Academic left

Why Didn’t MIT Expel Violent Students?

Featured image Some of the worst anti-Semitic campus outbursts of recent weeks have been at MIT. Pro-genocide activists physically prevented Jewish students from attending classes, and refused to disperse when ordered to do so by university officials. Normally you would assume that a student who engaged in such barbaric conduct would be expelled. Yet MIT has treated its anti-Semites with kid gloves. Why? MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth has now made a statement »

Hitler Youth at MIT

Featured image Earlier today, Steve noted that it is Springtime for Hitler at MIT. (Penn, too.) Here’s one more: what happened in an MIT math class this morning: This is a math class this morning at @MIT. This is the state of learning and ‘free speech’ at our top universities. It would not be happening without a failure leadership at MIT. Imagine being a student who borrowed $250k to attend MIT or »

Springtime For Hitler at Penn

Featured image MIT is not the only “elite” school where Jews are unwelcome. At the University of Pennsylvania, anti-Semites put on a light show, projecting hate messages onto the walls of buildings: Heinous antisemitic slogans were beamed onto buildings at the University of Pennsylvania in the latest disturbing incident at the Ivy League institution — as the school faces a civil rights complaint accusing it of being “a magnet for antisemites.” Multiple »

Springtime for Hitler at MIT

Featured image The headline comes from a David Burge (“Iowahawk”) Tweet about this letter from Jewish students about events on campus at MIT yesterday: To all students at MIT, Today, Jewish and Israeli MIT students were physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students that call themselves the CAA [Coalition Against Apartheid, apparently]. This is after students from the CAA harassed MIT staff members in »

Bill Ackman to Harvard: Get Your Act Together

Featured image Bill Ackman is one of the most successful Wall Street investors of our age. He is also a double alumnus of Harvard, having received has A.B. and MBA from Harvard. He has sent the following letter to Harvard’s disgraceful, affirmative action president Claudine Gay—it is long, but worth it: November 4, 2023 Dear President Gay, I am writing this letter to you regretfully. Never did I think I would have »

Updates

Featured image • Further to yesterday’s item about the two dozen Big Law firms writing to law school deans telling them to get a grip on anti-Semitism, the Wall Street Journal today reports details on the origin of the letter: The letter was the idea of Joe Shenker, senior chairman of Sullivan & Cromwell, who was in Israel on Oct. 7. He tells us that after the American Lawyer wrote about his »

The Right to Privacy at Columbia

Featured image Earlier today, students at Columbia University walked out on a two-hour lecture by Hillary Clinton. I can’t blame them for that, although I admire Hillary’s stamina. But the students walked out for a different reason than I would have: Thirty students walked out of Hillary Clinton’s class at Columbia University to “shame” the Ivy League school for how they perceive it allowed its students who signed an anti-Israel statement to »

Big Law Drops a Big Foot: Will Law Schools Listen?

Featured image Yesterday I spotted on social media the letter shown below from two dozen top law firms (“big law,” as they are sometimes called) addressed to law school deans telling them to get a grip on the anti-Semitism that they have let run rampant at their schools. I was not able to verify its authenticity so I refrained from posting it, but the New York Times reports on it this morning, »

Arrest In Cornell Case

Featured image As you probably have read, viciously anti-Semitic threats were made against Jewish students at Cornell by an anonymous person. The apparent perpetrator has now been arrested: Patrick Dai, of Pittsford, posted threats to shoot up a multicultural dining room on campus to an online discussion site, prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York said in a news release. *** Dai, a junior, also called »

Harvard Vows to Do Better on Anti-Semitism

Featured image On Friday evening, Harvard President Claudine Gay gave a speech to Harvard Hillel that was adapted in Forward. Gay forthrightly admitted that Harvard has an anti-Semitism problem: Here in the U.S., we are witnessing a surge in anti-Jewish incidents and rhetoric across the nation — and on our own campus. The ancient specter of antisemitism, that persistent and corrosive hatred, has returned with renewed force. A recent ADL report found »

On Scene at the Pro-Hamas Campus “Walkout”

Featured image As noted earlier in the week, I was on campus at Berkeley yesterday to host a guest lecture at the law school from Hadley Arkes about his latest book Mere Natural Law (podcast forthcoming), but yesterday happened to coincide with the “National Walkout” in favor of Hamas called for on college campuses nationwide. I decided to take in some of the scene down at Sproul Plaza, the main site for »

Why Are Our Universities Anti-Semitic Cesspools?

Featured image Students at George Washington University, one of the most expensive in the country (tuition: $64,000, not including room and board, so add another 20K at least) have started projecting their support of Hamas on the library building of the campus: I’m sure GWU’s office of diversity, equity and inclusion will get right on this. How do the students at our campuses end up like this? Maybe this set of recent »

Really It’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology, But….

Featured image This short clip by Bill Maher, via InstaPundit, is great. If you want to know who is OK with burning babies alive, gang rape and mass murder, look no further than America’s “elite” institutions. The good news is that pretty much everyone is on to them: “If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard in the Wuhan wet market” – @BillMaher #RealTime pic.twitter.com/ReozVvO4NY — Brent Baker 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@BrentHBaker) October 21, »

Evil People Self-Identify

Featured image My opinion of leftists is so low that I am hard to disappoint. But I admit to being shocked by the reaction of many leftists and liberals to the Gazan invasion of Israel. In many instances, they feel no obligation even to disavow the Gazans’ mass murder, gang rapes, kidnappings and beheadings of infants. They go straight to denouncing Israel for imagined crimes and, in some instances, attacking anticipated actions »

Universities: Maybe We Should Just Shut Up?

Featured image The moral nihilism and leftist willfulness of American higher education have finally been exposed by the harsh light of the Hamas barbarism, and for a change there are consequences. When a squishy, status-conscious centrist like Jon Huntsman tells the University of Pennsylvania that his “checkbook is closed” to further donations (Huntsman’s family has given tens of millions to Penn over the years) because Penn is “deeply adrift in ways that »

It Has Come to This: The Hamas Lockdown

Featured image On Friday Stanford Law School canceled in-person classes and moved all classes back to Zoom as they did during the COVID lockdown. Late last week Columbia University announced that it would limit campus access to student and staff ID holders only, after a Jewish student was beaten by a stick-wielding assailant. Elsewhere we have seen scenes of students and, at the University of Michigan, one faculty member, tearing down flyers »

Harvard Sticks Up For Free Speech

Featured image Harvard’s President Claudine Gay has rejected calls to name the university’s pro-terrorism students: Harvard president Claudine Gay pushed back on attempts to name students who signed a letter blaming Israel for the massacres committed by Hamas amid mounting criticism of her handling of the crisis. Gay said the Ivy League school “embraces a commitment to free expression” in a video released Thursday night — her latest attempt to quell outrage »