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Can The Current Universities Be Saved? Politicized faculty, infantilized students, and mediocre classes have combined to erode the prestige of college degrees, even at once elite colleges. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/05/02/can-the-current-universities-be-saved/

Elite higher education in America—long unquestioned as globally preeminent—is facing a perfect storm. Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170 percent.

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

They aren’t revolutionaries. They’re bigoted brats The Columbia cranks rant about killing Zionists one minute and demand hot meals the next. Tom Slater

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/01/they-arent-revolutionaries-theyre-bigoted-brats/

If you want to know what’s driving the Israelophobic protests and occupations at New York’s Columbia University – and many more elite campuses across America – get a load of this clip that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past 24 hours.

In it, one Johannah King-Slutzky – spokesperson for the occupation of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, which was forcibly ended by the New York City Police Department last night, with around 100 arrests – issues her and her comrades’ demands. On top of Columbia ‘divesting’ from Israel and such, King-Slutzky also demanded meals and water.

Apparently, Columbia was refusing to allow the students who were then breaking windows and barricading themselves inside Hamilton Hall to access their usual canteen grub. ‘We’re saying that [Columbia is] obligated to provide food to students who have paid for a meal plan here’, King-Slutzky told a sceptical press conference.

When pushed, she said they were only asking that supplies be allowed to be brought in:

‘Do you want students to die of dehydration and starvation or get severely ill, even if they disagree with you?… I mean, it’s crazy to say because we are on an Ivy League campus, but this is like basic humanitarian aid we’re asking for. Like, could people please have a glass of water?’

It’s all there. The whinging cadence, the ‘like’-strewn patter, the obligatory keffiyeh, the industrial-strength victimhood, the bloke in a crop top stood behind her… King-Slutzky and Co are the picture of trustafarians in revolt. Their anti-Israel bigotry is matched only by their profound sense of entitlement. How dare the university not provide adequate refreshments while we are smashing shit up?

Stagflation Makes Its Appearance On Biden’s ’70s Show

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/05/02/stagflation-makes-its-appearance-on-bidens-70s-show/

Joe Biden got his start in politics in the 1970s and appears determined to recreate the world as it existed back then.

Misguided federal policies have pushed energy prices to punishingly high levels. Americans are struggling with inflation. Radical Muslims are holding American citizens hostage in the Middle East. Our adversaries, including Russia, are on the march. Even bell bottoms are making a comeback.

And, now, the pièce de résistance of the 1970s is also making a comeback: stagflation.

Stagflation. It’s a term that most young people and plenty of not-so-young people have probably never heard before because it’s been nearly 50 years since the U.S. suffered this leftist policy-induced madness. A combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation.

It’s something that liberal Keynesian economists say can’t happen. Inflation, they say, is caused by a too-hot economy and a tight labor market. A sluggish economy should push prices down.

And yet stagflation did happen then, and appears to happening again, thanks to massive spending and growth-choking taxes and regulations imposed by the Biden administration.

Last Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that GDP growth in the first three months of the year was an anemic 1.6%, well below the consensus forecast. The next day, the “personal consumption expenditures” price index, a key policy barometer for the Federal Reserve Board, climbed 2.8%, higher than anticipated, marking the third-straight month in which prices went up faster than expected. In other words, inflation was accelerating during the same months the economy was flatlining.

This Regime Is Built on a Lie By Scott Yenor

https://tomklingenstein.com/this-regime-is-built-on-a-lie/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

In the following essay, Scott Yenor examines the “mandatory ideology” of the emerging regime: “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the all-consuming paradigm by which our schools and (in due course) our nation are being reoriented toward the principle of group outcome equality. This is the first in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

As red states burden and ban diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices across the country, DEI operators broadcast defiance. “Under Siege,” reads one headline in the industry-standard Chronicle of Higher Education, “DEI Officers Strategize to Fight Back.” “Leaders Create Informal Support Network Amid DEI Opposition,” reads a headline in Insight into Diversity. Conferences are held to organize resistance. Even “College Presidents Are Quietly Organizing to Support DEI,” reads another Chronicle headline.  

An alleged moral necessity underlies this open political defiance. The current environment, it is assumed, is saturated with racism. It must be re-engineered with DEI policies: racial preferences in admissions and hiring, mandatory diversity training, a race-centered curriculum. Peace, harmony, achievement, and opportunity will then reign in workplaces and on campuses—after a generation or so of such policies. 

How Soros helped Hamas go mainstream Rachel Ehrenfeld

https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/how-soros-helped-hamas-go-mainstream

The left-wing billionaire and his Open Society Foundations have poured untold millions into pro-Palestinian, anti-American groups. We’re seeing the results on college campuses across the country.

George Soros, who for decades has been funding progressive, neo-Marxist leftist groups, also poured money into groups and individuals that reject the existence of Israel. So, it is not surprising that his son, Alexander, who now runs the ironically named Open Society Foundations, is now funding, directly and indirectly, pro-Hamas demonstrations and Hamas-supporters’ encampments on university campuses across the United States.

The campus “occupations” are reminiscent of Kyiv’s Maidan Square encampment in the winter of 2004-2005, when Soros helped fund the Orange Revolution. He also supported the 2014 demonstrations of the Maidan Revolution, for which he was awarded Ukraine’s Order of Freedom by the Ukrainian president he helped elect, Petro Poroshenko.

Soros is the prime mover behind a decades-long effort culminating with a tsunami of anti-Semitic attacks on Israel and Jews everywhere.

When Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, took over Gaza in 2007, Soros criticized Israel for refusing “to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government.” He deliberately ignored the fact that the Islamist terrorist group’s explicit and well-advertised objective is the elimination of the Jewish state of Israel.

Soros has been funding, directly and indirectly — and apparently with the acquiescence of U.S. administrations — Israeli-Jewish and Israeli-Arab leftist groups, as well as media outlets, that oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

‘Make Government Work’ John Stossel

https://pjmedia.com/john-stossel/2024/05/01/make-government-work-n4928660

President Joe Biden says, “I know how to make government work!”You’d think he’d know. He’s worked in government for 51 years. But the truth is, no one can make government work. 

Biden hasn’t.

Look at the chaos at the border, our military’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the rising cost of living, our unsustainable record-high debt …

In my new video, economist Ed Stringham argues that no government can ever work well, because “even the best person can’t implement change. … The massive bureaucracy gets bigger and slower.”

I learned that as a consumer reporter watching bureaucrats regulate business. Their rules usually made life worse for consumers.

Yet politicians want government to do more!

NYPD Officers Storm Barricaded Columbia Building, Arrest Anti-Israel Protesters by David Zimmerman

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nypd-begins-entering-columbia-campus-moving-toward-barricaded-anti-israel-protesters/

Hundreds of New York City police officers equipped with riot gear took dozens of anti-Israel protesters into custody Tuesday evening after Columbia University called in the police to end the pro-Palestinian occupation of a campus building.

Columbia protesters occupied Hamilton Hall early Tuesday morning and blocked the entrances to claim the area as their own. Protesters were seen smashing windows and barricading themselves inside the building, one day after the university began suspending students for refusing to leave a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus.

The New York Police Department received a letter from Columbia president Minouche Shafik authorizing officers to move onto campus, marking the second time the university administration had done so. The NYPD closed off streets around Columbia while moving toward the barricaded campus location. Officers then entered Hamilton Hall through a second-floor window and began pulling people out of the building, according to Columbia radio station WKCR-FM.

Columbia’s property, including Hamilton Hall, was cleared of all pro-Palestinian protesters by around 11 p.m. Tuesday, less than two hours after the law-enforcement raid began.

Large numbers of protesters could be seen getting arrested, zip-tied, and escorted onto buses. Over 100 protesters were arrested at Columbia and the City College of New York, which saw a similar situation developing. Most of the arrests were made at Columbia, according to law enforcement.

The police department denied using tear gas when clashing with protesters; flash-bang grenades and other “distraction devices” were used instead, according to an NYPD spokesperson.

“The decision to reach out to the NYPD was in response to the actions of the protesters, not the cause they are championing,” university spokesman Ben Chang said in a statement. “We have made it clear that the life of campus cannot be endlessly interrupted by protesters who violate the rules and the law.”

The building occupation was believed to have been led by people not affiliated with the university, Chang added.

In addition to clearing out all encampments, Shafik asked city police to maintain a presence on campus for at least two more weeks.

“In light of the activities that occurred after the events of April 17-18, 2024, we further request that you retain a presence on campus through at least May 17, 2024 to maintain order and ensure encampments are not reestablished,” Shafik wrote in the letter to NYPD deputy commissioner Michael Gerber. The school’s commencement is scheduled for May 15

Beware of The Deadly Progressive Touch Reflections on leftists being eaten alive by their own ideologues. Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/beware-of-the-deadly-progressive-touch/

Recently, viral videos have highlighted the furor—and narcissism—of progressive elites when they rarely face the consequences of their own actions.

The most hilarious video was the defiant DA of New York’s Monroe County, dripping with elite condescension. She felt she had the right to go 20 mph over the speed limit, ignore a patrol car signaling her to pull over, and then in her garage dress down police officers for daring to treat her like she was a mere citizen.

Another was the Emory professor screaming (“I am a professor!”) when handcuffed and hauled off her campus by Georgia law enforcement. She exited whining to cameras that she had only “lightly” hit a policeman on the head (“I impulsively hit him on the head very lightly to get his attention and they grabbed me.”). And then there was the Bakersfield fiery leftist who bragged to the City Council about murdering them in their homes, only to flicker and weep in court when facing felony indictments.

Progressive hothouse plants assume their supposed moral superiority exempts them from living by the rules in the manner of others. But sometimes it is not just the police who anger them, but the very Frankensteinian monsters they created who do not cooperate with their degreed and elected enablers.

In California, an epidemic of crime, from theft to assault, has struck liberal politicians in the last few months, including most recently Adam Schiff, the leftwing mayors of San Jose—Matt Mahon—and Los Angeles—Karen Bass, and even the unhinged district attorney of Oakland Pamela Price. Critical legal theory, no-bail, and defund the police apparently offer no protection.

Sen. Chuck Schumer thought it a neat trick in 2020 to assemble a pro-abortion throng outside the Supreme Court doors, and threaten Justices Kavanagh and Gorsuch by name. He grandstanded that they would not know what would soon “hit” them as they reaped the “whirlwind”. Now a pro-Hamas whirlwind hit his own home, in the fashion leftists not long also did with impunity to Supreme Court Justices’ homes—then to the sudden silence of the otherwise loud Schumer.

NYPD Reclaims City College, Lowers Terror Flag, Raises U.S. Flag We will remember moments like this in the years to come. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/nypd-reclaims-city-college-lowers-terror-flag-raises-u-s-flag/

I’ve written quite a bit since 9/11 about where I expected the growing battle between America and Islamic terrorists to go, but this is still a stunning moment.

There’s the NYPD reclaiming a portion of a New York City campus, lowering a terror flag and raising the American flag again.

There are echoes here of the flag at Ground Zero and of the Star-Spangled Banner.

This is literally a battle for our country being fought on college campuses between the NYPD and Islamic terrorists and their Marxist allies.

It’s all the more stunning in contrast to what’s going on in Los Angeles at UCLA.

America’s Poisonous Antiwar Protests Have we moved the doomsday clock to the brink of midnight? by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/americas-poisonous-antiwar-protests/

The sorry spectacles being staged at our most prestigious universities bespeak the accelerating degeneration of our future cognitive elites. How else do we describe the aggressive ignorance and moral idiocy of protestors who identify with sadistic, savage terrorists, and adopt the rhetoric and tropes of Nazi Germany? Who shamelessly smear Jews––the intended victims of Hamas’ widely publicized and celebrated genocidal aims­––the perpetrators of genocide? Who clearly know nothing of the region’s history, or that of Islam’s “settler colonialism” and millennium of imperialist depredations and slaving, or the Koranic foundations of that sanctified  aggression?

The letter of these chants and slogans is new, but the spirit goes back to Marx’s debut in history, whence it gradually migrated to Western fellow-travelers and progressives, until emerging during the Sixties to drive the protest movements against the Vietnam War.

There too willful ignorance about the facts of the conflict filled antiwar propaganda––especially the canard that the war was a “civil war” between North Vietnamese “patriots” seeking “national self-determination,” “decolonization,” and “human rights,” just as the American colonies did in the Revolutionary War. Wasn’t Ho Chi Min just another George Washington?

On the other side were the South Vietnamese, the willing collaborators with the “racist” occupiers and oppressors, the capitalist, imperialist Americans propping up the quisling regime in Saigon in order to take control of natural resources like “tin and tungsten,” the talking point provided to Jane Fonda by her handlers when she first became an activist against the war.

And of course, ignored was the reality of the conflict––a proxy war in the U.S.’s efforts to contain Soviet communism’s imperialist ambitions to turn the world into communist satrapies like Eastern Europe. The same callow, mostly affluent youth who demonized America soldiers as the feral attack dogs of the capitalists masters, never mentioned the millions slaughtered, tortured, and enslaved by Soviet and Maoist communist tyrants.

Also then as now, the shock troops of the antiwar movement were college students, some of the most privileged young people not just in America, but the world. Like today, they were cultivated, praised, and sometimes financed by America’s enemies exploiting these “useful idiots” who couldn’t have survived for five minutes living under communist totalitarianism, any more than the pro-Hamas feminists and champions of the LGBTQ alphabet people could survive under illiberal, homophobic, misogynist Islamic sharia law that recognizes only one “human right”––the right to submit to Islam by accepting dhimmitude or converting.