Higher education
April 25, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Atlantic today has posted up an article from George Packer that, as John Podhoretz noted on Twitter, you could have read in Commentary at any point for the last 35 years. The fact that this is appearing in The Atlantic perhaps marks a turning point in established liberal opinion, but will college administrators and trustees take note and do anything about it? It’s a long piece, but here are
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April 25, 2024 — Scott Johnson
In an act of leadership that contrasts with the malicious indifference of President Biden and his team, House Speaker Mike Johnson went up to Columbia University to call for the restoration of order on campus. He spoke from the steps of Low Library to denounce the treatment of Jewish students on campus. I have posted video below. Johnson was joined by a GOP delegation including Reps. Virginia Foxx, Anthony D’Esposito,
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April 24, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The pro-Hamas kill the Jews crowd in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at the heart of campus has received an extension. Not to get the campers’ term papers in, of course, but rather to vacate the encampment at the heart of the campus. The encampment is unauthorized and was supposed to be removed days ago. Columbia President Minouche Shafik then set a deadline of this morning at 8:00 a.m. She has
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April 23, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Columbia University presents an extreme case of the rot infesting our major institutions — elite organs of higher education, corporate America, the mainstream media, the entertainment business, the legal profession, the teachers’ unions, and so on. We can learn from Columbia’s extremity. It highlights elements of the phenomenon that otherwise remain beyond our view. The rot at Columbia runs through the students, the administration, and the faculty of the university.
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April 23, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The silence of President Biden on the eruption of anti-Semitic “protests” on elite college campuses constitutes a disgusting sidebar to the unfolding story. He was asked about them yesterday as he shambled down a sylvan path in Triangle, Virginia. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden told reporters. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” “Palestinians” widely support Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the terrorist forces
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April 22, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The Columbia campus appears to have been taken over by the pro-Hamas kill the Jews crowd among the student body. Jessica Costescu rounds up the news in the Washington Free Beacon story “Columbia University Campus Unravels in Face of Escalating Anti-Semitic, Eliminationist Protests.” The New York Post reports “New anti-Israel tent city takes over Columbia University lawn days after NYPD raid as activists vow to stay ‘forever.’” In other words,
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April 21, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Working for then Minnesota Senator Walter Mondale in the summer of 1969, I went to hear the late Allard Lowenstein speak to a large group of interns. Lowenstein was serving his only term in Congress before he was gerrymandered out of his district. Lowenstein asked us to go back to our campuses, do our thing in opposition to the Vietnam war, and “eschew violence.” He said the word “eschew” several
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April 20, 2024 — Scott Johnson
It looks like the mob has taken control of Columbia University, SA style. The Columbia Spectator reports on the suspensions issued for for participation in Wednesday’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” One of Ilhan Omar’s daughters (Isra Hirsi) is among the suspended students. The rotten apple doesn’t fall far from the rotten tree. The Spectator quotes Columbia undergrad Maryam Alwan, another one of the suspended students. Alwan told the Spectator that she
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April 19, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Current events at Columbia may call to mind events at Columbia circa 1968. Before matriculating at Dartmouth in the fall of 1969, I joined a group of incoming freshmen who met to discuss Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice and Columbia undergrad James Simon Kunen’s just-published The Strawberry Statement. We didn’t take Cleaver’s book particularly seriously and Eric Hoffer did even less so. He caustically mocked it as Soul On Horse
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April 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Ilhan Omar elicited the testimony of Columbia President Minouche Shafik at the House Education Committee hearing yesterday that she had seen no “protests” at Columbia “saying we are against Jewish people.” See the video below at 0:40. Omar also regurgitated the canard that students had been attacked by “a toxic chemical substance.” That appears not to be the case. I think it might more accurately be deemed the raspberry statement.
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April 18, 2024 — Scott Johnson
Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik skipped the December 5 House Education Committee Hearing on anti-Semitism at their institutions that disgraced the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT. President Shafik was invited to the hearing, but she was otherwise engaged. She was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai. Some might say that she sensed stormy weather. Yesterday the committee reconvened to hear from President Shafik and
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March 24, 2024 — John Hinderaker
There are several answers to that question, but start with the fact that it is mostly the “elite” universities, and to some extent the larger ones, that have seen severe outbreaks of anti-Semitism. What is different about these institutions? For one thing, they have large numbers of foreign students, many of them from the Middle East and China. This has become a financial racket: the top universities post sky-high sticker
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March 18, 2024 — Steven Hayward
The Wall Street Journal has a feature news story in today’s edition detailing a fact long known about the success Cuban intelligence has enjoyed penetrating American government over the years, in particular their sophisticated and widespread recruitment efforts. “Cuba has ‘the best damn intelligence service in the world’ for cultivating agents, said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst who led the agency’s Latin America division,” the story notes. There is
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March 17, 2024 — Steven Hayward
In its typically clueless way, The New Yorker is hot on the topic of whether the liberal arts—and especially classical education—have gone conservative. (The article is titled, “Have the Liberal Arts Gone Conservative?”) Better break out the smelling salts. You’d think this is an easy question. The left have attacked or hollowed out the liberal arts on campus, and the only people who take the classics seriously, and on their
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March 14, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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.
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March 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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
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March 12, 2024 — Scott Johnson
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,
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