the Catholic Church — to be abhorrent and a fundamental affront to academic values of inclusion even as she ruled out any suggestion that event be banned. 

Likewise when controversial conservative scholar Charles Murray was invited to speak at Harvard, a variety of communications were sent to students labeling him a practitioner of racist pseudoscience.

So there is nothing “anti-First Amendment” about calling out antisemitism. Indeed not identifying and attacking antisemitism in our midst would be a major moral failing, especially when it comes in conjunction with proposals to instrumentalize the university by having it engage in antisemitism.

The question that remains is whether the BDS agenda enthusiastically embraced by the PSC and the Crimson is in fact antisemitic. The Crimson and other BDS proponents ​​condemn antisemitism and note that there are people of Jewish descent who support BDS. That is true.

It’s also true that President Trump asserts firmly that he is not racist and can point to prominent African-American supporters and to having received more than a million votes from African Americans. At Harvard we don’t consider such assertions “arguments.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/academic-diversity-quotas-are-real/

Who should be the custodians of science? For centuries, scientists themselves have been. Now, their custodianship is under threat.

Science has long operated as a sort of guild, with the guild managing its own practice and traditions. This holds for the guild’s continuity: admission of aspiring members to the guild is controlled by the guild itself. For the sciences, aspiring members must clear a competitive series of hurdles: apprenticeship (graduate school), journeyman (post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor), then full membership (tenured professor).

For the past few decades, science’s stewardship has been shifting into the hands of an arriviste managerial class with no idea what science is or any real respect for it. Their aim is to seize control over the hiring of new faculty. No longer will admission to the science guild be based on assessed merit and mastery, but on de facto hiring quotas based upon race, gender, and sexual proclivity.

The new quota system is being implemented through the “diversity statement,” which demands an applicant express fealty, not to the guild, but to the new managerial class. The guild’s standards for admission — once a sign of mastery — are thereby subordinated.

https://americanmind.org/features/inclusive-exclusion/the-black-student-body/

This is a response to an excerpt from A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education, edited by Gail Heriot & Maimon Schwarzschild.

As Peter Wood observes, the notion of academic and cultural “inclusion” was presented as a response to performance disparities between blacks and whites in the 1980s. It has, however, morphed into codified cultural essentialism. “Inclusion” now means assuming a monolithic view of black culture, and judging black students by black standards only.

In accepting the idea that “blacks” as a whole have a distinct and separate culture which must be protected from the incursions of mainstream American values, universities effectively declared that blacks must separate themselves from the prevailing mainstream culture in order to escape racism. What has followed is a distinct pattern of racial self-segregation across America in pedigree universities and even smaller liberal arts colleges.

This neo-segregation has only become more institutionalized since the ’80s. This year, New York University opened negotiations with students to create black resident floors on campus. A group called “Black Violets NYU” has complained that the overwhelming presence of white students makes it difficult for black students “to connect.” Black Violets therefore wants a “themed engagement floor” for black students, as well as more black professors in NYU’s politics department and a black student lounge on campus.

In June of last year, students at Rice University demanded that the University fund a “non-residential Black House” on campus. They also wanted a statue of the university’s founder removed. Other demands included that new black students be able to request and receive black roommates, and that course descriptions have tags indicating which race and ethnic groups are involved in the course material.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/georgetown_universitys_free_speech_double_standard.html

On April 26, Georgetown University histed a talk by Mohammed El-Kurd, who has said that Jews have an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood,” and other viciously antisemitic statements. World Israel News reports:

Mohammed El-Kurd, a media personality who has repeatedly accused Israel of harvesting and trafficking organs from Palestinians and described Zionists as “sadistic, barbaric Neo-Nazi pigs” was invited by Georgetown Law’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.

News of El-Kurd’s talk sparked a response from the NGOs StopAntisemitism and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which urged the university to intervene and disinvite him.

“Administrations like Georgetown’s state they’re against antisemitism yet allow Jew haters like Mohammed El-Kurd to freely spread hatred against Jews on their campuses,” StopAntisemitism wrote on its twitter account on Monday. “Enough is enough — cancel El-Kurd’s speech ASAP!”

“Mohammed El-Kurd has a long, ugly history of antisemitic incitement & conspiratorial rhetoric that goes far beyond reasoned criticism of Israel,” the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblat tweeted. “Outrageous & indefensible that @GeorgetownLaw invited him to bring his hate to their campus.”

The University brushed aside these concerns, claiming to to be on the side of free speech.

During a meeting with Jewish students concerned about El-Kurd’s campus appearance, Georgetown Law’s dean said that the university prioritizes free speech.

“We allow a huge amount of latitude even where speech is deeply offensive to some members of the community, some or even many,” Dean Mitch Bailin is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting obtained by the National Review.

“Those are things that we think are important to educational values, to promoting free speech, to promoting a free discussion of ideas, even if those ideas are deeply, deeply offensive.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-claims-school-children-dont-belong-to-parents-when-theyre-in-the-classroom/

At the 2022 Teacher of the Year ceremony hosted by the White House on Wednesday, President Biden claimed that school children don’t belong to parents “when they’re in the classroom.”

“They’re all our children. And the reason you’re the teachers of the year is because you recognize that. They’re not somebody else’s children. They’re like yours when they’re in the classroom,” he said.

Later in the speech, Biden targeted Republicans and the parent movements in local school districts that have fought to remove from libraries and curricula books that promote radical gender and racial ideologies.

“There are too many politicians trying to score political points trying to ban books, even math books. Did you ever think when you’d be teaching you’re going to be worried about book burnings and banning books all because it doesn’t fit somebody’s political agenda?” Biden said.

The comments struck a similar tone to that of former Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, when he made his now infamous remark last year that parents should not be involved in K–12 public education. On the campaign trail, he declared at a debate: “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

https://www.city-journal.org/ap-radicalism

When the Placentia Yorba–Linda School Board in Orange County, California, considered banning critical race theory instruction, a surprising entity stood in the way: the College Board. The nonprofit, which develops advanced-placement (AP) courses and standardized tests, has stated ambiguously: “If a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course and its inclusion in the AP Course Ledger provided to colleges and universities.” The Placentia Yorba–Linda school district told the school board that removing critical race theory from the classroom would risk the AP status of its courses, and that it “has no intention to proceed with any action that would inhibit its ability to continue to offer AP courses and content.”

Ultimately, the school board moved ahead with the ban, adding an exception stipulating that it did not intend to circumscribe any material appearing in AP courses. But similar difficulties may unfold nationally as more districts seek to remove divisive racial instruction from the classroom. At stake is more than just the curriculum of American high schools. Colleges frequently accept AP classes for college credit, so each class can save a student thousands of dollars in tuition. AP classes can be the difference that makes a student able to afford a college degree and all the job opportunities that depend on a college credential. That gives the College Board a tremendous amount of power—and an obligation to ensure that its policies don’t stand in the way of the determinations of democratic bodies.

Not that the group has managed to remain apolitical in the past. As the National Association of Scholars documented in a recent report, the College Board has abused its monopoly to impose on American students a politicized, progressive version of history.