#President Sally Kornbluth

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik had a sharp response to the news that University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was stepping down from her position over the weekend: “One down. Two to go.”

It was Stefanik’s line of questioning at a hearing last week before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce that attracted the most attention from the roughly five hours of testimony. A series of exchanges went viral when Magill and other university presidents at Harvard and MIT failed to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews as explicitly against campus rules on harassment and bullying. The answers from such high-profile leaders in higher education sparked bipartisan backlash and condemnation, which led to Magill’s departure and increasing pressure to oust both Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.

Stefanik, a Harvard graduate herself, has been leading the charge since the hearing to highlight and investigate campus antisemitism, and her efforts have attracted supporters from across the aisle as well as former President Donald Trump.

In a new statement Monday, Stefanik again called out MIT and Harvard, saying, “The leadership at these universities is totally unfit and untenable.”

“As clear evidence of the vastness of the moral rot at every level of these schools, this earthquake has revealed that Harvard and MIT are totally unable to grasp this grave question of moral clarity at this historic moment as the world is watching in horror and disgust,” Stefanik said in the statement. “It is pathetic and abhorrent.”

Stefanik announced late last week the committee was launching an investigation into Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. While the investigation became public before news of Magill’s resignation broke, the New York congresswoman’s statements since then have made clear she’s not finished with the issue.

“This forced resignation of the President of Penn is the bare minimum of what is required,” Stefanik said in a statement over the weekend. “These universities can anticipate a robust and comprehensive Congressional investigation of all facets of their institutions’ negligent perpetration of antisemitism including administrative, faculty, and overall leadership and governance.”

Former Penn board chair Scott Bok also resigned Saturday.

Trump praised Stefanik as “very smart” over the weekend.

“I guess they’re all gonna be losing their jobs within the next day or two, but one down, two to go,” Trump said in a speech hosted by the New York Young Republican Club late Saturday night – repeating Stefanik’s line hours after she put her statement out.

Stefanik has a polarizing reputation on Capitol Hill as a staunch supporter of Trump. But the congresswoman has managed to amass Democratic support for pushing for the ouster of university presidents. She co-wrote a letter dated Friday with Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida demanding those presidents’ removal. The letter was also signed by Democrats Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Joe Courtney of Connecticut.

“I am proud to lead a bipartisan letter with @RepMoskowitz and 72 of our colleagues to the members of the Governing Boards of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn demanding that their presidents be removed after this week’s @EdWorkforceCmte hearing,” Stefanik tweeted Friday.

Gay has since apologized for her remarks, in an interview with The Harvard Crimson on Thursday.

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay told the student newspaper. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “Words matter.”

The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board, issued a statement last week saying President Sally Kornbluth has their “full and unreserved support.”

Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014, replaced then-Rep. Liz Cheney as GOP conference chairwoman in May 2021. While she voted against one of Trump signature legislative victories – his 2017 tax plan – she attracted significant attention for her impassioned defense of Trump around the former president’s first impeachment investigation in 2019.

While she’s been one of the most visible messengers for the House GOP Conference, she was not one of the many Republicans to throw themselves in for nomination to be the next House Speaker, after Kevin McCarthy was ousted earlier this fall.

Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the Department of Education has opened an unprecedented number of investigations into alleged incidents of hate on college campuses.

Both Harvard and Penn, along with 11 other colleges and five K-12 school districts, have come under investigation since that time. The Department of Education has told CNN that the situation is becoming untenable for the Office for Civil Rights, and that it doesn’t have the investigative staff to match the influx of cases, shining a light on where the investigation Stefanik announced last week may be able to fill in those gaps.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jessica Costescu

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty member went on an anti-Semitic tirade after the House Committee on Education and the Workforce pressed the school to provide internal documents about its response to the outbreak of anti-Semitism on campus.

A postdoctoral associate working in MIT's Tonegawa neuroscience lab, Afif Aqrabawi, derided the committee chairwoman, Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), as "a treasonous Zionist tool, a genocide enabler, and a disgusting shit stain of a human," and described other members of the House as "Israeli bootlickers."

Aqrabawi also referred to American politicians as "loyal prostitutes of Netanyahu," lamented the influence of Jewish political groups, and referred to Israelis as "parasites."

"I make it clear your representatives are eager cucks for defense contractors and AIPAC," he wrote. "My words are dangerous because they may alert a distracted American public to the parasites using their country as a host species."

Aqrabawi’s tirade came in the wake of a letter from Foxx to MIT president Sally Kornbluth that panned Kornbluth’s response to several anti-Semitic incidents on campus and pressed the school to provide internal documents shedding light on its policies and code of conduct.

The committee’s letter cited several tweets Aqrabawi sent, including one in which he said Israel "has no future in this world." In other posts highlighted by the committee, the MIT faculty member accused Israelis of "harvesting" the organs of dead Palestinians and called Zionists "Jewish fundamentalists who want to enslave the world in a global Apartheid system."

As a postdoctoral associate in MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, Aqrabawi earns a minimum salary of $66,950 and works under a "faculty mentor," according to MIT’s website. The head of Aqrabawi's lab is Susumu Tonegawa, a professor of biology and neuroscience.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Alec Schemmel

Last fall, Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth tapped a group of Jewish faculty members to advise the school on a new initiative meant to combat campus anti-Semitism. The participants were "hopeful," they said in an email to fellow MIT staff, that the move would help them "more effectively influence the decision making to reduce the tensions on campus."

Shortly thereafter, in January, an announcement from MIT chancellor Melissa Nobles dashed those hopes.

The school's "Standing Together Against Hate" (STAH) initiative, Nobles said, would include four panels: one on anti-Semitism, one on "campus freedom of expression," one on Islamophobia, and one on "anti-Palestinian racism." Omitted from the speaker series was any talk on racism or hatred targeting Israelis and Zionists.

MIT's hand-picked speakers also prompted concern. Islamophobia panelist Dalia Mogahed in the wake of Oct. 7 endorsed Hamas terrorism as an act of lawful "resistance" and suggested that Israelis are "savages" who "kill babies" and "bomb hospitals." Free speech panelist Erwin Chemerinsky, meanwhile, serves as the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, which was sued in November over "unchecked" campus anti-Semitism.

For the Jewish faculty members, Nobles's announcement came as a surprise—not because MIT declined to take their advice on panel topics and speakers, but because the school failed to seek out their advice altogether. The members responded by disbanding their advisory group.

"As our group was originally conceived in the framework of STAH, we want to emphasize that we had no input to the published program and/or reviewed it before its announcement," the advisory group members said in their February email. "As a result, we recently informed President Kornbluth that we would disband the advisory group."

Kornbluth has since vowed to reassess MIT's policies on "harassment, bullying, intimidation and discrimination." She also launched the "Standing Together Against Hate" initiative in November, which MIT leaders said would help "bring our community together" by addressing anti-Semitism and other "tension between some groups and individuals."

Instead, the initiative created tension between Kornbluth and Jewish faculty members, calling into question the embattled president's pledge to combat anti-Semitism. For the MIT Israel Alliance, a campus group formed in the wake of Oct. 7 to protect Jewish students, Kornbluth's freezing out of the advisory committee marks a "missed opportunity … to tackle the very real and disturbing heightened antisemitism on campus."

[beardedmrbean]

PHILADELPHIA – In the City of Brotherly Love, Gemma Levy sometimes doesn’t feel safe.

Levy decided to attend the University of Pennsylvania partly because of its long history of tolerance toward Jewish students like her. But with recent events – pro-Palestinian protests, antisemitic chants, university President Liz Magill’s perplexing remarks about genocide and her subsequent resignation – the campus hasn’t seemed all that tolerant.

“I’ve felt super unsafe at times,” Levy, a freshman cognitive science major from Brooklyn, said while hurrying to class along the tree-lined Locust Walk in the oldest part of the campus. “It’s a weird experience to feel that way.”

It’s an unsettling experience for the city, too.

Philadelphia, known as the birthplace of the United States, is where the Founding Fathers met and debated the future of the new country. Founded on the principles of religious freedom, it’s home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the country.

The University of Pennsylvania, founded primarily by Benjamin Franklin and now regarded as one of the nation’s premier schools of higher learning, kept its doors open to Jewish students when Harvard and other Ivy League colleges implemented quotas and other measures to limit their enrollment or keep them out altogether.

Today, though, Philadelphia and the university are at the epicenter of the clash over free speech and antisemitism, the Israel-Hamas war and the right to feel safe and secure.

How did that happen? In Philadelphia of all places?

“We’re a microcosm of society,” said Michael Balaban, president and chief executive officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

Antisemitism is a virus that mutates over time and is easily spread through the prevalence of social media, Balaban said.

“We see it online in vicious ways every single second of the day,” he said.

'Vile, antisemitic messages'

Antisemitism in Philadelphia has turned up online, on campus and in the streets.

In November, the university responded to what it described as “vile, antisemitic messages” threatening violence against the Jewish community. Antisemitic emails were sent to a number of staffers, and antisemitic language was projected onto several campus buildings. The school said it planned to increase security across the campus, including at Penn Hillel, a Jewish student organization.

A month later, an off-campus protest by pro-Palestinian demonstrators was widely condemned for targeting the Jewish-owned falafel restaurant Goldie. Video posted on social media showed a large crowd gathered outside the restaurant, chanting: “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the restaurant was singled out because its owner, Philadelphia-based Israeli chef Michael Solomonov, had raised over $100,000 for an Israeli nonprofit that provided emergency relief services to Israeli Defense Forces soldiers after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

Regardless, the White House, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and others condemned the protesters’ actions, calling them antisemitic and reminiscent of a dark time in history.

Then came Magill’s downfall.

Magill and the presidents of two other elite universities – Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – already had been under scrutiny over how their institutions had responded to a rise in antisemitism on their campuses when they agreed to testify last week before a GOP-led House congressional panel.

Lawmakers lobbed a series of tough questions at the three college leaders, who hedged when Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their schools’ code of conduct against bullying and harassment.

Appearing to sense a trap, Magill and the other two presidents gave carefully worded responses that sounded scripted and lawyerly but failed to directly answer the question. In one exchange, Magill called those decisions “context-dependent” but conceded that calls for genocide could be considered harassment “if the speech turns into conduct.”

The backlash was fast and brutal. To some, the presidents’ responses raised questions about whether the schools would adequately protect Jewish students. The White House condemned their answers, donors threatened to withhold millions of dollars, and the House committee announced an investigation into the universities' policies and disciplinary procedures.

Magill tried to walk back her comments, but the damage was done. She resigned last Saturday but will remain at the university as a tenured law professor. Scott Bok, chairman of the university’s board of trustees, also stepped down.

Julie Platt, the trustees’ interim chair, declined requests for an interview but said in a statement after Magill’s resignation that a leadership change at the university was “necessary and appropriate.”

While Penn has made strides in addressing the rise of antisemitism on campus, “we have not made all of the progress that we should have and intend to accomplish,” she said.

Magill, who had been president for just a little over a year, was already on shaky ground even before her testimony. She had come under fire in September over a Palestinian Writers’ Festival that was held at the university and drew criticism for including speakers who have been accused of antisemitism. Magill and others had raised concerns about the program but did not stop it, citing support for “the free exchange of ideas” – even those that are controversial and “incompatible with our institutional values.”

Last week, a pair of Jewish students sued the university, claiming it has become a lab for "virulent anti-Jewish hatred, harassment and discrimination."

Author Jerome Karabel, who has written about the history of exclusion at Ivy League schools, said it is ironic that Penn is facing charges that it hasn’t done enough to quell antisemitism on campus. At some point, all of the other Ivy League schools tried to limit Jewish enrollment. Penn never had any such limitations, he said.

“You could argue that Penn, historically, has been the friendliest of the Ivy League schools for Jewish students,” Karabel said.

'An inclusive and welcoming community for all students'

On campus, there were few outward signs of turmoil this week. With final exams under way, students hurried to class on a cold, blustery late-fall morning. Stickers and fliers supporting the Palestinian people and urging a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war were posted on billboards and along walkways and pedestrian bridges.

At Houston Hall, which the university says is the oldest student union in the country, a small group of students has been staging a sit-in since mid-November to show support for the Palestinians. Early one afternoon this week, protesters nestled in big chairs and slept under sheets on cushions. Others painted posters and fliers listing their demands: A cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. The protection of freedom of speech on campus. “Critical thought” on the subject of Palestine. A place for Palestinian studies.

“Nobody here is calling for the genocide of Jews,” insisted Clancy Murray, who is working on a Ph.D. in political science.

Murray said several Jewish students have joined the sit-in but acknowledged that some feel unsafe in the current environment. Some Palestinian students on campus aren’t comfortable being visible either, Murray said, because of threats and the possibility of doxing, harassment and even violence and hate crimes.

As for Magill’s departure, Murray said it’s concerning “that she was driven out” and that “there are a handful of donors who are empowered to dictate what is and what is not acceptable speech on campus.”

David Donovan, who was on his way to his daughter’s graduation from Penn’s nursing school, said emotions surrounding the Israel-Hamas war are charging tensions on campus like never before.

“We are more sensitive to the feelings of other people, and that’s a net positive, I believe,” said Donovan, a history teacher from Morristown, N.J.

When it comes to deciding what constitutes free speech vs. hate speech, Donovan said, “we still have to be very apprehensive and think very carefully that our positions are backed by reason.”

“We need to err on the side of free speech,” Donovan added, acknowledging, “That’s an easy thing for me to believe as a straight, white man.”

The community at large is also grappling with issues of free speech. Some Jewish families are rethinking outward expressions of Judaism, Balaban said.

At his home in the Wynnewood suburb, Balaban flies both the Israeli and American flags in the front of his house and displays a menorah in the window. Before, “that would never have been a question in my mind to do it or not to do it,” he said. But with everything that has happened, “in my household, the question was, ‘Are we OK doing this?’” he said.

“Of course, the answer is, yes, we're going to,” Balaban said. “But did we worry that someone may do something? The answer is yes. I think we will always display an Israeli flag with pride. We will always display symbols of our Judaism. But there was a pause of what does that mean.”

'We will come through this difficult moment'

So what's next? How do the community and the university heal after the trauma of the past few months?

"This is a strong community built on a sturdy foundation.  We will come through this difficult moment," the university promised in an email message to students this week.

The university pledged to redouble its commitment to ensuring that Penn is a place where “intellectual growth is cultivated” and students are “supported as a person.”

“Initiatives recently launched to address bigotry and hatred on our campus will continue, and this will be an inclusive and welcoming community for all students,” the message said.

Levy urged school administrators to be more proactive and less reactive.

“I hope,” she said, “instead of being on the defensive and apologizing after things happen, they’ll take steps to actually stop these incidents in the first place.”

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

Maresuke Nogi was always his own toughest critic. Emperor Meiji trusted him and appointed him to high military posts in Japan: general in the imperial army, governor-general of Taiwan. But we all make mistakes, and Nogi’s lapses gnawed at him. Twice he requested the emperor’s leave to commit ritual suicide. Each time, the emperor refused. In Nogi’s home, now a quiet shrine in a Tokyo meadow, you can see pictures of Nogi reading the newspaper on September 13, 1912, the morning of his boss’s funeral. No one was left to stop him. Near the photo you can see the sword he used later that day to disembowel himself.

I raise the example of General Nogi to encourage present-day leaders (military, political, educational) to take a much more modest step. They should offer to resign—often, and both in times of trouble and in times of calm. This weekend, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, did the honorable thing, and the chair of Penn’s board, Scott Bok, followed his kōhai’s example shortly after. Magill resigned because she, along with Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth, performed abysmally under questioning in Congress. Their inquisitor, upstate New York’s Elise Stefanik, a Republican, asked them whether chanting genocidal slogans violated their universities’ policies. It depends on the context, they all said, on the advice of counsel and the worst PR teams money can buy. Within days, Magill and Gay conceded that their answers had not been ideal. Gay is facing calls for her resignation, too.

Resign. Resign. Everyone: resign. Resignation has come to mean failure, something one does when cornered, caught dead to rights, incapable of continuing for even another day. It should be an act of honor—a high point in a career of service. It isn’t shameful. It is noble. It is the first and sometimes only step in the expiation of shame, and (ironically) the ultimate sign of one’s fitness for office.

No one demonstrates the value of these traits better than those who lack them entirely. I thought of Nogi’s katana, flashing from its scabbard, last week when the House voted to expel George Santos, Stefanik’s colleague in New York’s Republican delegation. The House almost never kicks anyone out, mainly because those facing expulsion have in the past tended to resign rather than weather the indignity of an expulsion vote. Santos is taking his ouster well and posting prolifically on TikTok. A psychologically normal person would have resigned the instant his tower of lies showed signs of wobbling. To let it crash down, then dance around the rubble of that tower until the orderlies arrive and pull you away, is truly mad behavior, and a demonstration of unfitness for the job, or indeed any job other than TikTok star.

I cannot prove this, but I believe the tendency to stick it out rather than resign started roughly when Representative Anthony Weiner (New York again, this time a Democrat) called a press conference to discuss whether he had, in fact, tweeted a picture of his penis, tumescent in his underwear. He could have just quit, and eventually he did (but lived to humiliate himself another day). But that pause to hold a press conference broke the seal on something dangerous, the idea that one can talk one’s way through a mortification. To take the podium and subject oneself to hostile questioning under those circumstances bespoke a delusionary chutzpah.

It soon became clear that anyone socially defective enough to persist through a scandal has a good chance of surviving it. By the time then-candidate Donald Trump (Republican, guess where) appeared on the Access Hollywood tape, describing his hobby of sexually assaulting women, it ceased to be obvious that at some point one should tap out and go home. If you have no shame, and you refuse to go, there might not be anyone out there who can make you. Mechanisms exist, as the Santos case shows. But the mechanisms were devised to govern people from another time, sensitive to ridicule and guffaws.

One should be ready for criticism, both earned and unearned. But resignation—more precisely, the offer of resignation—is an expression of confidence, both in oneself and in one’s employers or constituents. A board can reject a resignation. Voters can turn out in the streets to beg you to reconsider, or can turn out at the ballot to vote you back in. In fact, the more defensible one’s position, the greater esteem we should show for the one who offers to leave it. Call this the Nogi rule.

Harvard’s Claudine Gay evidently believed that she’d erred, because she reverted immediately to damage-control mode after leaving Washington. The next day, she told the Crimson that her testimony did not represent “my truth”—that is, that she disapproves of genocidal anti-Semitism. (This is an extreme example of the political axiom “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”) Her original answer before Congress lacked any visceral disapproval of anti-Semitism, certainly none to match Harvard’s recent record of condemning speech deemed offensive to historically disadvantaged groups. Her affect was robotic, neutral. She showed no signs of concern at all.

But her neutrality was born of an honorable principle, well worth defending. It reflected the values of free expression in a modern interpretation of the First Amendment, under which anyone can say just about any foolish thing, as long as saying it isn’t about to cause someone else to break the law. If the “context” of a genocidal chant is a nonviolent rally, the university shouldn’t stop anyone from chanting. (It should examine its soul. But that is another matter.) If the context is a crowd of protesters with bricks in hand, running at a group of Jews, the university should expel or fire every demonstrator there, whether armed with a brick or a bullhorn. All three presidents should have said this, then added a note of contrition over their universities’ failure to uphold these principles of free expression in the past.

But I’ll say it again: Gay should resign. To offer her neck to Harvard’s Board of Overseers would show her confidence that its members, like Emperor Meiji, would see past her error and ask her to endure in her position. It would also demonstrate her willingness to own that error, to acknowledge it publicly and unselfishly. Maybe the board would accept her resignation, and maybe it would not. Either of these fates is better than the one she is courting. At the moment she is trying to wriggle out of her error, and clinging to her job as if her dignity depended on keeping it. Better to teach by example that the reverse is often true, that dignity depends on leaving a job—and that staying suggests that one has nothing else, once it is gone.

The greatest legacy a resignation leaves is the creation of a culture of resignation. One institution that, up until now, has had such a culture is the Israeli defense establishment. A few weeks ago, I spoke with a former Mossad official who assured me that the entire leadership of the Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces would, as soon as the Gaza war reached a satisfactory pause, resign from their positions. They would do so, he said, because resignation was the only honorable response to their failure to foresee and prevent Hamas’s attack on October 7. Their predecessors did so in 2006, after the very messy war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and after several other episodes of modest failure in Israeli history. That they might stick around, slinking back to their offices as if hoping everyone forgot about their mistakes, would be inconceivable. In this context, one understands better the popular rage against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in whom the spirit of General Nogi is extinct: To this day, he is making the case to the Israeli right for his remaining their leader indefinitely.

One can’t get far in politics without a dogged willingness to destroy one’s critics and step on their corpses to reach the next height. But this is a minimal qualification for success, and everyone who attains high office, having climbed up from decades in the Senate or in departmental meetings, has it to an unusual degree. To persist is just to do what comes naturally for these people. To give up at the right moment—that is a quality against type, and a virtue possessed by the greatest of leaders. It is nevertheless available even to those who have hitherto shown no signs of greatness at all. Let it be said of them what is said in Macbeth of the Thane of Cawdor: that nothing became them in public service like the leaving it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Emily Tamkin for The UnPopulist:

Unable to attend last December’s explosive congressional hearing probing antisemitism on college campuses along with Harvard’s Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth due to prior arrangements to attend a climate conference, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik came before Congress on April 17 and was questioned for over three hours. Shafik insisted throughout the hearing that Columbia had been taking antisemitism seriously, at one point even listing the various ways the university has meaningfully addressed this issue under her watch:

[Our actions included support for students, enhanced reporting channels for incidents, hiring additional staff to investigate complaints, developing new policies on demonstrations, holding listening forums to model respectful behaviors, launching educational programs, and forming a task force of our senior leaders to propose solutions to antisemitism.]

The day after she testified before Congress, Shafik, Columbia’s first woman and first Arab president, called the police to campus to break up a student encampment set up to protest Israeli actions in Gaza. Over 100 students participating in the encampment were arrested, in addition to being suspended by the university. “The president’s decision to send riot police to pick up peaceful protesters on our campus was unprecedented, unjustified, disproportionate, divisive, and dangerous,” Christopher Brown, a professor in the history department at Columbia University, told the crowd during a faculty demonstration. “I’m here because I am so concerned with what has happened at this university, with where we are now, and with where we are going,” said Brown, who indicated that this was the first time he’d spoken into a microphone at a protest of any kind. Congress wants to dictate disciplinary and educational decisions to Columbia; this is not the job of Congress, he said. Other faculty I interviewed after the hearing felt similarly.

All of this—the testimony, the protests, the call to the police, the endurance of the protests—is national news. The students are demanding that Columbia divest (that is, that Columbia withdraw from investments that students say are profiting from Israel’s military actions) and there are chants on campus—and off campus by people who are not students—that have made some Jewish students uncomfortable. Some—notably Rabbi Elie Buechler, who directs Columbia University’s Orthodox Union-Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus—have even said it is not safe for Jews at Columbia. Shafik’s handling of the situation has managed to enrage faculty and students and those on the left who find it shocking that Shafik called police to campus while also enraging those who want the encampment gone. As of this writing, it remains, still standing even after Shafik imposed a removal deadline of 2 p.m. on Monday under threat of suspension. Faculty created a protective rim around their students. Early Tuesday morning, some students took over Hamilton Hall, a building on campus.

Some of the discourse about the campus protests, at Columbia specifically and throughout the country more generally, has made it sound as though the protests are motivated by antisemitism and seek to endanger Jewish students. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went as far as to liken the protests to Nazi Germany. Leaving aside that it is grossly ahistorical to conflate student protests against a war carried out by the Jewish state to a historical episode in which the state carried out violence and discrimination against Jews, this narrative is simplistic and, more than that, wrong. The protests are an opportunity to remind ourselves of the function of universities; that no identity is a monolith; and why students are moved to protest in the first place.

Columbia’s Only Jurisdiction Is Its Campus

Some have conflated action outside Columbia’s gates with action inside the campus. To the students who have to hear “go back to Poland” or “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you!” outside their campus, this may well be a distinction without a difference. And the truth is that Columbia, as an urban campus, bumps up against the real world and real people (including, yes, antisemites) who are not bound by the student code of conduct and are not in community with their fellow students in the same way. This is true not only of pro-Palestine protests, but also pro-Israel protests: Some in the crowd yelled “Go back to Gaza!” from outside the gates on April 26. That’s why members of Columbia’s Policy and Planning Committee of the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences noted in a letter to the media: “It is because of this respect for all Columbians that we have been so distressed by reports that conflate on-campus protests with the actions of bad actors from outside our community.” To the extent that there are specific threats made against or harm done to Jewish students at Columbia by their fellow students, those students should be specifically disciplined. This, in fact, is what the university eventually did in the case of the student who said in a January video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and that people should “be glad, be grateful that I am not just going out and murdering Zionists.”

It is true that, while student protesters are protected by the First Amendment, universities are within their rights to regulate demonstrations on their campuses. It is also true that, as these particular demonstrations are happening on university grounds, student and faculty safety should be paramount. The university has both a higher obligation to academic freedom and a higher obligation to protect the safety of all students. There are moments, however, when it may be hard to distinguish between protests and veiled violence: for example, people within the encampment at Columbia formed a human chain to stop the movement of alleged “Zionists” to protect the privacy of the encampment. That wasn’t violence, exactly, but arguably did contain within it a threat (what happens if you try to go past the chain?). Still, balancing the two, expression and safety, should be the point of a university’s disciplinary policies—not silencing a movement or chilling speech because some disagree with or are upset by its aims, or to privilege one preferred foreign policy outcome over another. Some Jewish students, for example, may not like or even feel uncomfortable because of calls like “from the river to the sea” or calls for the elimination of the Jewish state and establishment of one binational state. However, the current policy of the Israeli government is that there will not be a Palestinian state between those two bodies of water, and that, in the West Bank, Palestinians should live under military rule while Jews live under civil rule; this, too, is surely upsetting to some students. [...]

Jewish Faculty and Students Are Not a Monolith

There is also the reality that Jews ourselves, at both an institutional and personal level, do not agree on what is and is not upsetting to Jews, as we do not agree on what is—and isn’t—antisemitic speech. There are thus Jewish faculty at Columbia writing against the weaponization of antisemitism and Jewish faculty asking that the university send in the National Guard to shut down the protests. (For that matter, faculty disagree even over whether it was appropriate to call for classes to go remote.) This division is reflected not only among faculty, but also among students. There are Jewish students who feel isolated and unsafe because of the protests; Jewish students who support the goals of the protest but worry about antisemitic rhetoric and want to see it more sharply denounced; and Jewish students who are taking part in the protest and indeed held their Passover Seder on the campus lawn. This is to say nothing of the Jewish students covering the protests for campus publication or Jewish students who don’t engage much at all with the issue of Israel. 

[...]

Protests Fulfill, Rather Than Challenge, the Purpose of Universities

It is important to remember that the population under discussion here—students—is ostensibly on campus in the first place to learn and think and challenge themselves and, most importantly, each other. It matters that they are able to do so safely; but it also matters that they are able to do so at all. In that multifaceted educational environment, in which they’re learning and thinking and challenging themselves, they might decide to engage with what is happening in the world around them. They might, for example, go from a history class to reading about the looming famine in Gaza, or from an art history seminar to learning of the physical destruction of Palestinian culture sites, or from a lecture on political science to a report that over 30,000 people have died in Gaza over the course of this war, or from a literature class to seeing that an Israeli strike killed the daughter of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was himself killed by an Israeli airstrike back in December. And perhaps this causes its own kind of discomfort and sense of pain. (On the other hand, some students might leave a history or political science or language class and decide after listening to the protesters that they do not support calls to end study abroad programs with Israeli academic institutions because they decide that that would be counterproductive to getting a full understanding about the conflict or the region.)

I have had some people tell me that they do not think the protests are helping the people in Gaza, and in a sense this is true. The student protesters are not in the White House. They are not in the halls of Congress. They are not setting policy. But those on the lawns of Columbia and other campuses seem to me, more than anything else, to be trying to do what they can with the limited power they have: show solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and push their own university to divest. The protests, then, are also an expression of student pain. And that pain, too, needs to be able to be expressed, not only for the sake of our foreign policy debates, and not only for the sake of academic freedom at Columbia and elsewhere, but also for our democracy.

Emily Tamkin wrote in The UnPopulist that shutting down anti-Gaza Genocide (aka Pro-Palestinian) protests are counter-productive to a college's mission to learn.

Also, Tamkin noted that Jewish students and faculty are split over the issue of college campus protests, with some favoring them and some condemning them as "antisemitic."

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

House Republicans launch multiple investigations into college protests

Four GOP committee chairs are probing pro-Palestinian campus activism.

+

New GOP move: discredit and defund the nation's major research universities and move funds to private, religious schools like Liberty University and Hillsdale, the new GOP models for higher education.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

May 2, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

MAY 03, 2024

More than 2,000 people have been arrested at protests on college and university campuses around the country opposing Israel’s military strikes on Gaza since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, and the subsequent humanitarian crisis there. It is unclear how many of the protesters are students, as many of those arrested have not been affiliated with the universities, or how many of the arrests will result in charges—sometimes arrests at protests are designed simply to clear an area.

The roots of today’s protests lie in an investigation by the Republican-dominated House Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC). The committee announced the investigation on December 7, two days after its members spent more than five hours grilling then-president of Harvard University Claudine Gay, then-president of University of Pennsylvania Liz Magill, and president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sally Kornbluth on how their universities were handling student protests against Israel over its military response to Hamas’s attack of October 7.

Led by Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Republicans on the committee insisted that the universities were not protecting Jewish students. The university presidents responded that they deplored antisemitism, that students had the right to free speech, and that they took action against those who violated policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation. But in their defense of free speech, they admitted both that hate speech against Jews and others is sometimes protected and that they had sometimes made bad calls.  

The Republicans’ interest in protecting Jewish students on campus overlapped with their opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that they associate with Democrats. Burgess Owens (R-UT) said DEI initiatives protect Black students at the expense of others. “I just remember a couple of years ago when we were dealing with Black Lives Matter,” he said. “Try to talk about Blue Lives Matter, Jew Lives Matter, Arab Lives Matter—they call it racist. It’s time for us to focus on what’s happening on your campuses.”

Stefanik called the testimony “pathetic” and, along with 74 other members of Congress, demanded that Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, resign. On January 2, following accusations she had plagiarized scholarly work, she did. Her resignation followed that of Liz Magill. “TWO DOWN,” Stefanik wrote on social media. 

Two days after the university presidents’ testimony, Stefanik announced that the House Education and Workforce Committee would be investigating universities. “We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage,” she said.

On February 12 the committee informed Columbia it was next up. Columbia University president Nemat "Minouche" Shafik had been unable to testify with the other presidents in December and gave her testimony to the committee on April 17, along with co-chairs of the Board of Trustees Claire Shipman and David Greenwald and former dean David Schizer over the university's response to antisemitism. 

In an April 16 essay in the Wall Street Journal, Shafik wrote that “antisemitism and calls for genocide have no place at a university…but that leaves plenty of room for robust disagreement and debate.” She said she prioritizes “the safety and security of our community” and that while the attack of October 7 had a "deep personal impact" on the Jewish and Israeli communities, there was also a "humanitarian catastrophe" in Gaza, and the war was "part of a larger story of Palestinian displacement." She explained that Columbia had defined a space for protests to enable those they upset to avoid them. 

Opening the hearing, committee chair Foxx said: “Since October 7, this Committee and the nation have watched in horror as so many of our college campuses, particularly the most expensive, so-called elite schools, have erupted into hotbeds of antisemitism and hate.” Stefanik called out tenured professor Joseph Massad of the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department, who called the October 7 attack a “stunning victory.” 

Shafik responded by condemning the professor’s statements. “Trying to reconcile the free speech rights of those who want to protest and the rights of Jewish students to be in an environment free of harassment or discrimination has been the central challenge on our campus, and many others, in recent months…. We do not, and will not, tolerate antisemitic threats, images, and other violations…. We have enforced, and we will continue to enforce, our policies against such actions,” she said. 

Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned Shafik about discrimination against pro-Palestinian protesters. She noted that Israel-born assistant professor Shai Davidai was accused of harassing pro-Palestinian students; Shafik said they have had more than 50 complaints about him and he is under investigation. 

On April 17, the same day the Columbia officials testified, pro-Palestinian protesters organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (a self-described “coalition of student organizations that see Palestine as the vanguard for our collective liberation”), Students for Justice in Palestine, and Jewish Voice for Peace set up a camp at the university. It garnered little attention; the April 18 New York Times did not mention it. According to Sharif, the school warned protesters they would be suspended if the encampment was not removed. They stayed. On April 18, according to New York mayor Eric Adams, Columbia officials called in New York City police to disband the protest. They arrested more than 100 people, including Representative Omar’s daughter, a Columbia student. The arrests were peaceful.  

University faculty and community members were shocked by the resort to law enforcement at a place known both for learning and debate and for its history. In April 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, a week of protests after students learned of Columbia’s support for weapons research and its plan to construct a seemingly segregated gym in a nearby community had led New York City police to crush the demonstrations with violence.  

In the days after the current arrests, nearly a dozen student and faculty groups released statements or open letters objecting to the police presence on campus and supporting students’ rights to free speech and peaceful protest. The protest encampment sprang back up. 

At the same time, Jewish leaders warned that antisemitism was increasing. Rabbi Elie Buechler, of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel and Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, urged Jewish students to return home for Passover, which began April 22, and to stay there for their own safety.

In the next weeks, protests sprang up around the country, with protesters generally demanding that university administrators divest from investments in Israel or in companies that sell weapons, technology, or construction equipment to Israel, and cut ties to Israeli universities. They have tended to turn their anger against President Joe Biden and his administration, whom they blame for what they call a genocide in Gaza. Universities have responded in a variety of ways, from discussion to armed law enforcement officers.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have insisted that Israel has a right to defend itself from Hamas and have continued to provide Israel with military defenses, whose importance in stopping the war from spreading showed on April 14, when those defenses shot down virtually all of the weapons Iran launched at Israel. They are working hard for a ceasefire, with Blinken currently in the Middle East and a proposal on the table that Israel has accepted but Hamas has not. 

The administration has also stood against the initial policy of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration to cordon off Gaza without food, water, or electricity, and has pressured Israel into permitting humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has also firmly opposed Israeli plans to attack Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians have taken shelter, and has stood firmly in favor of a Palestinian state, which the protesters have not indicated they endorse.

On April 24, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) visited Columbia, where he called for Shafik  to resign. On Monday, April 29, he and Republican leadership met to discuss how they might reenergize the party and gain traction now that their impeachment effort against Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has flopped, the conference is bitterly split, their control of the House of Representatives has resulted in one of the least productive congresses in American history, and their presumptive presidential nominee is being tried for election interference that involved paying off women with whom he had extramarital sex. They settled on campus antisemitism—although Trump’s open embrace of white nationalists makes this problematic—and the campus protests as a sign that Democrats are the party of disorder.

On that same day, 21 House Democrats wrote a letter to Columbia’s trustees demanding they “act decisively, disband the encampment, and ensure the safety and security of all of its students.” That night, protesters took control of Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, where they broke windows and vandalized furniture. About twenty hours later, police in riot gear arrested them. Arrests across the country climbed.

Yesterday, Representative Foxx announced that her committee’s antisemitism investigation will expand into a Congress-wide crackdown on colleges. In a press conference, she said she had a clear message for “mealy-mouthed, spineless college leaders. Congress will not tolerate your dereliction of duty to your Jewish students. American universities are officially put on notice that we have come to take our universities back.” 

Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that right-wing politicians jumped on the Kent State shootings of May 1970 to defund colleges and universities, while a “law and order” backlash helped to give Republican president Richard M. Nixon a landslide reelection in 1972. 

Today, President Biden addressed the protests, saying they “test two fundamental American principles. The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.” 

Biden called for lawful, peaceful protests and warned: “Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations—none of this is a peaceful protest…. Dissent is essential to democracy,” he said, “But dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish the semester and their college education…. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

When asked, he told reporters he did not think the National Guard should be involved in suppressing the protests. 

Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu of the New York Times reported today that Russia, China, and Iran are amplifying the protests “to score geopolitical points abroad and stoke tensions within the United States,” as well as to “undermine President Biden’s reelection prospects.” 

It is unclear if the protests will continue during the summer, when fewer students will be on campus.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[jcmarchi]

MLK Celebration Gala pays tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and his writings on “the goal of true education”

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/mlk-celebration-gala-pays-tribute-to-martin-luther-king-jr-and-his-writings-on-the-goal-of-true-education/

MLK Celebration Gala pays tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and his writings on “the goal of true education”

After a week of festivities around campus, members of the MIT community gathered Saturday evening in the Boston Marriott Kendall Square ballroom to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Marking 50 years of this annual celebration at MIT, the gala event’s program was loosely organized around a line in King’s essay, “The Purpose of Education,” which he penned as an undergraduate at Morehouse College:

“We must remember that intelligence is not enough,” King wrote. “Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”

Senior Myles Noel was the master of ceremonies for the evening and welcomed one and all. Minister DiOnetta Jones Crayton, former director of the Office of Minority Education and associate dean of minority education, delivered the invocation, exhorting the audience to embrace “the fiery urgency of now.” Next, MIT President Sally Kornbluth shared her remarks.

She acknowledged that at many institutions, diversity and inclusion efforts are eroding. Kornbluth reiterated her commitment to these efforts, saying, “I want to be clear about how important I believe it is to keep such efforts strong — and to make them the best they can be. The truth is, by any measure, MIT has never been more diverse, and it has never been more excellent. And we intend to keep it that way.”

Kornbluth also recognized the late Paul Parravano, co-director of MIT’s Office of Government and Community Relations, who was a staff member at MIT for 33 years as well as the longest-serving member on the MLK Celebration Committee. Parravano’s “long and distinguished devotion to the values and goals of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. inspires us all,” Kornbluth said, presenting his family with the 50th Anniversary Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Next, students and staff shared personal reflections. Zina Queen, office manager in the Department of Political Science, noted that her family has been a part of the MIT community for generations. Her grandmother, Rita, her mother, Wanda, and her daughter have all worked or are currently working at the Institute. Queen pointed out that her family epitomizes another of King’s oft-repeated quotes, “Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth.”

Senior Tamea Cobb noted that MIT graduates have a particular power in the world that they must use strategically and with intention. “Education and service go hand and hand,” she said, adding that she intends “every one of my technical abilities will be used to pursue a career that is fulfilling, expansive, impactful, and good.”

Graduate student Austin K. Cole ’24 addressed the Israel-Hamas conflict and the MIT administration. As he spoke, some attendees left their seats to stand with Cole at the podium. Cole closed his remarks with a plea to resist state and structural violence, and instead focus on relationship and mutuality.

After dinner, incoming vice president for equity and inclusion Karl Reid ’84, SM ’85 honored Adjunct Professor Emeritus Clarence Williams for his distinguished service to the Institute. Williams was an assistant to three MIT presidents, served as director of the Office of Minority Education, taught in the Department of Urban Planning, initiated the MIT Black History Project, and mentored hundreds of students. Reid was one of those students, and he shared a few of his mentor’s oft repeated phrases:

“Do the work and let the talking take care of itself.”

“Bad ideas kill themselves; great ideas flourish.”

In closing, Reid exhorted the audience to create more leaders who, like Williams, embody excellence and mutual respect for others.

The keynote address was given by civil rights activist Janet Moses, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s; a physician who worked for a time as a pediatrician at MIT Health; a longtime resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a co-founder, with her husband, Robert Moses, of the Algebra Project, a pioneering program grounded in the belief “that in the 21st century every child has a civil right to secure math literacy — the ability to read, write, and reason with the symbol systems of mathematics.”

A striking image of a huge new building planned for New York City appeared on the screen behind Moses during her address. It was a rendering of a new jail being built at an estimated cost of $3 billion. Against this background, she described the trajectory of the “carceral state,” which began in 1771 with the Mansfield Judgement in England. At the time, “not even South Africa had a set of race laws as detailed as those in the U.S.,” Moses observed.

Today, the carceral state uses all levels of government to maintain a racial caste system that is deeply entrenched, Moses argued, drawing a connection between the purported need for a new prison complex and a statistic that Black people in New York state are three times more likely than whites to be convicted for a crime.

She referenced a McKinsey study that it will take Black people over three centuries to achieve a quality of life on parity with whites. Despite the enormity of this challenge, Moses encouraged the audience to “rock the boat and churn the waters of the status quo.” She also pointed out that “there is joy in the struggle.”

Symbols of joy were also on display at the Gala in the forms of original visual art and poetry, and a quilt whose squares were contributed by MIT staff, students, and alumni, hailing from across the Institute.

Quilts are a physical manifestation of the legacy of the enslaved in America and their descendants — the ability to take scraps and leftovers to create something both practical and beautiful. The 50th anniversary quilt also incorporated a line from King’s highly influential “I Have a Dream Speech”:

“One day, all God’s children will have the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

[adventuresinclientservice]

Instead of being good in the moment, failing at it.

After happily arriving at a title for the International Advertising Association’s Annual Conference – “Why Client Service is an Art” – I soon realized I needed a story to open my remarks, something that would illustrate, demonstrate, and validate the title.

I was stymied for a bit, but then recalled a post I wrote, “Great client service people are ‘good in the moment;’ what the hell does that mean?” and had my answer. 

The piece recounts how my Foote, Cone & Belding Account Management colleague, Jane Gardner, was able to convince a client CEO, on the verge of thwarting a major brand campaign we presented, to instead do the exact opposite and greenlight it.

It was an amazing turn of events, now largely forgotten by nearly everyone in the room that day with Jane, by everyone at the rest of the agency, and by everyone in the rest of the business.  Pretty much everyone except me.

I thought of this again as I revisited post-October 7 events occurring on university campuses around the country, as Jewish students felt the sting of threatening backlash emanating in the aftermath of the terrorist group Hamas’ ruthless slaughter – there are no other words to describe it – of 1,200 Israeli citizens.

With temperatures rising in college campuses around the country, the Presidents of three of the country’s most prestigious and prominent universities, Penn, Harvard, and MIT, were called to testify before Congress.  In the midst of the hearing, there came a moment when Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked President Elizabth Magill of Penn,

“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn's rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?”

Stefanik then turned to Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, to ask if

“calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard's Code of Conduct?”  

Stefanik also put much the same question to Sally Kornbluth of MIT.

The answer was obvious, but the responses were uniformly tentative, waffling, indecisive, unclear, and compromised:

From Magill:  “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment, yes,” From Gay:   “It depends on the context,” From Kornbluth:  “It would have to be targeted at individuals and pervasive, as well as require an investigation.”

It’s a simple question:  is the answer yes, or no?  There are times when nuance is called for; this clearly was not that time. 

No need to take even a second to respond.  No need to consult with attorneys.  No need to check with anyone on campus, not professors, not administrators, and not students.  The answer is simple, unequivocal, unimpeachable.

I’m reading these answers, thinking, “What is wrong with you people??  Have you lost your minds??”

Here was a moment when clarity, concision, and conviction were at stake, and all three Presidents, instead of being equal to that moment, failed at it.

Magill and Gay are no longer Presidents of the Universities they led.  Kornbluth, who is, if you can believe it, Jewish, might survive, but should not.

My politics are the polar-opposite of Elise Stefanik’s – she stands for everything I’m opposed to -- but when a moment like this presents itself, it defies politics or party; more than anything else, it serves as a fundamental test of character:  do you have the courage to stand up and proclaim what’s right, or not?

Th other day, in an entirely different venue, I heard Presidential candidate Nikki Haley respond to a question, “What was the cause of the Civil War?” in an equally baffling, outrageously infuriating way.

What is wrong with all these people??? 

When I witnessed Jane Gardner’s response to our CEO client, there was absolutely no one she could turn to for advice or guidance.  A bunch of us were in that room, but Jane didn’t need rescuing.  She needed to be good in the moment; she was, and then some.

The stakes were admittedly exponentially higher for those tone-deaf University Presidents and that laughably ridiculous Presidential candidate, but their answers were no less clear.  They had their moment to be good.

To a person, they weren’t.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Heather Mac Donald

Published: Dec 11, 2023

Liz Magill was forced to resign Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania—by all indications because, at a congressional hearing, she could not bring herself to declare that calls for the genocide of Jews are punishable speech. She would more justly have lost her job for being a bald-faced hypocrite when it comes to campus free expression. The future of higher education depends on which of these motives governs such decisions in the future.

Magill was part of a triumvirate of college presidents who testified before a House committee last week. Magill, Harvard president Claudine Gay, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth had been called to discuss the anti-Israel hatred embroiling their universities since the October 7 terror attacks on Israel. To call their performance robotic would insult robots. When asked a repeated question after their first evasion did not satisfy the questioner, these intellectual role models repeated their first evasion verbatim, maybe adding a cryptic non sequitur.

Congressman Jim Banks (R., Indiana) grilled Magill, for example, about a conference on Palestinian culture that the University of Pennsylvania had hosted two weeks before the Hamas terror attacks. Critics had demanded that Penn cancel the conference, due to the presence of alleged anti-Semites among its speakers. Penn allowed the gathering to continue, however, citing academic freedom.

Banks focused on invitee Roger Waters, founder of the rock group Pink Floyd and a vocal proponent of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement: “Why in the world would you host someone like that on your college campus to speak?” he asked.

Magill: “I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this. Antisemitism has no place at Penn.”

Banks: “Why did you invite Roger Waters? What did you think you would get out of him?”

Magill: “Antisemitism has no place at Penn, and our free speech policies are guided by the United States Constitution.”

It was on the question of condoning the “genocide of Jews” that the presidents were not only robotic but breathtakingly duplicitous.

Congressman Elise Stefanik (R., New York) parlayed this line of interrogation into national fame. Stefanik to Harvard president Claudine Gay: “Can you not say here that [calling for the genocide of Jews] is against the code of conduct at Harvard?”

Gay: “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment.”

Stefanik: “Is that speech according to the code of conduct or not?”

Gay: “We embrace a commitment to free expression and give a wide berth to free expression, even of views that are objectionable.”

The other two presidents took the same substantive position: whether speech constitutes actionable conduct depends on the context, including whether it is targeted at specific individuals.

Stefanik to Magill: “I am asking, specifically calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment,”

Magill: “If it is directed and severe or pervasive, it is harassment.”

Stefanik: “So, the answer is yes.”

Magill: “It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman.”

Stefanik’s questioning was relentless, but was it fair? As MIT president Kornbluth noted plaintively, she was unaware of anyone at MIT calling for the genocide of Jews. Stefanik was extrapolating from the ubiquitous student chants of “intifada” to explicit calls for Jewish genocide, but the former expression is more ambiguous, especially in the mouths of ignorant American students.

Nevertheless, Stefanik’s interrogations went viral. “American college presidents tongue tied regarding the genocide of Jews!” was the common takeaway, even among liberal defenders of academia, such as Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

And this failure to agree that alleged calls for the genocide of Jews should be banned appears to be what did in Magill. (Penn’s chairman of the board also resigned on Sunday, a shake-up as momentous for the future of university governance as Magill’s departure.) Sensing her imminent peril, Magill released a video a day after the hearing reversing her position on punishable speech. A “call for genocide of Jewish people [is] harassment or intimidation,” she stated—and thus, subject to prior restraint or retroactive sanction.

The problem, Magill explained, was the Constitution: “For decades, under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the Constitution and the law. In today’s world, . . . these policies need to be clarified and evaluated.” Penn would be initiating a “serious and careful look” at those constitutionally inspired limits, in order to provide what Magill called a “safe, secure, and supportive environment [where] all members of our community can thrive.”

In other words, though Penn had heretofore chosen to abide by constitutional norms (though as a private institution, it was not mandated to do so), it would now put those norms aside to ensure that students feel “safe.”

The presidents’ refusal to declare hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews punishable conduct has been portrayed as the greatest scandal of the hearing. It was not.

The real scandal was the presidents’ duplicity in citing a “commitment to free expression” as the reason why they needed to give “wide berth to . . . views that are objectionable,” as Gay put it.

GOP congressmen demolished the presidents’ protestations of free speech loyalty, providing example after example of faculty members and outside speakers who had been muzzled, punished, or banned because of views contrary to campus orthodoxy. Those views included the assertion that sex is biological and binary, that racial preferences harm their beneficiaries, that the diversity bureaucracy inhibits academic freedom, and that an open-borders immigration policy damages the country.

It was those fantastically counterfactual assertions of loyalty to academic freedom that should have doomed Magill and the other two presidents. On any common understanding of truthfulness, their claims to protect “objectionable” views were flagrantly contrary to the facts. Having been exposed as hypocrites, dissemblers, and enforcers of politically correct thinking, they should all be fired as unfit to lead institutions ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of truth and the transmission of knowledge.

Ironically, however, it was their one correct stance during the entire hearing debacle that put them in peril. However woodenly they asserted their alleged reason for not shutting down the pro-Hamas demonstrations, that reason should have been controlling. Speech should be protected unless it crosses the line into direct threats to individuals or incitement to imminent violence. Student parroting of Islamist slogans does not meet those tests. Allowing a central authority to ban speech that it declares injurious to the common good is a license for precisely the abuse of power that has been the norm throughout human history, a norm that the Founders were so insistent on overturning. Moreover, it has been in the name of creating what Magill called a “safe, secure, and supportive” campus “climate” that universities have suppressed unwelcome facts and unpopular speakers.

Of course, even the presidents’ explanation for why they tolerate the pro-Hamas demonstrations is likely a lie. The real reason for their equivocation is fear of the campus Left—or, in the case of the diversity bureaucrats who often took the lead in responding to the terror attacks—agreement with the campus Left that anti-Israel terrorism is merely a matter of Palestinian self-defense.

Critics of the American university have seized on what they perceive as the most efficacious means for discrediting academia. But though accusations of tolerance for the genocide of Jews guarantees the most media coverage, conservatives are making a mistake in highlighting that alleged tolerance as the main reason to revamp the university. This mistake will come back to haunt them.

Absent a complete turnover of university personnel, a renewed authority to limit speech will be used overwhelmingly against conservatives. Even now, Penn is weighing sanctions against law professor Amy Wax for her challenges to campus orthodoxy. Had the public consensus been that the universities’ mistake was in not extending the same tolerance they showed to the pro-Hamas demonstrators to dissenters from leftist nostrums, Wax could have argued that she is entitled to the same protections for controversial speech. Now, with renewed support, even from the right, for student “safety,” Penn can argue that its newfound concern for Jewish student safety requires it to intensify its solicitude for the “marginalized” groups whom Wax allegedly jeopardized with her contrarian opinions.

A colleague of Wax’s has published an op-ed in the Washington Post unironically headlined: “To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech.” “Isn’t it time for university presidents to rethink the role that open expression and academic freedom play in the educational mission of their institutions?” asks law professor Claire Finkelstein. However fanciful the question’s premise—that universities currently honor academic freedom—it is chilling that the answer is increasingly affirmative, even from many on the right.

[sunaleisocial]

A bright and airy hub for climate at MIT

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/a-bright-and-airy-hub-for-climate-at-mit/

A bright and airy hub for climate at MIT

Seen from a distance, MIT’s Cecil and Ida Green Building (Building 54) — designed by renowned architect and MIT alumnus I.M. Pei ’40 — is one of the most iconic buildings on the Cambridge, Massachusetts, skyline. Home to the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), the 21-story concrete structure soars over campus, topped with its distinctive spherical radar dome. Close up, however, it was a different story.

A sunless, two-story, open-air plaza beneath the tower previously served as a nondescript gateway to the department’s offices, labs, and classrooms above. “It was cold and windy — probably the windiest place on campus,” EAPS department head Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, told a packed auditorium inside the building in March. “You would pass through the elevators and disappear into the corridors, never to be seen again until the end of the day.”

Van der Hilst was speaking at a dedication event to celebrate the opening of the renovated and expanded space, 60 years after the Green Building’s original dedication in 1964. In a dramatic transformation, the perpetually-shaded expanse beneath the tower has been filled with an airy, glassed-in structure that is as inviting as the previous space was forbidding.

Designed to meet LEED-platinum certification, the newly-constructed Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) seems to float next to the Brutalist tower, its glass façade both opening up the interior and reflecting the sunlight and green space outside. The 300-seat auditorium within the original tower has been similarly transformed, bringing light and space to the newly dubbed Dixie Lee Bryant (1891) Lecture Hall, named after the first person to earn a geology degree at MIT.

Catalyzing collaboration

The project is about more than updating an overlooked space. “The building we’re here to celebrate today does something else,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said at the dedication.

“In its lightness, in its transparency, it calls attention not to itself, but to the people gathered inside it. In its warmth, its openness, it makes room for culture and community. And it welcomes in those who don’t yet belong … as we take on the immense challenges of climate together,” she continued, referencing the recent launch of The Climate Project at MIT — a whole-of-MIT initiative to innovate bold solutions to climate change. In MIT’s famously decentralized structure, the Moghadam Building provides a new physical hub for students, scientists, and engineers interested in climate and the environment to congregate and share ideas.

From the start, fostering this kind of multidisciplinary collaboration was part of Van der Hilst’s vision. In addition to serving as the flagship location for EAPS, Building 54 has long been the administrative home of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering — a graduate program in partnership with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. With the addition of Building 55, EAPS has now been joined by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) — a campus-wide program fostering education, outreach, and innovation in earth system science, urban infrastructure, and sustainability — and will welcome closer collaboration with Terrascope — a first-year learning community which invites its students to take on real-world environmental challenges.

A shared vision comes to life

The building project dovetailed with the long-overdue refurbishment of the Green Building. After a multi-year fundraising campaign where Van der Hilst spearheaded the department’s efforts, the project received a major boost from lead donors Tina and Hamid Moghadam ’77, SM ’78, allowing the department to break ground in November 2021.

In Moghadam, chair and CEO of Prologis, which owns 1.2 billion square feet of warehouses and other logistics infrastructure worldwide, EAPS found a fellow champion for climate and environmental innovation. By putting solar panels on the roofs of Prologis buildings, the company is now the second largest on-site producer of solar energy in the United States. “I don’t think there needs to be a trade-off between good sound economics and return on investment and solving climate change problems,” Moghadam said at the dedication. “The solutions that really work are the ones that actually make sense in a market economy.”

Architectural firm AW-ARCH designed the Moghadam Building with a light touch, emphasizing spaciousness in contrast to the heavy concrete buildings that surround it. “The kind of delicacy and fragility of the thing is in some ways a depiction of what happens here,” said architect and co-founding partner Alex Anmahian at the dedication reception, giving a nod to the study of the delicate balance of the earth system itself. The sense is further illustrated by the responsiveness of the façade to the surrounding environment, which, depending on the time of day and quality of light, makes the glass alternately reflective and transparent.

Inside, the 11,900-square foot pavilion is highly flexible and serves as a showcase for the science that happens in the labs and offices above. Central to the space is a 16-foot by 9-foot video wall featuring vivid footage of field work, lab research, data visualizations, and natural phenomena — visible even to passers-by outside. The video wall is counterposed to an unpretentious set of stair-step bleachers leading to the second floor that could play host to anything from a scientific lecture to a community pizza-and-movie night.

Van der Hilst has referred to his vision for the atrium as a “campus living room,” and the furniture throughout is intentionally chosen to allow for impromptu rearrangements, providing a valuable public space on campus for students to work and socialize.

The second level is similarly adaptable, featuring three classrooms with state-of-the-art teaching technologies that can be transformed from a single large space for a hackathon to intimate rooms for discussion.

“The space is really meant for a yet unforeseen experience,” Anmahian says. “The reason it is so open is to allow for any possibility.”

The inviting, dynamic design of the pavilion has also become an instant point of pride for the building’s inhabitants. At the dedication, School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala quipped that anyone walking into the space “gains two inches in height.”

Van der Hilst quoted a colleague with a similar observation: “Now, when I come into this space, I feel respected by it.”

The perfect complement

Another significant feature of the project is the List Visual Arts Center Percent-for-Art Program installation by conceptual artist Julian Charrière, entitled “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More.”

Consisting of three interrelated works, the commission includes: “Not All Who Wander Are Lost,” three glacial erratic boulders which sit atop their own core samples in the surrounding green space; “We Are All Astronauts,” a trio of glass pillars containing vintage globes with distinctions between nations, land, and sea removed; and “Pure Waste,” a synthetic diamond embedded in the foundation, created from carbon captured from the air and the breath of researchers who work in the building.

Known for themes that explore the transformation of the natural world over time and humanity’s complex relationship with our environment, Charrière was a perfect fit to complement the new Building 55 — offering a thought-provoking perspective on our current environmental challenges while underscoring the value of the research that happens within its walls.

[eretzyisrael]

by Jessica Costescu

"The Jewish and Israeli community at MIT … has undergone some of the worst violence, hatred, and injustice in the past 7 months," Khan and Moore wrote in a Monday letter to Kornbluth, "and we have seen the MIT Administration stand idly by as classmates, lab partners, and even our professors praised the murder of our friends and family, called for violence against Jews, and most recently chanted 'Death to Zionists' on MIT campus."

"You claim that if we are willing to wait just one more week, on top of the seven months we have already waited for you to act, you will finally support the Jewish community and take action against those calling for our deaths and the deaths of our loved ones," the students continued. "We don't believe you. … We will hold our celebration of Jewish self-determination, as planned."

Kornbluth's failed attempt to clear the encampment—and shifting deadline to do so—comes as the president faces congressional scrutiny into her handling of campus anti-Semitism.

The House Education Committee formalized an investigation into MIT in March, roughly three months after Kornbluth appeared before the committee alongside then-Harvard University president Claudine Gay and then-University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill. The hearing was a disaster, and both Magill and Gay resigned in its wake.

Now, the committee, led by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), is in the process of obtaining internal documents regarding Kornbluth's response to campus anti-Semitism. In a March letter sent to Kornbluth, Foxx expressed "grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of MIT's response to antisemitism on its campus," citing "hypocrisy and selective enforcement of Institute rules."

MIT did not respond to a request for comment.

In her Monday directive to disband the encampment, Kornbluth said student protesters who opted to leave voluntarily would avoid suspension. Those who stayed in the encampment would face immediate suspension, she said.

Hours later, after protesters breached the campus lawn and retook the encampment, Kornbluth issued a Monday evening "update." She said most students "had left the enclosed tent area" on Monday afternoon before "a large number of outside demonstrators arrived" and caused a "surge." None of those demonstrators were arrested, Kornbluth said.

"As we write, about 150 students and others are standing in a circle around the tents and others are nearby chanting," she said. "While no arrests have been made on campus, police officers from MIT, Cambridge and the state remain on the scene to preserve public safety."

"We have much work still to do to resolve this situation, and will continue to communicate as needed," Kornbluth said.

Kornbluth has a history of walking back promises to discipline anti-Israel protesters. In November, she threatened to expel students engaged in unsanctioned protests before opting to place those students on a "non-academic suspension," which allowed them to continue attending class. Kornbluth said she did so to protect foreign students, citing "serious concerns about collateral consequences for the students, such as visa issues."

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Dion J. Pierre

Jewish and Israeli students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have warned in a new letter to university president Sally Kornbluth that radical anti-Zionism and intimidation of Jewish students on campus has become intolerable and reminiscent of Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.

The letter, shared on X/Twitter by MIT professor Retsef Levi, recounted an incident from Thursday in which students from the MIT Coalition Against Apartheid (CAA), a campus anti-Israel group, “physically prevented” them from attending class by forming a “blockade” of bodies in Lobby 7, a space inside the main entrance of the university. Non-students were invited to attend CAA’s demonstration, and together the entire group spent hours chanting “Intifada” — a term used to describe violent Palestinian uprisings against Israel — and declaring solidarity with Hamas.

“Instead of dispersing the mob or de-escalating the situation by rerouting all students from Lobby 7, Jewish students specifically were warned not to enter MIT’s front entrance due to a risk to their physical safety,” wrote the MIT Israel Alliance. “The onus to protect Jewish students should not be on the students themselves.”

Even after being threatened with suspension should they not disperse, the letter continued, CAA remained in Lobby 7, inviting more non-student protesters, which caused the university to issue through its emergency notification system a directive to “avoid” the area. The students added that a high-level official of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning vowed, in defiance of official orders, to protect any CAA students who continued the demonstration.

The MIT Israel Alliance said that by the end of the day, Jewish students were told to enter the university through its back entrance and avoid the campus’ Hillel building.

“On the 9th of November, on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked the beginning of the Holocaust, Jews at MIT were told to enter campus from back entrances and not to stay in Hillel for fear of their physical safety,” the group concluded. “We are seeing history repeating itself and Jews on MIT’s campus are afraid.”

When asked for comment, an MIT spokesperson told The Algemeiner that the school is closed in observance of Veterans Day, but MIT President Sally Kornbluth addressed the incident late Thursday after the MIT Israel Alliance issued its letter. Her statement did not mention antisemitism.

“I am deliberately not specifying the viewpoints, as the issue at hand is not the substance of the views but where and how they were expressed,” Kornbluth said, noting that Jewish and pro-Israel counter-protesters were also present in Lobby 7 and that all students were recently reminded of guidelines forbidding holding protests in the building. “Today’s protest — which became disruptive, loud, and sustained through the morning hours — was organized and conducted in defiance of those MIT guidelines and polices. Some students from both the protest and counterprotest may have violated other MIT policies, as well.”

Kornbluth added that protesters who remained after being told to leave will receive a non-academic suspension.

[beardedmrbean]

A Black Harvard law professor has been accused of tweeting, then deleting, the word "Karma" in an apparent response to Claudine Gay announcing her resignation as president of the university following accusations of plagiarism and a row over campus antisemitism.

The post was allegedly made on X, formerly Twitter, by Professor Ronald Sullivan Jr., who in 2019 was effectively demoted after serving as part of Harvey Weinstein's defense team when the disgraced film producer was facing sexual assault allegations.

Political commentator Wesley Yang shared what he claimed was a screenshot of Gay's post, adding: "Ronald Sullivan deleted this one word post written in response to former Harvard president Claudine Gay's resignation: 'Karma.'"

Newsweek could not immediately verify the veracity of the screenshot's content or that the tweet was directly related to Gay's resignation.

Newsweek has reached out to Sullivan and Harvard University for comment via email.

Sullivan's decision to represent Weinstein sparked a furious response from some students, after which Harvard decided not to extend his contract as an undergraduate residence faculty dean. According to student-run newspaper The Harvard Crimson, Gay, then dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was one of those involved in the decision.

Gay announced she was stepping down as Harvard president on January 2, with a letter in which she claimed it was "in the best interests" of the university for her to resign after facing what she described as "personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus."

It came amid an ongoing row over free speech and bigotry on campuses, which had already claimed the job of Liz Magill, who resigned as president of Pennsylvania University last month following a controversial House committee appearance alongside Gay and Sally Kornbluth, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Sullivan faced protests on campus after The New York Post first reported he had joined Weinstein's defense team in January 2019, with demonstrators demanding he step down as faculty dean and for a public apology be issued.

Weinstein was later convicted of rape and sexual assault in the New York trial and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He was subsequently sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison by a court in Los Angeles in a separate case.

In response to the controversy, Sullivan sent a 1,200-word email to students at Winthrop, then his undergraduate faculty residence, stressing the importance of representing an "unpopular defendant."

In an interview with The Harvard CrimsonGay branded Sullivan's response to the row as "insufficient," and months later it was announced his position as Winthrop faculty dean would not be renewed.

Within hours of Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, which resulted in around 1,200 people killed and another 240 taken into Gaza as hostages, 34 Harvard student organizations signed a statement written by the university's Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee stating they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence."

The move triggered a furious response from the university's Jewish center Harvard Hillel, which said the statement promoted "hatred and antisemitism."

Appearing before a House committee in December, alongside Magill and Kornbluth, Gay was asked whether "calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard code of conduct" by Rep. Elise Stefanik.

She replied "it depends on the context," sparking outrage and calls for her to resign. Speaking to The Harvard Crimson, Gay later apologized for her remarks, and said: "Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group, are vile, they have no place at Harvard."

In December it was revealed Gay was facing an anonymous complaint of serial plagiarism, with additional allegations published by the Washington Free Beacon in January.

She initially denied any wrongdoing in response, stating: "I stand by the integrity of my scholarship." However, The New York Times reported that a Harvard investigation concluded there were cases of inadequate citation in her dissertation as well as at least two of her articles.

[tienramadan]

MIT deadline to clear encampment passes. Students face suspension and possible eviction

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ordered protesters in a letter to peacefully clear an encampment by 2:30 p.m. on Monday or face disciplinary action, after efforts to reach an agreement crumbled.

Students who refuse to leave the encampment by the deadline will face “immediate interim academic suspension” that will last through commencement activities, barring them from classes, exams, research or graduation activities, according to the letter.

Two weeks ago, pro-Palestinian students at MIT in Cambridge set up over a dozen tents as an act of solidarity with students at Columbia University, camping out at Kresge Oval. 

In a message to the university community, MIT President Sally Kornbluth warned of a threat of outside interference and potential violence.

“As recently as this weekend, we were presented with firm evidence of outside interference on US campuses, including widely disseminated literature that advocates escalation, with very clear instructions and suggested means, including vandalism,” said Kornbluth. “Our own campus has seen a variety of actions involving people from outside MIT, including a series of rallies organized by people who have no MIT affiliation. An outside group is planning another campus disruption here this afternoon.”

Last week, the university erected barriers around the Pro-Palestinian encampment, ahead of a large counterprotest organized by the New England chapter of the Israeli American Council.

The letter handed out to MIT activists detailed escalating consequences for students depending on whether or not they voluntarily leave.

Those that have previously been sanctioned by the Committee on Discipline or have a pending case since October 7, face “immediate interim full suspension” meaning students will “not be permitted to reside in your assigned residence hall or use MIT dining halls.”

Students who do voluntarily leave the encampment and swipe their IDs on the way out will have that noted as a “mitigating factor” when reviewing their disciplinary case.

“This prolonged use of MIT property as a venue for protest, without permission, especially on an issue with such sharp disagreement, is no longer safely sustainable,” said Kornbluth.

[stanbeedotme]

Three Presidents Go to Washington (Part 2) - Draft 8

Synopsis: On December 5, 2023, Harvard president Claudine Gay, University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth were called before the House Committee on Education & the Workforce for a hearing titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism”. Their answers to a particular set of questions from…