Category: Colleges acting badly

The state of Harvard according to Bill Ackman

October 3, 2024 • 8:50 am

Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum; as Wikipedia notes:

In 1988, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard College. His thesis was titled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions”.  In 1992, he received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.

But Ackman’s not a rapacious piker. Wikipedia adds this:

Ackman is a signatory of The Giving Pledge, committing himself to give away at least 50% of his wealth by the end of his life to charitable causes.  He has given to charitable causes such as the Center for Jewish History, where he spearheaded a successful effort to retire $30 million in debt, personally contributing $6.8 million.  The donation, along with those of Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, were the three largest individual gifts the center has ever received.  Ackman’s foundation donated $1.1 million to the Innocence Project in New York City and Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey.

Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. Here’s the tweet with the slides. I’ll highlight some of them, which are pretty damning for Harvard.

There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology.  In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators.  But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Here are some slides that support that thesis. First, a financial summary and the avowed mission of the College.

Here are some figures taken over the last 20 years:

Yet look at this administrative bloat! Why do they neeed so many administrators (in 20 years the administration has grown by 42% while student enrollment has grown by 0.3% and faculty by 0.5%:

And the cost of going to Schmarvard has doubled, “far outpacing inflation”. The cost of living over this period has increased only 61%. The tuition and fees this year are about $83,000 per annum, so a four-year education costs over a third of a million bucks.

Yet Harvard’s endowment has also more than doubled over this period, and is now 51 BILLION dollars. Ackman’s conclusion:

Here are three of Ackman’s plaints (he’s a registered Democrat but appears to support Trump). I can’t verify the first one (Ackman’s figures are likely accurate), but we all know about the second.  As for the slide just below, Harvard is probably LESS liberal than other schools, but we know that the dearth of conservative viewpoints (just 3% of faculty) is a general issue. Whether you consider that a problem, and if so, how to remedy it—these are matters for debate.

Last year Harvard was last in FIRE’s free-speech ranking, now it’s sixth from last:

Grade inflation is something I abhor, but it seems unstoppable; it’s part of the Alice in Wonderland view that “all must have prizes,” and a sign of the devaluing of merit. It cannot be that students have gotten so much smarter in 20 years! No, grading has gotten easier.

He then shows a series of slides explaining what has happened to Harvard.  This is the summary: it’s become woke and its mission has become woker, conforming to the ideology of the day rather than seeking truth and knowledge.  You can find the new mission statement below:

The latest mission statement, showing the emphasis on diversity, and it doesn’t mean intellectual diversity. The emphasis is on social diversity, coming from “different walks of life,” and having “different identities.” These differences, asserts Schmarvard, will perforce YIELD “intellectual transformation.”

There follows a series of slides showing that while the “demand” of students for education in economics and computer science has grown modestly (as well as the number of faculty in these areas and the number of degrees conferred), the faculty in “studies” departments has grown much faster.  But the number of degrees conferred in “studies” has decreased sharply.. Ackman concludes that Harvard is allocating its resources according to an ideological, diversity-centered platform.

He supports this by giving an analysis of the words used in Harvard’s course catalogue, presumably reflecting its curriculum:

Truth is mentioned much less often than Gender or “oppression”.

Ackman does note that the interim President (Garber will be there for three more years) has done some good things:

From all of this, and assessing Harvard as an “investment” (possibly aimed at potential donors), Ackman regards the College as a “hold”:

I largely agree with Ackman about Harvard, though the problems he singles out, like grade inflation and an ideological bent, also plague other schools. But Ackman, like me, went to Harvard, and we share a sentimentality about the place that lingers (I had a terrific time and got a terrific education in its grad school).  So here’s his reply when someone questions him about why, given all these problems, Harvard is a “hold” rather than a “sell”:

 

The President of Wesleyan wants MORE political activism in college

September 4, 2024 • 11:30 am

Bring it on! More encampments, more divisiveness, more people rooting for terrorists and demanding divestment from the world’s only Jewish state! This, apparently, is what Michael Roth, the President of prestigious Wesleyan College, is calling for in his new NYT op-ed. Click below to read, or find the article archived here.

Now the title is a bit misleading. Although Roth wants a return to the days when the main mission of colleges was often said to be “producing good citizens” rather than “research. teaching and learning, especially learning how to think”, he’s really not saying much more beyond the latter mission, though he sounds radical at the start (emphasis below is mine):

Last year was a tough one on college campuses, so over the summer a lot of people asked me if I was hoping things would be less political this fall. Actually, I’m hoping they will be more political.

That’s not to say that I yearn for entrenched conflict or to once again hear chants telling me that I “can’t hide from genocide,” much less anything that might devolve into antisemitic or Islamophobic harassment or violence. But since at least the 1800s, colleges and universities in the United States have sought to help students develop character traits that would make them better citizens. That civic mission is only more relevant today. The last thing any university president should want is an apolitical campus.

College students have long played an important, even heroic role in American politics. Having defended the voting franchise during the civil rights movement and helped to end the Vietnam War, they have continued to work for change across a range of social issues. If you went to college in the past 50 years, there’s a good chance the mission statement of your school included language that emphasized the institution’s contribution to society. Like many others, my university’s founding documents speak of contributing to the good of the individual and the good of the world. Higher-education institutions have never been neutral.

Well, that’s not exactly true. First of all, where’s the evidence that college students have produced, on average, more social justice than people who didn’t go to college? (These days, in fact, it seems to be the opposite, as antiliberal wokeness is concentrated in influential colleges.) I’m betting, in fact, that the Civil Rights movement of the sixties was propelled not by traits developed by a college education (granted, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King did go to college), but by simple awareness of a morality involving equal rights and opportunities. And those things you don’t learn in college.

Further, when Roth asserts that “higher-education institutions have never been [politically] neutral,” he’s just wrong.  Contributing to the good of civilization is not a violation of political neutrality; divesting from Israel is.  And plenty of colleges, most notably mine, refuse to take stands on political issues (viz., the Kalven Report).

But wait! There’s more:

The issue that matters most to many activists right now is the war in Gaza, and protesters will undoubtedly continue to make their voices heard. Last spring at Wesleyan, students built an encampment of up to about 100 tents to protest the war and to call for the university to divest from companies thought to be supporting it. Since the protest was nonviolent and the students in the encampment were careful not to disrupt normal university operations, we allowed it to continue because their right to nonviolent protest was more important than their modest violations of the rules.

I walked through the protest area daily, as did many faculty members, students and staff members. I also met with pro-Israel students, mostly Jewish, some of whom felt beleaguered by what their classmates were saying. I made clear that if any of them felt harassed, I would intervene. I also said that I could ensure their ability to pursue their education but that I could not protect them from being offended.

Good thing President Roth doesn’t lead Columbia (see latest report here) or Stanford, where recent reports show pervasive anti-Semitism as documented by student reports (granted, it’s based on students’ experiences, but that’s exactly what Roth wants to know about). Further, on many campuses the protests certainly did violate campus regulations, as well as the law. Roth seems to be unaware of that.

Roth also seems to think that the only alternative to the college mission of “developing good citizens” is “helping students get a job”. But of course learning itself, and learning how to think, do research, and analyze arguments, is a third alternative, and one that is a quality we want in our citizens but comes as a byproduct of the third mission:

These days many Americans seem to think that education should be focused entirely on work force development. They define the “good of the individual” as making a living, not working with others to figure out how to live a good life. It’s understandable. In these days of economic disparities, social polarization and hyperpartisanship, it is certainly challenging to talk with one’s neighbors about what we want from our lives in common. But that is the core of political discussion.

In the end, in fact, Roth shows that the qualities that make for effective learning just happen to be the qualities he thinks produce “good citizens”: freedom of thought and speech, and the ability to discuss things rationally and civilly, and, especially, to pay attention to those with opposing views.  Who would have thought that?:

Professors aren’t in classrooms to entice students to share their ideology; they are there to challenge students to grapple with how much more there is to learn about any issue that really matters.

These discussions, like all authentic learning, depend on freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression. They also involve deep listening — thinking for ourselves in the company of others. The classical liberal approach to freedom of expression underscores that discussions are valuable only when people are able to disagree, listen to opposing views, change their minds.

To strengthen our democracy and the educational institutions that depend on it, we must learn to practice freedom better. This fall we can all learn to be better students and better citizens by collaborating with others, being open to experimentation and calling for inclusion rather than segregation — and participating in the electoral process. As for those loud voices in the political sphere who are afraid of these experiments, who want to retreat to silos of like-mindedness, we can set an example of how to learn from people whose views are unlike our own.

Forget about the DEI-ish “inclusion” part, and it’s beyond me why college should teach students how to “participate in the electoral process” when anybody with neurons already knows how to vote. What Roth has produced, under a novel and provocative title, is just the same old (and, yes, salubrious) call for truly free speech and a college ethos of imparting and creating knowledge.  My reaction is “meh.”

I asked Greg Mayer what he thought of the piece, and his first response was this (quoted with permission):

It’s pretty awful, both in overview and detail. God help Wesleyan with people like him in charge.

Followed by this in a second response:

To elaborate a bit, Roth seems nostalgic for the 60s, and wants to regenerate that atmosphere. To do so, he is willing to bend the rules and negotiate under conditions approaching blackmail. He adopts the anti-woke stance of “you have to handle being offended”, but he doesn’t want to offend pro-Hamas protesters. Roth doesn’t seem to know what institutional neutrality is, and he doesn’t know what universities are for.

And a second addendum:

Also, Roth’s attempt to invoke alternatives to the neoliberal consensus is risible. Higher ed is so deep into neoliberalism they don’t even know what it is anymore, him included. (Search “neoliberal consensus” on WEIT for discussion.) His apparent alignment with “progressives” reveals his fondness for neoliberalism. As Adolph Reed wrote, antiracism is a neoliberal alternative to a left.

Greg’s reaction is stronger than my “meh,” he thinks that Roth is basically pushing nonsense. But both Greg and I agree that the article makes no new arguments, and also floats some bad ones.

Anti-Israel protests begin on first day of class at Cornell

August 31, 2024 • 12:00 pm

I’m back in Cape Town, and preparing Kruger Post #1. In the meantime, have another read about college miscreants:

See below. I told you so, but this isn’t rocket science. Anybody with two neurons to rub together could have guessed the protest engine would rev up when classes begin again, for, especially at elite schools, students are more interested in enforcing what they consider Social Justice on others than engaging in learning.

The article below (click to read), written by Judy Lucas four days ago, was published in The Ithaca Voice, the local paper. Click headline to read:

An excerpt:

The spring semester at Cornell University ended with protests, as students erected an encampment on the Arts Quad to oppose the university’s ties to institutions supporting the Israeli state. The war in Gaza raged on through the summer, with reports of thousands of more lives lost. Cornell’s fall semester started much like its last one ended.

A crowd of about 150 student protestors at Cornell University marched into a campus dining hall Monday, the first day of classes, where speakers renewed the call for the university to divest from any institutions supplying weapons and support to the Israeli military in the war against Hamas, among a set of other demands first released earlier this year.

Have a look at the list of demands, especially the “land return” demand (#1) and the usual “and-of-course-we’re-not-to-be-punished” demand (#8).

Twenty minutes into the rally, seven university police officers entered the atrium of Klarman Hall and stood guard near the protestors. At the instruction of lead organizers, students joined arms to form a chain in order to resist interactions with police.

And the kicker: no IDs proferred when asked, and no punishment (bolding is mine, and it’s all bolded because it shows the cowardice of the Cornell administration).

Officers asked protesters to hand over their student identification cards to refer them to the university’s conduct office for potential disciplinary action. None of the protestors followed orders but no arrests were made. 

Have a tweet; this one has three videos and it’s just like the bawling we heard so often last year.

The unions, by and large all anti-Israel (are there any pro-Israel unions?), were part of the demonstration:

The Coalition for Mutual Liberation (CML), which represents the university’s activist organizations and the group responsible for organizing and maintaining the pro-Palestinian encampment on Cornell’s Arts Quad in April, planned Monday’s demonstration.

They were joined by representatives of the United Auto Workers Local 2300, the union representing about 1,200 university employees, including custodians, cooks and food service workers, who are currently on strike demanding an increase in wages and improved working conditions.

As usual, there’s illegal vandalism:

The morning of the demonstration, graffiti reading “Israel bombs, Cornell pays” and “Blood is on your hands” was found, spray-painted in red, on the front facade of Day Hall, the university’s administrative building. The front door was also shattered.

Cornell’s Vice President for University Relations Joel Malina released a statement on behalf of the university Aug. 26. Malina wrote the administration was “appalled by the graffiti spray painted.”

“Acts of violence, extended occupation of buildings, or property damage (including graffiti) will not be tolerated and will prompt an immediate response from public safety,” Malina wrote. “Cornell Police are conducting a thorough investigation, and those responsible will be subject to suspension and criminal charges.”

Joel Malina is Cornell’s Vice President for University Relations, and if you think that anybody will be suspended or subject to criminal charges, I have some land in Florida to sell you.

Finally, the interim Provost and President sent out an email with dire warnings about what would happen to students who engaged in encampments:

Students involved in encampments would first receive a warning of their violation of the university’s policy. On a second violation, the student would receive a “non-academic temporary suspension.” After a third violation, a student would receive “temporary academic suspension.”

I guess to get a “permanent academic suspension,” you have to shoot someone.

This is only the very beginning. When asked for a comment, the University said bupkes. 

Cornell University has not released a statement or comment regarding the specific demonstration Monday evening during which university police officers were involved.

In response to an email from The Ithaca Voice requesting a statement regarding the protest, a media representative for the university said “We don’t have anything specific regarding yesterday afternoon’s protest.”

Have another tweet with two videos:

There are more invertebrates in Cornell’s administration than there are in one square meter of the bottom of Cape Town’s Harbour. But there’s one consolation. While Cornell’s administration is demonstrating its spinelessness, I seriously doubt that it will give in to any of the student demands.

h/t: Debi

More on the decline and fall of science education in New Zealand

August 21, 2024 • 11:15 am

Skip this if you don’t care about science education in New Zealand, but plenty of scientists there are worried about it. And it’s a harbinger of what may happen to science education in the U.S. as science courses add requirements to teach indigenous “ways of knowing” and the curriculum itself pushes out traditional material to make way for content that aligns with ideological and political objectives.

Each faculty at the University of Auckland, for instance, has to have one of these mandatory courses tailored to ideological ends.  The one below, for instance, is being created on a trial basis as a requirement for all science majors. I believe I’ve discussed it before, so click on the headline below to see what’s on tap in science education.

Here is the course overview and the course goals (“learning outcomes”):

Course overview:

Contemporary science is deeply entwined with place, knowledge systems and ethics. This course examines these concepts through the lens of sustainability to demonstrate how they shape research agendas, methodologies, and applications of contemporary science. To address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, science must recognise and navigate the complexities of these interrelated concepts.

Explore the role of place-based knowledge, the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand. This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Learning outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

    1. Demonstrate how place, and an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are significant to your field of study
    2. Critically and constructively engage with knowledge systems, practices and positionality
    3. Employ a reciprocal, values-based approach to collaborating
    4. Communicate ideas clearly, effectively and respectfully
    5. Reflexively engage with the question of ethics in academic practice
    6. Demonstrate a critical understanding of sustainability

Note the worshipful discussion of “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi that is nearly sacred and almost serves as a constitution for New Zealand, though some of its interpretations are questionable and it was not signed by many Māori leaders on the South Island.  It’s not even a document with hard legal status.

The Treaty did assure the Māori that they’d have the same rights as British citizens and would keep control of their lands and properties, and was written to bring New Zealand into being as a British colony. That means that today Europeans are seen as oppressive “colonizers”. The treaty is now used as a rationale to ensure that Māori or those of Māori ancestry are given equity (not just equal opportunity) in admissions, grants, and so on. The Treaty is also the rationale for the current change in curricula, meant to effect “decolonization,” which in my view means changing modern education to one infused with traditional Māori “ways of knowing.”

The course outline and objectives above are ideological in this way, involving not science per se but a postmodern philosophy of science in which reality is shaped by the scientist and the place where he/she came from.

The emphasis on “ethics” doesn’t belong in a mandatory science course, and I think will serve only to confuse students.

Finally there’s this:

“the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand”

and this:

“This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi.”

I’d be delighted if someone would explain to me why the Treaty of Waitangi should be explicitly discussed in a required science course. Note the emphasis on “diverse knowledge systems”.  I can only guess what that means, but it’s pretty clear.

Now here’s a new course that isn’t required for science majors, but still counts as a science course. Click on the headline below for the course description, even more risible than the one above,

Here is the course prescription, the course overview, and the learning outcomes. Remember, this is a course for which students get science credit:

Course Prescription

Mātauranga is central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand. Explores foundational understandings of mātauranga Māori and Kaupapa Māori for scientists. Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori through place-based relational learning and case studies grounded in whanaungatanga. Students will experience Māori ways of being, knowing, and doing.
Course Overview
This course welcomes all students who wish to engage with mātauranga in relation to scientific place-based knowledge. Engagement with Indigenous knowledge, including mātauranga, is increasingly important to the practice of science in Aotearoa [New Zealand] and beyond. Pūtaiao, meaning science curriculum that includes mātauranga, is well established in primary and secondary education. This course will further develop the learning of pūtaiao [pūtaiao] into tertiary science education and scientific research. Enhancing understandings of mātauranga and Kaupapa Māori [Māori practice] for scientists will develop skills in critical thinking, reflective and relational practice, and the application of Kaupapa Māori in science.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, students will be able to:
    1. Compare articulations of Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    2. Recognise strategies that support, protect, and empower mātauranga in science and the relevance to whānau, hapū and iwi.
    3. Critically explain and communicate understandings of the relationship between Kaupapa Māori, mātauranga and science.
    4. Describe the history of Pūtaiao in science education and relate the development of Pūtaiao to the practice of science in Aotearoa.
    5. Work effectively in a team to develop research skills, including the ability to meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori.

Note that Kaupapa Māori means the practices of the indigenous people and  Mātauranga Māori comprises Māori “ways of knowing”, including some empirical knowledge gained by trial and error (MM isn’t hypothesis-based), as well as a bunch of superstition, ethics, tradition, myths, lore, legend, and religion.

This course appears one designed to demonstrate that indigenous ways of knowing are not only vital to modern science, but nearly coequal to it, something “central to the future practice of science in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

My answer to that last quote is simply “no it isn’t.” In science classes what should be taught is modern science: the general body of knowledge and tools for knowing as practiced throughout the world today.  Indigenous knowledge may be a part of that, but only a very small one, and likely could be omitted without loss.  If traditional lore and knowledge about when to collect eels or berries is to be taught, it should be in anthropology or sociology class, not a class that gives you science credit.

This course shows that the new curriculum in NZ simply has lost sight of the distinction between science and non-science, and is blurring the boundaries between naturalistic modern science, social science, and ideology.

Note in particular this bit from the second course: “Students will meaningfully and respectfully engage with te ao Māori”. (Te ao Māori is the specifically Māori worldview.) What would people make of the phrase “meaningful and respectful engagement” if used in a science course, where students are encouraged to question everything? What this shows is data being replaced by motivated reasoning that aligns with social justice principles.

If you think this is irrelevant to America, think again. What we’re seeing is fast-forward time travel of DEI carried to its logical limits, with the sacralization of everything indigenous.  While I don’t think for a moment that we’ll have Native American science courses pervading American universities, American teaching of science is becoming increasingly infected with principles of social justice. I’ve gone into this issue many times before and won’t repeat my thoughts, but do spare a thought for the poor science teachers in New Zealand who have to spoon this stuff into the mouths of their students, impeding what should be a real education in science.

Another one bites the dust: Columbia’s president resigns

August 15, 2024 • 8:15 am

Congressional hearings about free speech and anti-semitism at Penn, Harvard, MIT and Columbia have now resulted in the resignation of the third of these Presidents. Yes, Columbia President Nemat Shafik, following Presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of Penn out the door, has resigned her post. President  President Sally Kornbluth of MIT remains in her job.

The brouhaha began last December when, facing two House panels, three Presidents said that in some cases, depending on context, calls for genocide of the Jews might not violate university regulations. Indeed, this was correct according to a First-Amendment construal of this kind of speech. The problem was that these universities, purporting to adhere to the First Amendment, didn’t really do so for other kinds of speech, so they were really guilty of hypocritical and unequal enforcement.  And their presentations on the Hill were stiff and unempathic. Shafik, grilled this April, angered those who said she’d done very little to curb antisemitism on her campus.

Further, Claudine Gay was later accused of serious and multiple incidents of plagiarism, and, in light of all the bad publicity, Harvard gave Gay the boot. Harvard now has now an interim President, Alan Garber, who will run Harvard for the next two years while it looks for a permanent President.

Click below to read the story. Shafik proved hamhanded in the face of pro-Palestinian and antisemitic behavior on campus, with apparently no students being disciplined, including those who stormed and occupied a Columbia building.

Click to read:

An excerpt:

Columbia University’s president, Nemat Shafik, resigned on Wednesday after months of far-reaching fury over her handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and questions over her management of a bitterly divided campus.

She was the third leader of an Ivy League university to resign in about eight months following maligned appearances before Congress about antisemitism on their campuses.

Dr. Shafik, an economist who spent much of her career in London, said in a letter to the Columbia community that while she felt the campus had made progress in some important areas, it had also been a period of turmoil “where it has been difficult to overcome divergent views across our community.”

What she means is that she can’t manage to stop violations of campus rules for encampment and behavior by pro-Palestinian students. This is because Columbia won’t discipline violators.  A lot of the lack of discipline stems from the attitudes of Columbia faculty, many of whom supported the illegal protests and called for Shafik’s resignation after she called the police to dismantle the local encampment. Caught between Jewish faculty and students on one hand and pro-Palestinian faculty on the other, Shafik was rendered powerless. More:

She added that her resignation was effective immediately, and that she would be taking a job with Britain’s foreign secretary to lead a review of the government’s approach to international development.

The university’s board of trustees named Dr. Katrina A. Armstrong, a medical doctor who has been the chief executive of Columbia’s medical center and dean of its medical school since 2022, as the interim president. The board did not immediately announce a timeline for appointing a permanent leader.

. . . But as much as its sudden end, the brevity of Dr. Shafik’s presidency underscores how profoundly pro-Palestinian demonstrations shook her campus and universities across the country.

Facing accusations that she was permitting antisemitism to go unchecked on campus, Dr. Shafik made a conciliatory appearance before Congress in April that ended up enraging many members of her own faculty. She summoned the police to Columbia’s campus twice, including to clear an occupied building. The moves angered some students and faculty, even as others in the community, including some major donors, said she had not done enough to protect Jewish students on campus.

Dr. Shafik’s tenure was among the shortest in Columbia’s 270-year history, and much of it was a sharp reminder of the challenges facing university presidents, who have sometimes struggled recently to lead upended campuses while balancing student safety, free speech and academic freedom.

Few university leaders were as publicly linked to that dilemma as Dr. Shafik, whose school emerged as a hub of the campus protests that began after the Israel-Hamas war erupted last year.

Those protests, as well as accusations of endemic antisemitism, drew the attention of House Republicans, who orchestrated a series of hearings in Washington starting last year.

But make no mistake about it: the protests will continue this next academic year at Columbia and at other schools. The war in Gaza continues, and Israel is still demonized by many academics (remember that the American Association of University Professors just eliminated their two-decade opposition to academic boycotts, undoubtedly to allow boycotts of Israel).

And so Columbia has a color-coded system to indicate the degree of protest occurring on the campus. This is ridiculous:

To prepare for the possibility of renewed protests in the fall, the university announced a new color-coded system to guide the community on protest risk level on campus, similar to a Homeland Security advisory system. The level was recently set from Green to Orange [JAC: there’s also red], the second-highest, meaning “moderate risk.” Only people with Columbia identification are permitted to enter the central campus, which in the past has been open to the public.

College protesters have vowed to come back stronger than ever to push their main demand that Columbia divest from weapons manufacturers and other companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Regardless of who leads Columbia, the students will continue their activism and actions until Columbia divests from Israeli apartheid,” said Mahmoud Khalil, a student negotiator on behalf of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the main protest movement. “We want the president to be a president for Columbia students, answering to their needs and demands, rather than answering to political pressure from outside the university.”

I doubt that Columbia, like Chicago and many other schools, will agree to divest, for that is eliminating institutional neutrality in the investment of college funds. As so long as there are calls for divestment, and the universities refuse to divest, the protests will continue.  Coming this fall: Code Red, when almost nobody will be allowed on Columbia’s campus.

Of course free speech, along the lines of the Chicago Prnciples, should reign at all campuses, but there should also be time, place, and manner restrictions so that speech doesn’t impede the functioning of the university (e.g. deplatforming speakers, sit-ins in campus buildings, use of bullhorns during class).  So far these restrictions have largely been ignored by schools like Columbia, loath to have officials or police “lay hands” on protestors since that creates bad “optics.”. But if these illegal protests continue, then we can kiss higher education in America goodbye.  But who cares? The pro-Palestinian protestors aren’t interested in holding universities to their mission. Rather, they want to bend universities to their own ideology, and many, in the end, want to efface the principles of Western democracy.

Year’s total: no University of Chicago protestors were penalized despite multiple breakages of state laws and University rules

August 14, 2024 • 10:00 am

The Hyde Park Herald reports that the University of Chicago, which previously withheld diplomas from eleven students for participating in our encampment, has given them back. This means that although the students were warned that being in the encampment was illegal, they, along with all the encampers, suffered no penalty for breaking University rules. The encampment was the fifth violation of University regulations by protestors that went unpunished. 

This seems to be the general trend in most universities. Now that the tumultuous year has ended, universities are experiencing a wave of forgiveness—a wave that will come back to haunt them this fall.  As far as I can see, no students were disciplined by the city of Chicago or by the University despite multiple and clear violations of both the law and University regulations. (This includes the Ciry of Chicago dropping trespassing charges against 24 students and two faculty who were arrested for violating University regulations for sit-ins in University buildings.}

In April I recounted the sad story of how remiss Chicago has been in punishing pro-Palestinian protestors who violated University regulations. As far as I know, the only puniahment levied the entire year, as described above, is a simple warning to the Students for Justice in Palestine that they had better desist from illegally disrupting and deplatforming opponents:

Official Warning – An official warning indicates the organization has violated University policies or regulations and will be placed on file. If the organization engages in any additional misconduct, the appropriate disciplinary body will be informed of this official warning, the related circumstances, and must consider the warning in determining further sanctions.

No that’s really going to deter illegal protests, isn’t it? As noted below, the protestors are proclaiming they’ll return this fall resuming their disruptions. Why wouldn’t they, when they know there’s no penalty for doing so?

Click below to read the Hyde Park Herald’s account of the restoration of diplomas:

An excerpt:

The last of the disciplinary cases against 10 University of Chicago students for their involvement in the pro-Palestine campus encampment was dismissed this week, student activists announced Monday.

Among those facing disciplinary cases were four graduating seniors and a graduate student, whose diplomas were withheld pending U. of C. investigations into potentially “disruptive conduct” at the encampment, which was erected on the Main Quadrangle in early May to protest the institution’s investments in weapons manufacturers arming Israel in its war on Gaza. Most of these cases – including those for another six undergraduate students – were dismissed last month, and the final one, the case of the graduate student, was dismissed and the degree conferred on August 12.

Youseff Hasweh, one of the four graduating seniors, said Monday that this final dismissal after months of pressure from students, alumni and faculty “tells UChicago that we’re never going to back down.”

“Students are even more fired up to join the movement and to let UChicago know that this wasn’t okay, that everything they’ve done this past year,” he said.

In addition to tearing down the encampment, U. of C. police officers arrested more than two dozen students and two faculty members during a November sit-in demanding divestment in the Israel-Hamas war and that the U. of C. cut ties with Israel altogether. U. of C. officers also arrested one person during a commencement walkout this June.

As I said, the City dropped all charges against the two dozen students and two faculty members.  I don’t know why this happened, but surely some punishment should be meted out by the University (as did Vanderbilt–see link above) for illegal sit ins, even if it’s only a note on the student’s transcript.

University regulations that aren’t enforced are regulations that are toothless and can be violated with impunity. I predict that the whole brouhaha will begin again this fall, as there’s simply no way the conflict between Israel and Hamas will be resolved by then. I’ll add this: those calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, including candidate Kamala Harris, realize that, by leaving Hamas in power, such a move will ensure that Israel will be forever subject to Palestinian terrorism—until the Jewish state is destroyed by an Iranian nuke.

As for my University, the paper says this:

Administrators for the U. of C. could not be reached for comment regarding the alleged photos as of press time.

That, of course, means they have no comment.

Get ready for fall—it will be a bumpy ride.

AAUP drops 20-year opposition to academic boycotts

August 14, 2024 • 8:30 am

Most rational people, I believe, are opposed to academic boycotts: those political movements that try to prohibit the exchange of scholars or academic information with countries deemed unacceptable on ideological grounds.  These boycotts not only stem the free flow of information among countries that is the lifeblood of academia—especially of science—but also punish those who can contribute to this knowledge even though those people rarely have any influence with their government. Indeed, as in the case of Israel (surely the reason for the dropping of the boycott prohibition), many scholars are opposed to the government’s policies.

Inside Higher Ed (click below to read) reports on the ending of boycotts by the influential organization the American Association of University Professors, an organization that should know better. Click to read:

The report:

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has dropped its nearly 20-year-old categorical opposition to academic boycotts, in which scholars and scholarly groups refuse to work or associate with targeted universities. The reversal, just like the earlier statement, comes amid war between Israelis and Palestinians.

In 2005, near the end of the second intifada, a Palestinian uprising, the AAUP denounced such boycotts; the following year, it said they “strike directly at the free exchange of ideas.” That statement has now been replaced by one saying boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses to conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the mission of higher education.” The new statement doesn’t mention Israel, Palestine or other current events—but the timing isn’t coincidental.

The new position says that “when faculty members choose to support academic boycotts, they can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”

Note that the AAUP never prevented individual professors from deciding not to cooperate with faculty from other countries. Rather, they used to aver that systematic academic boycotts were not approved by the organization.   Now that’s all changed: systematic boycotts are okay.  But o its credit, the University of Chicago, under the late President Bob Zimmer, opposed academic boycotts in a 2013 statement, and our opposition remains intact:

“The University of Chicago has from its founding held as its highest value the free and open pursuit of inquiry. Faculty and students must be free to pursue their research and education around the world and to form collaborations both inside and outside of the academy, encouraging engagement with the widest spectrum of views. For this reason, we oppose boycotts of academic institutions or scholars in any region of the world, and oppose recent actions by academic societies to boycott Israeli institutions.”

That’s the way a gutsy university handles such matters. Sadly, the AAUP punted (read its statement at the link).  The AAUP’s statement was also heartily approved by a group participating in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, an antisemitic initiative whose goal is to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state. Click to read:

An excerpt:

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) commends the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for dropping its biased, unethical policy opposing academic boycotts, which was primarily aimed at shielding Israeli universities from accountability for their egregious human rights violations.

PACBI salutes all those who worked tirelessly to push the AAUP to change its position, as well as the conscientious academics, students, and progressive academic associations that have for years advocated for ending US academic institutional complicity with Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid and, in the process, challenging AAUP’s hypocrisy. Without their persistent protests and intellectual challenges, without the student-led encampments reenergizing campus campaigns for academic boycott and divestment in response to Israel’s Gaza genocide, the AAUP would not have reversed its ethically and logically untenable policy.

. . . Scrapping its unethical policy, which was, arguably by design, used to suppress academic freedom of many calling for BDS against Israel, the new AAUP position recognizes the obvious. It finally accepts that academic boycotts targeting institutions deeply implicated in grave human rights violations can be legitimate “to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”

The PCBI’s only beef is that the AAUP didn’t go far enough and denounce Israel specifically:

. . . AAUP’s failure to now endorse the Palestinian call to boycott complicit Israeli universities, which it finally recognizes as legitimate, even as Israel’s violence culminates in the world’s first livestreamed genocide, which has included scholasticide, domicide and engineered famine, is a profound ethical failure to make amends for the harm the AAUP’s racist policy has done to Palestinians and to our struggle for emancipation from colonial subjugation.

It’s clear from all this, as Inside Higher Ed notes, that the AAUP’s change of policy was to legitimize academic boycotts of Israel.  The coincidence of timing is too strong to imply otherwise.