Higher Ed: Now it’s Just Loco

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@ProfDBernstein

It was all stuff and nonsense, wasn’t it? All that talk of “hate speech” and “accountability culture” and “systemic oppression” and the need to ensure that everyone in the community feels “safe” at all times? It was all guff, flotsam, baloney. About 15 minutes passed between the news of the atrocities committed by Hamas and the crumpling of the progressive creed. Rarely has jetsam looked so vile. Pick, at random, a fashionable idea about the ideal limits of free expression, and you’ll observe that it has collapsed ignominiously into the dust. The prohibition on “tone policing”? Gone. The injunction to “believe all women”? Evaporated. The insistence that “silence is violence,” that “neutrality is complicity,” or that institutions are thus obliged to speak out about any injustice that they might see? Defunct. Obsolete. Kaput. In the annals of bad human ideas, has an ideology ever been as swiftly hollowed out as was this one? 

There are more than enough examples of the Loco in higher education today, but here are some, unfortunately not inclusive:

• A professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School was found after an internal investigation to have engaged in anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli discrimination. No personnel action was taken and one Harvard publication hailed him as a “civil rights hero.” 
• At the University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill refused an effort to move off campus a festival called “Palestine Writes.” One of the featured panelists posts on X under the name Rafaat in Gaza. 

In response to the baby burned to death in his family’s oven, Rafaat Alareer posts “with or without baking powder.”

He’s a Gaza professor who was hailed by the New York Times as a “bridge builder” two years ago, a man so vile, Burge remarks that Alareer was “auditioning for humor columnist for Der Sturmer.” The paper has now admitted it was taken in by him.

• UC San Diego’s ethnic studies department demanded “an end to genocide in Gaza” and cancelled a day of classes to conduct a general strike in support of Hamas. 
• Yale’s Daily News editor, a major in “women’s, gender and sexuality studies” issued a “correction” to an article on the atrocities by Sahar Tartak, a correction which ignoring all evidence, said that the claims that Hamas raped women and beheaded men were “unsubstantiated” and was finally forced to correct the correction albeit still disingenuously. 
• At Brandeis, a university founded by Jews after the Holocaust, the student government, padded with radicals, voted down a resolution to condemn Hamas.
• At Stanford students wrote “Come chat about how Jewish babies should be burned alive.”
• At Georgetown University (a big if not the biggest recipient of Qatar funds) Aneesa Johnson, who has a long history of anti-Semitic and anti-American conduct, was hired by the School of Foreign Service to be the “primary point of contact” for master’s students on “everything academic,” and only after public exposure was she placed on administrative leave.
• At the University of Minnesota posters of kidnapped Israelis were repeatedly vandalized, and “posters too obscene to share …were plastered around campus, Students at Hillel there say they are struggling.”  
• At Rutgers Professor Noura Erakat claims Israel is thirsty for Palestinian blood.
• At Harvard, some students went to Palestine and returned to campus to endorse Palestine and harass Jewish students.

One of the founders of GS4P, Elon Tettey-Temalko, a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School was filmed this week allegedly assaulting an Israeli Harvard Business School student who was filming a pro-Palestinian demonstration. 

Tettey-Temalko is under investigation by campus police and the FBI, according to a report in the Washington Free Beacon. Neither Harvard nor Tettey-Temalko returned The Post’s requests for comment Friday. Tettey-Temalko is also a proctor, a staff member who advises undergraduates and lives in their dorm.

A Harvard Law Review editor was also among those harassing and assaulting a Jewish student.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitic incidents “more than doubled in May 2021 compared to the same time period in 2020.

Cornell President, Martha Pollack sent out a letter in which she noted the “alarming national rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes… amid ongoing tensions in the Middle East” and appealed for “rigorous discourse and debate, devoid of personal invective and attacks.”

Cornell SJP’s [Students for Justice in Palestine] response was to trivialize this increase in anti-Semitism and condemn President Pollack for her statement.

In response to President Pollack’s letter, the group rejected the university president’s call for “rigorous discourse and debate.” Instead, they promoted “the duty to resist colonial violence.” The chapter added, “In conclusion: Our expectations for you were low but Holy F#%k.”

Cornell SJP then called on their followers to “send an email to administration [sic] in regards to their complete dismissal of the ethnic cleansing and apartheid of Palestinians.” 

In an Instagram post, Cornell SJP attached a link to an email condemning President Pollack’s letter. It was signed by Cornell professors, students and student groups.

One Cornell student was charged by the FBI after issuing death threats to Jewish students.

• At Cooper Union Jewish students took shelter in a locked library against a threatening mob.
• At Columbia:

Jewish students at Columbia University facing growing antisemitism on campus say they are feel unsafe and abandoned by campus administrators and some of their faculty and classmates, as tensions from the war between Israel and Hamas spill over onto college campuses.

Their concerns are echoed by many students across other New York colleges, including Cornell University and Cooper Union, who have reported feeling threatened on campus or isolated in their condemnation of Hamas’ terror attacks on civilians.

“This is a failure of the university to create a setting where students see each other as human,” said Yoni Kurtz, 21, a junior at Columbia studying history.

Kurtz and dozens of his Jewish classmates at Columbia have been stunned by a series of incidents, including an assault on campus being charged as a hate crime and a swastika found Friday in a school bathroom. They gathered Monday to say the university’s official response to these reports and others has been inadequate.

“We got to this point because the Columbia administration by their inaction has enabled antisemitic rhetoric to spread,” said Eli Shmidman, who is in his second year at Columbia Law School. Shmidman reported a student who approached him in a main thoroughfare of Jerome Greene Hall in the middle of the afternoon and said “f*ck the Jews.” 

• At Berkeley, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law Erwin Chemerinsky, a leftist whose record I’m sorry to say is not itself beyond reproach, says “Nothing prepared me for the antisemitism on college campuses.”
• Oberlin, which now seems to exist only to expend its endowment on litigation fees, fines, and judgements for outrageous behavior while its Board of Trustees (like those at all these schools) looks away and fails to act on the administration, faces a Title VI investigation for tolerating anti-Semitism and hiring Mohammad Jafar Mhallati (Professor of peace) who called for the elimination of Israel and the death of Salman Rushdie. 

Apart from the question of who funds and endorses this outpouring of hate, the best explanation is again David Burge’s:

@iowahawkblog

The intellectual manifest for this (to the degree it even exists) is People With Perceived Power = Bad and People Lacking Perceived Power = Good, and any that all People Lacking Perceived Power must sympathize and unite with all other People Lacking Perceived Power, regardless of how many children they behead.

Truth told, not *regardless* of how many children they behead, but *because* of how many children they behead. Because beheading children only underscores how desperately their plight, and the righteousness of their fight against the evil People With Perceived Power. 

The anguish among Jews who so respected academia and supported it is real.

We are not the ones ripping down missing posters or celebrating deranged murderers, but our uneasy silence has allowed those people to monopolize our public squares until we no longer have space to mourn our dead. The past three weeks are what happens when we stay quiet and let others set the alarming temperature of the air in the elite institutions we inhabit. Because to take a stand would make it harder to enter certain rooms. It would interfere with the work — the increasingly difficult, uncomfortable, queasy-making, indeed disfiguring work — of belonging.

I see clearly now who occupies those rooms — the moral arbiters of our generation, with their “pristine” ethical codes riddled with hypocrisy, their jargon-bloated excuses for antisemitic hate, their hollow pontification about empathy and justice delivered in the same breath with which they rationalize the murder and torture of people who might be my brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, cousins, or friends. I don’t want to contort myself to be in those rooms anymore. Do you?

It’s time those outfits that rank colleges and universities (Forbes, US News, USA Today), include a measurement of safety and civility for all students. Other measures in response to this rot are worth consideration and support.

There’s Title VI and other legislation that would apply. The Departments of Education and Justice should be pressed to investigate.

Can the radicals who have rotted out what until a few years ago was a country with an outstanding higher education record, be removed? Steve Hayward says it’s unlikely.  

He looks to the example of Ward Churchill, who like Elizabeth Warren faked his way into a professorship by lying about his ethnicity.

Though he didn’t have a PhD or any major publications, the department granted Churchill tenure in an accelerated process, and in due course he became department chair. 

It is clear the reason for his surprising advancement was ideological and not academic merit.

How often is this ideological process duplicated today? Quite widely. 

Here’s a current job ad from Georgetown: “The Department of Economics seeks to hire a tenure-track assistant professor who aligns with the University’s social justice objectives by conducting outstanding research and teaching in the areas of race, gender, inequality, and social justice economics.” 

In other words, it wants an ideological leftist.

Ohio State’s English Department is seeking a scholar who will work on “settler colonialism, decolonization, genocide, Indigenous epistemologies, sovereignty, social movements and activism…”

Students hoping for lively readings of Shakespeare or Jane Austen will want to enroll elsewhere.

Not to be left out, Duke University’s literature program is looking for a professor who will focus on “political theory, decoloniality and post-colonial theory” and “critical race and ethnic studies.”

Or consider elite Williams College, whose German department wants an assistant professor “committed to inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy,” especially in the areas of “migration, race and anti-racism, post- and decolonial approaches.”

These are just a few of the current university job ads in the humanities and social sciences; I have enough to fill a file cabinet. 

The irony of the Williams German department seeking a plainly ideological hire is that these centers of virulent antisemitism would have been at home in the pro-Nazi German universities of the 1930s.

University presidents and especially provosts, who are supposed to be the quality-control officers of higher education, could put a stop to this by exercising their authority to veto such ads or disapprove tenure and advancement of politicized professors. 

The invertebrates who serve as college presidents will do nothing meaningful beyond appointing a task force to look into the issue, as Harvard has done to cover its shame.[snip]

Our universities are so far gone and the number of professors deserving of dismissal so large that every school will shrink in terror from the controversies any housecleaning will cause 

Tongue in cheek, he suggests on X “we should dust off the de-Nazification manuals from 1945 and update them for use on college campuses in America.”

Of course, you can pressure Boards of Trustees to fulfill their fiduciary and moral obligations to clean up these outrages and put an end to them. You can fight to change tenure. You can (especially at state colleges with public funding) demand the end to DEI departments which foster this and the elimination of the made-up studies programs both of which are designed to employ pity hires — that is, people with no accepted academic credentials — to pad their diversity quotas, and return to solid scholarship. 

Apart from government action and pressure on trustees, those few sane deans left could follow George Q. Daley of Harvard’s medical school and condemn such rotten behavior. Major law firms have offered to represent Jewish students at universities which have allowed this harassment. Other firms have withdrawn employment offers and threaten to never hire students involved in anti-Semitic campus attacks. A number of major donors have said they will no longer contribute to schools which tolerate this, Steve Eisman, for example, has said he no longer — “ever” — wants his name associated with the University of Pennsylvania. And similar big donors to the school are withdrawing patronage over its support for Hamas and anti-Semitism. We can endorse legislation that limits foreign donations to these schools and provides some real oversight into the use to which they are put. Whether a big or small donor, you can keep your wallets shut when the begging letters come, and fight to end federal and state contributions to these cesspools. It might be time, even, to raise much higher taxes on the big endowments of the Ivies which have abandoned their educational responsibilities, choosing instead to operate like hedge funds.

Work together to expunge this rot. It took decades for this cancer to infect our colleges and universities. It will take time to eradicate it, but do not give up. React, write, speak, demand federal and state action, sue the dickens out of them, hire no student who engages in this. Draw down through taxes the huge endowments by which they have insulated themselves from all decency. They made the rules of cancel culture and it’s time we used the rules they made. 

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