by Clarice Feldman
It took decades for this cancer to infect our colleges and universities. It will take time to eradicate it.
Decades ago, higher education was held to a standard of legal responsibility for the welfare of its students. The Latin term in loco parentis (in
place of parents) gave them the right and duty to act as parents would.
In recent decades, a better description of the how they manage their
responsibilities to all students in their care is just plain loco.
David Burge explains:
@iowahawkblog
The idea that virulent antisemitism on campus is some kind of
shocking unforeseen phenomenon that suddenly appeared out of nowhere in
October 2023 is f***ing willful blindness. Every "elite" university in
the US has spent 40 years creating sinecures and chairs and entire
departments for Jew-hate-peddling lunatics, and for the last 20 years
panhandled donations from every lunatic oil sheikhdom to pay for them.
So, college presidents and deans can
spare me the shock when some of their edgy pity-hire faculty members
chant support for Hamas into a bullhorn. You dumb f***ers knew full well
what they were all about when you hired them in the first place, it was
all there in their curriculum….
Hamas
filmed and published with glee many of its barbarous atrocities in
Israel. Unlike the Nazis, who tried to hide the worst of it. Dwight
David Eisenhower, then commander of the European Theater of Operations,
knew there would be Holocaust deniers and made neighboring German
civilians join the press in touring concentration camps so that they and
the world would have a hard time doing that. Today, there can be no
question of what Hamas did: We have the audio of their phone calls and
the videos they produced. After the war, Eisenhower was the president of
Columbia University. Today, he’d be appalled to be connected with it in
any way.
The media has downplayed much of the horrific barbarism,
and this may be hard to hear, but here are just a few examples. In one
family, a first responder reported the husband was shot, the baby was
placed in a burning hot oven, and the wife, to the screams of her dying
child, was gang-raped and then killed. Secretary of State Antony Blinken
offers another:
"The father's eye gouged out, the mother's breast
cut off, the girl's foot amputated, the boy's fingers cut off before
they were executed, and then their executioners sat down and had a meal.
That is what this society is dealing with."
In recent years higher ed has been a place where free
speech was muzzled with lunatic claims of misgendering, misappropriation
and such. This conduct now makes hash of the bull hockey.
Professor David Bernstein nails the hypocrisy:
@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.
Clarice Feldman
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/11/higher_ed_now_its_just_loco.html
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