Wharton donor withdraws $100M due to antisemitism

It's amazing how suddenly these presidents find 'clarity' and the 'apologies' spew forth from their hypocritical lips, once donors stop donating. This reeks of insincerity and platitudes to placate the press, the public, and politicians rather than genuine remorse. Don't ask me how I really feel about campuses that pledge to allow free thought in the name of education and then ostracize conservatives, anything not woke, facts that don't support their ESG narratives, and now allow support for HAMAS and its only true goal of Jewish genocide. It's unfathomable to allow support protests that praise Hamas and threaten Jews. This is just another example of the loony far Left in action... allowing radicalization to promoted on their campuses.  

And now this...


Harvard president apologizes for remarks on antisemitism as pressure mounts on Penn’s president

Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik pressed Ivy League college presidents about antisemitism on their campuses and whether some acts are considered “bullying and harassment” at a hearing on Tuesday.

BY COLLIN BINKLEY AND MARC LEVY - Updated 4:09 PM EST, December 8, 2023
apnews.com/article/harvard-mit-penn-campus-antisemitism-20b8513293ee2dbaee053a6fd3f8ce7a

WASHINGTON (AP) — Harvard University’s president apologized as pressure mounted for the University of Pennsylvania’s president to resign over their testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism that critics from the White House on down say failed to demonstrate they would stand up to antisemitism on campus.

In an interview Thursday with The Crimson student newspaper, Harvard President Claudine Gay said she got caught up in a heated exchange at the House committee hearing and failed to properly denounce threats of violence against Jewish students.

Meanwhile, lawyers for a major donor to Penn, Ross Stevens, wrote to Penn’s general counsel on Thursday to threaten to withdraw a gift valued at $100 million because of the university’s “stance on antisemitism on campus” unless Penn President Liz Magill is replaced.

Gay’s and Magill’s testimony have drawn intense national backlash, as have similar responses from the president of MIT who also testified before the Republican-led House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday. Donors, alumni and members of Congress in both parties have called for their resignations.

Several critics have pushed colleges and universities to do more to fight antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus:

The federal government opened an investigation into seven schools last month.

The University of Michigan opened a new institute to promote religious inclusion.

Harvard’s president isn’t the only leader who has apologized for her remarks in the hearing.

At issue was a line of questioning that asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the universities’ code of conduct. At the Tuesday hearing, Gay said it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”

Gay told The Crimson she was sorry, saying she “got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”

“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,” Gay said.

Magill walked back some of her comments Wednesday, saying she would consider a call for the genocide of Jewish people would be considered harassment or intimidation. She also said she would launch a review of Penn’s policies, saying they have long been guided by the U.S. Constitution but need to be “clarified and evaluated.”

Universities across the U.S. have been accused of failing to protect Jewish students amid reports of growing antisemitism following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The three presidents were called before the committee to answer those accusations, but their lawyerly answers drew renewed blowback from opponents.

The White House joined the criticism of Gay, Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth, with a spokesperson saying calls for genocide are “monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, also called Magill’s testimony “unacceptable” and urged trustees there to consider Magill’s job. On Thursday night, he joined Jewish students at Penn to mark the start of Hanukkah with a menorah lighting on campus.

Penn’s trustees remained quiet about Magill’s future, although they were scheduled to meet this weekend, Shapiro said Friday.

The episode has marred Gay’s early tenure at Harvard — she became president in July — and sowed discord at the Ivy League campus. On Thursday, Rabbi David Wolpe resigned from a new committee on antisemitism created by Gay.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Wolpe said “events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.” A statement from Gay thanked Wolpe for his work, saying he helped deepen her understanding “of the unacceptable presence of antisemitism here at Harvard.”

The Republican-led House committee announced Thursday it will investigate the policies and disciplinary procedures at Harvard, MIT and Penn. Separate federal civil rights investigations were previously opened at Harvard, Penn and several other universities in response to complaints submitted to the U.S. Education Department.

At Penn, some donors and alumni have been critical of the university’s response to antisemitic acts on campus — including a swastika drawn inside the design school building and vandalism at the Hillel chapter there — that happened before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The gift from Stevens — shares of his Stone Ridge Holdings Group — were given in 2017 to underwrite the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. However, in the letter, his lawyers said Penn’s “permissive approach to hate speech calling for violence against Jews and laissez faire attitude toward harassment and discrimination” likely violate the donor agreement.

The letter said Stevens and Stone Ridge are open to giving Penn a chance to fix the violations “if, and when, there is a new university president in place.”

___

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

And what about Stanford, you ask?

Stanford is the latest elite university to be slammed for its lack of ‘moral resolve’ in its response to Hamas’ attack on Israel

BYDANIEL CANCEL, JANET LORIN, BIZ CARSON AND BLOOMBERG - October 27, 2023 at 7:46 PM EDT
fortune.com/2023/10/27/stanford-alumni-students-hamas-israel-response/

////////////////////////

And now this...

The Day The Empress' Clothes Fell Off

Did the Congressional hearings finally expose the scandal of the Ivy League?

ANDREW SULLIVAN - DEC 8, 2023
andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-day-the-empress-clothes-fell-ffa


From left to right: Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn president Liz Magill, professor Pamela Nadell of American U, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth testify before Congress on December 5. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? In the immortal words of Hitch (peace be upon him), as you listen to these people, “You see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they have dined.”

The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.

In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”

Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.

If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified.

It would be wrong to see this as a function merely of old-school anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism is simply a subsidiary of the entire rubric of “anti-Whiteness” that is taught as the supreme principle of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” DEI does not mean and has never meant diversity, equity and inclusion for all. It means active support for the “oppressed” against the “oppressors.” It means challenging “whiteness,” as represented by individual white people. Let’s go to the Smithsonian to read a definition of the term:

Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not. These benefits and advantages, of varying degrees, are known as white privilege. For many white people, this can be hard to hear, understand, or accept — but it is true.

Now replace the word “white” with “Jewish,” and it all fits neatly into place, doesn’t it? Jews “hold most of the power.” Jews “receive advantages” others do not. Jews have “Jewish privilege.” Within “white supremacy” there is, definitionally, “Jewish supremacy,” because Jews in America (and even Israel!) are defined by their “whiteness.” They may not want to hear it, but they are the oppressor class now. If “white supremacy” is changed to “Jewish supremacy,” you even get the title of David Duke’s 2003 book, Jewish Supremacism.

The tropes, the structure, and the psyche of anti-Semitism have simply been copied and pasted onto anti-whiteness. There’s the same envy and resentment of an all-controlling racial group that is deemed not inferior (as in anti-black racism), but superior — by underhanded, shifty, rigged means. That’s why the word “merit” is now derided in the Ivy League: it doesn’t exist in neo-Marxist eyes. Only power exists.

As whites, Jews helped construct a Constitution long ago that pretends to guarantee equal rights, but once you “awaken” to the racist conspiracy that will always define America, you can see it was actually designed to oppress non-white goyim forever. This is what the New York Times believes, as we discovered in 2019, in an entire issue of their magazine, which they then distributed to high-school kids, so they could learn which groups to hate in America, and which groups to love.

This is why when non-whites commit hate crimes, they are instantly redefined as enacting “white supremacy.” It is why it is not “triggering” to call a conservative student a “white supremacist” or a white gay man of my generation a “queer” — we deserve it as oppressors — but it is a form of violence if you misgender a trans person or ask where someone is from. Even “Silence Is Violence,” as the BLM protestors insisted. In fact, some say, “silence is the worst form of violence.” Could Chairman Mao have put it better?

It is why you can set up a segregated dorm at MIT, call it “Chocolate City,” and be praised by the president, Sally Kornbluth, as being about “positive selection.” It’s why due process exists in sexual abuse cases for women on campus, but is denied to all men. It’s why these universities have racially segregated graduations for everyone — except “whites.” And because this grotesque racist engineering requires admitting vast numbers of students who cannot meet the academic standards of the evil past, 80 percent of Harvard and Yale students now get an A or A- as a grade. This is not “equity,” however they re- and re-define it. It is the hard bigotry of no expectations.

Drudge readers 20% off

The absolute worst thing you can do right now is what the presidents of these woke institutions now say they intend to do: switch Jews out of the “oppressor class” and into the “oppressed one,” and re-apply all the DEI discrimination on their behalf.

That doesn’t solve the problem; it compounds it. Pro-Palestinian, and anti-Israel speech should no more be censored than any other — and the suppression is real. There should be one standard and it should be free speech. But there can be no free speech and no guarantee of it until the toxins of critical theory, and the architecture of its enforcement, DEI, are excised from the university altogether. Asking the current leadership to correct these lost institutions is an exercise in futility.

End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academic merit alone. Save standardized testing — which in fact helps minorities, and it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids,” as Steven Pinker said this week. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut or shout down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students, and see them as free human beings with open minds. Treat them equally as individuals seeking to learn, if you can remember such a concept.

David Wolpe is a distinguished and learned rabbi who resigned this week from Harvard’s advisory committee on anti-Semitism. In a tweet, he wrote:

Harvard is still a repository of extraordinary minds and important research. However, the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.

Yes, it is evil. This is no time to be mealy-mouthed about it. And we must root it out. Before its poison makes our liberal democracy almost impossible to reconstruct.