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On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox Business Network’s “Kudlow,” Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz stated that Columbia University President Nemat Shafik should get some credit for her handling of antisemitism on campus, but “she hasn’t dealt with the problem.
The post Dershowitz: Columbia Hasn’t Addressed DEI, Which Causes Antisemitism and Will ‘Destroy’ Every School appeared first on Breitbart.
Dennis Ross is a scholar and diplomat of unmatched experience in the vagaries of “the peace process.” His 2005 memoir The Missing Peace: Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace runs to 880 closely printed pages. He served in both the Bush (41) and Clinton administrations. He also served as special assistant to President Obama and worked on National Security Council in both the Reagan and Obama administrations. He currently serves as a distinguished fellow on the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. His impressive Washington Institute profile is posted here.
On a personal note, I would like to add this. When I was working on the 2007 Weekly Standard article “How Arafat got away with murder,” I caught Ambassador Ross by telephone in his office late on a Friday afternoon. He was on his way out the door and didn’t know me from Adam, yet he took my question and responded as quoted in the article. He seemed to me a straightforward and decent gentleman.
Ross was invited by the MIT Jewish Alumni Alliance to speak at MIT’s “Standing Together Against Hate” program launched in the aftermath of the the October 7 massacre. MIT president Sally Kornbluth trumpeted the program as an effort aimed at “community building.” She put MIT chancellor Melissa Nobles in charge.
A Hamas apologist is scheduled to speak at MIT as part of the program on March 18. Jewish alumni reached out to Ross and confirmed his willingness to participate in the program’s speaker series. When attempts were made to move forward, however, program planners informed the alumni that Ross is not an appropriate speaker because they deem him “a politician.” The alumni group has posted its March 12 open letter to Kornbluth here.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Jessica Costescu now takes a deep dive into the story under the headline “MIT Refused To Host Dennis Ross. It Invited a Hamas Apologist Instead.” Subhead: “Dalia Mogahed, who described Hamas terrorism as legal ‘resistance,’ slated to speak as a part of MIT’s ‘Standing Against Hate’ Initiative.”
What’s the trouble with Dennis Ross? It’s not that he is a politician. He has never run for office:
Like Ross, Mogahed has served as a presidential adviser, albeit to fewer presidents and in more junior roles. She served as an adviser to former president Barack Obama in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
For Matthew Handel and Lori Ullman, two Jewish Alumni Alliance members, MIT’s refusal to host Ross—and its excuse for excluding him—are insulting.
“It’s already patronizing for anyone to say we’re at MIT, so we think we’re smarter than you,” Handel, who co-founded the group, told the Free Beacon. “It’s beyond arrogant that they would say, ‘We work at MIT, so as MIT alums, we’re smarter than you; MIT students, we’re smarter than you; Congress, we’re smarter than you.'”
Costescu gives the reader everything he might need to understand the story and the actual trouble with Ross, including this valuable note: “MIT did not return a request for comment.”
The great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hosts the Illusion of Consensus podcast. I have embedded his most recent episode below via X. In this episode he speaks with Martin Kulldorff. Please check it out in its native habitat here and help Dr. Bhattacharya extend his reach to other platforms.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s introduction to the podcast notes that “in this critical conversation we discuss a number of hot topics, most crucially Martin’s firing from Harvard for his opposition to vaccine mandates. He has broken the silence on this tragic issue and we are happy to host his first public conversation on the matter. We also discuss Martin’s firing from the CDC over the J&J vaccine and Harvard’s generally unscientific response to the pandemic. The conversation concludes with a discussion on decentralizing and reforming the scientific community.”
Drs. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are are two-thirds of the team that hatched the Great Barrington Declaration. With any luck, they will be recognized in next year’s Samizadat Prize.
New Illusion of Consensus podcast with @martinkulldorff. Martin tells the story of his career in public health, his advocacy for the basic principles of public health in the covid era, and his departure from Harvard.
(The link to the podcast is in my bio. Please subscribe!) pic.twitter.com/K3GOZupBlQ
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) March 12, 2024
The required reading for the Illusion of Consensus podcast is of course Martin Kulldorff’s March 11 City Journal column “Harvard tramples the truth.” Dr. Kulldorff also discusses his experience in the excellent City Journal podcast with John Tierney below (City Journal transcript here).
According to his Martin Kulldorff bio, Ph.D., Dr.h.c., is an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He was a Professor of Medicine at Harvard University for thirteen years. Dr. Kulldorff’s research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. In October 2020, he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, advocating for a pandemic strategy of focused protection instead of lockdowns.
City Journal has just published Professor Kulldorff’s account of the censorship of his work and his involuntary departure from Harvard. It was something (many things) he thought and said — crimes against the groupthink of the Covid regime. His account runs to 2,500 words and is titled “Harvard tramples the truth.” It’s straight outta Cambridge. It’s straight outta D.C. It’s straight outta Orwell.
It opens: “I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.” Read every word here.
In her February 26 Tablet column “The takeover,” Neetu Arnold traces the relationship among international student recruitment, DEI policies, and left-wing activism on American campuses. It is a long column that is full of information and data. This is how it opens:
Something new and peculiar stands out about the wave of anti-Israel student activism that has rocked American university campuses since October: There is a visibly more radical element to these protests. Student activists almost seemed to take glee in Hamas’ massacre of innocent civilians—when they weren’t denying that it happened at all. The antisemitic rage struck a different tone than the typical anti-Israel fare that has become a central part of American student activism since Students for a Democratic Society formed in the 1960s.
So what changed? The answer is clear to anyone who watched the videos: these student protests are no longer composed solely of left-wing American students steeped in critical theory and post-colonial ideology. The protests are now havens for foreign students, especially those from Arab and Muslim countries, with their own set of nationalist and tribal grievances against Israel and the United States. In some cases, such foreign students appear to lead the protests in their pro-terrorism chants—some of which are in Arabic, or translations of Arabic slogans.
What we are witnessing is the latest consequence of a quiet revolution in higher education: the internationalization of the American university. Today, there are more than one million foreign students enrolled at American universities, making up more than 5% of the total student population. At elite universities, the situation is much more extreme: international students make up almost 25% of the student population.
I would add that Arnold’s introductory paragraph seems to me to apply not only to pro-Hamas “activism” on campus, but also to pro-Hamas “activism” on the streets of our major cities and inside the Democratic Party’s left-wing base. Someone needs to undertake the same kind of analysis to the off-campus phenomenon that Arnold does to the on-campus phenomenon. It isn’t pretty and it’s not going away.
Niall Ferguson must be one of the three most prominent historians writing in English today. He is the author of 16 books. Late last year he wrote the timely and trenchant essay “Treason of the Intellectuals.” Now he follows up that essay with the lecture “After the Treason of the Intellectuals” at the University of Austin, where he is Founding Trustee. With Ferguson’s invocation of Max Weber, the lecture put me in mind of Steve Hayward’s address to incoming graduate students at Pepperdine’s school of public policy at the beginning of this academic year.
This is the talk Ferguson gave at the University of Austin’s Founding Class of 2028 reception. It is in part a description of the state of higher education and in part a motivational talk for incoming students. He speaks from notes in front of a fiery backdrop that seems to serve as a metaphor — he calls it “a simulated apocalyptic landscape” –for the spirit of his remarks. The nascent University of Austin bids to join Hillsdale College as one of our essential educational institutions.
Bryan Caplan, professor of economics in George Mason University’s excellent economics department, has a long article out today with the James Martin Center about the attempt to impose a mandatory “Just Societies” course for all students at George Mason starting next fall, and the course is a total ideological DEI wokefest. He also has a separate Substack article that goes into lengthy detail.
Partly because Caplan blew the whistle on this Orwellian outrage, the course requirement is on hold for the moment, pending “review” by the administration. And naturally the DEI campus Stasi is threatening to “review” Prof. Caplan for this offense.
One passage from his Martin Center article deserves special highlight:
This is quixotic, I know, but let me try to break through the woke academic echo chamber with some harsh truths. If you promote DEI for a living, the reality is that normal, apolitical people see you as a racist, sexist, censorious fanatic. They don’t say so publicly … because they are afraid of you. They don’t tell you privately … because they are afraid of you. But when they’re speaking to people they trust, they vehemently disagree with you—and yearn to see you all fired.
Well, it appears that the University of Florida has figured this out. Today the University (where Ben Sasse is now president) summarily closed down the entire DEI apparatus, and is summarily dismissing, rather than “reassigning” DEI staff to other offices. It has also canceled all outside contracts for DEI consultants. It will save $5 million right away, which Sasse says will be diverted to new faculty recruitment.
Here’s the note that went out:
More of this please. Burn them all down.
Related: Harvard announced today that it is appointing . . . a white male as interim provost. I didn’t think that was allowed any more at Harvard. But not just a white male, but a somewhat conservative white male—John Manning of Harvard Law School. Manning clerked for both Robert Bork on the DC Circuit and Nino Scalia at the Supreme Court. How he snuck onto Harvard Law’s faculty is something to ponder.
Harvard must really be badly rattled if it is willing to violate current progressive dogma and appoint a white male to such a senior position.
The Biden administration has fashioned another program of student debt relief forgiveness. The so-called SAVE plan was promulgated by regulation last year. It takes the load off the fanny of beneficiaries of certain federal college loan programs and puts it right on the back of taxpayers. Politico reports that Biden is emailing 153,000 student loan borrowers that he’s canceling their debt. “I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room,” the message says.
Those of us who actually pay taxes could use a little breathing room, but there is no breathing room to be found. Suffocation is the order of the day.
President Biden is himself a suffocating demagogue, as in his victory lap in the video below (White House transcript here). We thought the Supreme Court had spared us this particular outrage by its decision last year in Biden v. Nebraska. Apparently the justices needn’t have bothered themselves.
Biden declares that he has discovered a workaround. To the extent that one can understand what he’s saying in the clip below, he strikes a defiant note. He’s unafraid of consequences. He’s daring someone to stop him.
Biden on student loan cancellation: “The Supreme Court blocked it. But that didn't stop me." pic.twitter.com/ZomPnhTU1k
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 22, 2024
NRO’s James Lynch has a good story on Biden’s announcement in “Biden Administration Wiping Out another $1.2 Billion in Student-Loan Debt.” Matt Continetti adds up the damage:
On February 21, Biden announced that he was canceling $1.2 billion in federal student loans for 153,000 borrowers. That’s on top of more than $130 billion in student debt that he has canceled to date. The Penn Wharton school says that Biden’s efforts will cost a total of $475 billion over 10 years.
NRO’s Charlie Cooke has posted a cry from the heart expressing his indignation over the unfairness of Biden’s action. In his concluding paragraph, he seems unfairly to blame House Republicans. According to Politico, however, the House actually voted to kill SAVE this past December, but the Senate saved it. Now what?
The regulatory background to the current monstrosity is set forth by Jill Desjean in “ED Releases Final Rule on Latest Income-Driven Repayment Plan.” The final regulation was announced in the Federal Register here last year.
In light of the Supreme Court decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the regulation purports to find authority for the regulation under section 455 of the Higher Education Act than under the HEROES Act. See the “Legal Authority” section of the Federal Register announcement linked above.
What we have here is a monstrosity. James Bovard has an entertaining New York Post column satirizing it, but Bovard has no proposal to kill it. The current monstrosity comes to life this coming July 1. What we need to kill it is a new president to rein in the Education Department, or Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, or some serious legal analysis on which to premise a challenge to the madness of King Joe.
Vaunce News 
