And then there was one.
Liz Magill out at Penn. Claudine Gay out at Harvard. Or as she might say: “Copy that.” And in due time we shall turn to MIT’s equally despicable president, Sally Kornbluth.
Don’t let that last name fool you. She is not from the Moshe Rabbeinu Eliyahu HaNavi Kornbluths but from the George Soros Bernie Sanders Kornbluths.
The first hint that Claudine Gay was a plagiarist came when she copied 2,000 years of anti-Semites and their enablers. (Thanks, Gavi.) It’s all in the context.
In our Brave New World — actually a Cowardly Old World — where DEI (“Diversity (but not intellectual diversity),” “Equity [of outcomes]” (but not equality of opportunity), and “Inclusion [of Intersectionals] (but Exclusion of White males, Jews, and Christians) — rules education, the great Ivy League universities have moved toward DEI Great Pretenders as presidents.
At a minimum, a woman. Better if black. Even better if colored and Muslim. Or black and gay. Or, if not gay, then black and Gay.
Competence is not the criterion. Adequacy is sufficient. If black and female, preferably lesbian, “Excellent” is unnecessary when “Good Enough” will do. Liz Magill, ousted from Penn? She initially seemed somewhere between “Adequate” and “Good Enough.” Claudine Gay? Even less so, according to standard academic standards. You ask: What is less than “Good Enough”? Categories 3 and 4:
Category 1: Adequate
Category 2: Good Enough
Category 3: OK, I guess.
Category 4: May As Well
Claudine Gay is a Category 4 storm: May As Well hire her.
Scholarly integrity barely matters. In fact, scholarly achievement is all but irrelevant. Imagine: a president of Harvard University who never wrote a book. She published only 11 mediocre articles in her entire career, and quaere how many of those were her own work. Sometimes a great article is “unforgettable.” By contrast, Claudine Gay’s few articles were not even “forgettable” because, to forget them, they first need to have merited being remembered to some degree.
The university selection committees look not at the content of candidates’ character but at the color of their skin and the shape of their reproductive organs. In a world in which no one who is woke knows what a woman is, the DEI selection-and-appointment committees by coincidence keep landing on the “Person of Pregnancy Potentiality” card.
Don’t let these perverted standards overwhelm Israel’s universities. Tel Aviv U., Haifa U., and Ben Gurion (Israel’s “Toxic Trio”) are bad enough, as is.
Most American universities now are evil. They teach evil. They brainwash children into pursuing an agenda of evil. “Amerikkka” is the Great Satan, as the tenured anti-war demonstrators of the 1960s and ‘70s chanted fifty years ago, taught their apostles of the ‘80s and ’90s, and now see inculcated into contemporary Zombies.
By now, those radicals of the ‘60s and ‘70s are forced to make do on Social Security, are too weak to fight off muggers, fear the subways, and cannot afford petrol for their cars or home utilities like electric and gas. In other words, the Radical Leftists of 50 years ago have become today’s conservative Republicans. That entire Hippie Anti-War generation now poll as the GOP’s loyal seniors, having confronted their Third-World Franz Fanon reading lists in real life. They planted the seeds of evil that have germinated — and, with the anti-Semitism now prevalent, seeds that have Nazi-Germanated — on the campuses, even as they now vote Republican, early enough in the day to qualify for the 5:00 p.m. discounted seniors’ dinner special.
I have said forever that Jews are society’s canary in the coal mine. Nor am I the first who so has observed. When evil is perpetrated against Jews on Monday, you can be certain that everyone else will feel it in spades by Thursday. Hitler murdered 6 million of us. He murdered 75 million of everyone else. Do the math.
-First the Hamas and Fatah subhumans went for the Jews. Soon after, they were beheading British policemen and bombing French rock concerts.
First the Houthis fired rockets at Israel. Now they disrupt everyone else’s international shipping.
The haters never stop with Jews. There simply are not enough Jews around to satisfy their lust for hate or to quench their thirst for blood.
American universities and Israel’s Toxic Trio have been poison for the past forty years, centers of The New Hate. They were liberal before, but reasonably so. Professors accommodated conservative students; I know because I was one at 1970’s Columbia. Students did not apply political litmus tests to friendships. I know because Mitch was a Communist with a Trotsky beard, and Steve the Radical Leftist (”But don’t call me a Communist!”) was his best friend. And yet, we were a threesome — with our girlfriends — when the neighborhood Olympia theater, which showed two old movies for a dollar, played “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein.”
In today’s world, Communist Mitch would not be caught near me. Even the more moderate Radical Steve would avoid me. In fact, Communist Mitch would avoid Radical Steve like The Plague. And no one anywhere would be seeing “Blazing Saddles” because such movies no longer are allowed above ground. An Indian speaking Yiddish? The repeated articulation of the forbidden “N” word that will be a White person tarred-and-feathered although hip-hop “artists” and rappers repeat that word throughout their “works of art”? Fuggediboudit.
These universities have been bought by Arab Muslim sheikhdoms, intent on exporting their hate-filled Radical Islamism to America. They pay the professors’ salaries obliquely by buying and paying for the Middle East Studies departments that breed hatred for the West, taught by Arab Muslim professors who hate the America where they are, and also by a fair share of extreme radical non-Muslims. Beyond that, the Arab Muslim sheikhdoms pay full tuition for tens of thousands of their own Arab Muslim citizens to be students at American universities. Those troublemakers are cash cows because they do not apply for scholarships that everyone needs; their governments pay full freight for them.
You want proof? Look at the list of more than 30 Harvard student groups that signed a letter against Israel and Jews: the vast majority are foreign students, Arabs and other Muslims from Africa and South Asia. You scan the list:
African American Resistance Organization
Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College
Harvard Act on a Dream
Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association
Harvard Chan Muslim Student Association
Harvard Chan Students for Health Equity and Justice in Palestine
Harvard College Pakistan Student Association
Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association
Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association
Harvard Graduate School of Education Islamic Society
Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine
Harvard Islamic Society
Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine
Harvard Divinity School Students for Justice in Palestine
Harvard Jews for Liberation
Harvard Kennedy School Bangladesh Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Women’s Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Palestine Caucus
Harvard Muslim Law School Association
Harvard Pakistan Forum
Harvard Prison Divest Coalition
Harvard South Asian Law Students Association
Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research
Harvard TPS [Temporary Protected Status] Coalition
Harvard Undergraduate Arab Women’s Collective
Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo
Harvard Undergraduate Muslim Women’s Medical Alliance
Harvard Undergraduate Nepali Students Association
Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee
Middle East and North African Graduate School of Design Student Society
Neighbor Program Cambridge
Sikhs and Companions of Harvard Undergraduates Society of Arab Students
So we have these way-out leftist universities with Muslim Arab and other African and South Asian Islamic imports who hate America, sprinkled with apostate Jews who hate Jews and especially their parents, and an even larger majority of people born to Catholics and Protestants who also are society’s dregs, outliers protected by Ivy and Ivory walls, all a community teaching American kids four years (often delayed into five years) of pure unadulterated garbage.
These tenured sorts do it because they cannot be fired — practically the only job in the world where a person cannot be fired, no matter how lazy and incompetent. “Tenure” is a lifetime guarantee as long as the dolt avoids moral turpitude. And, armed with that vocational invincibility, they construct absurd reading lists that present their Zombies with only one world of thinking.
Even the Columbia University I attended in the 1970’s was like that. I majored in Political Science. Almost every reading list in every class seemed to have “The Marx-Engels Reader” as required reading. Almost always “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon.
I once had to see a doctor in the University Health program for a sinus condition. He was a nice guy, and as he was helping cure me, he also started playing “Conservative Footsie” with me. It was something like what homosexuals did in the 1940’s and 1950’s, afraid to reveal their orientations, yet searching for fellow travelers on that journey. It was scary for them. They looked for clues, hints — and woe unto them if they read someone wrong.
That was “Conservative Footsie” at 1970’s Columbia. The doctor dared not risk his job in Health Services by revealing himself a conservative. And yet, he saw my yarmulka and knew that we Orthodox usually are the most right-wing Americans. So this doctor, while pumping some saline solution into one nostril — a moment when I was atypically compromised — started pumping me for information, too: what was I reading for my classes? I told him “Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Frantz Fanon. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Frantz Fanon. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. And Frantz Fanon.” He asked me, warily: “Have you ever been assigned to read Ayn Rand?”
“No.”
“Have you ever heard of Ayn Rand?”
“I’m sorry. I never heard of him. Was he a Columbia alumnus?”
“Actually, it’s not ‘he’ but ‘she.’ And I don’t want to prejudice you about her. I am just asking you this one favor: If you wake up tomorrow with clearer sinuses and an ability to breathe easier, will you agree to read a book called ‘Atas Shruggged’?”
Oh, come on, I thought. I have so many reading assignments every day. All I do is read, except when Commie Mitch and Radical Steve are up for Mel Brooks. I had to ask my question:
“How many pages is it?”
I had no idea what I had walked into.
“It’s a million pages. And that’s only the radio address. So, instead, do me a favor and read either ‘We the Living’ or ‘The Fountainhead.’ OK?”
“Yes, it’s a deal. If I can breathe better tomorrow, I will dig one up and read it.”
I ended up reading “We the Living.” As soon as I was done with Kira Argounova, I was so transformed that I went for The Million . . . pages. I read “Atlas Shrugged.”
Four years of Columbia University, and the best education I ever got was when my nose would not stop dripping even with Sudafed.
It took rabid anti-Israelism and pure Jew-hatred at The Ivies to bring out what else is now going on in the canaries’ coal mine. The methane gas is not just leaking but is being spewed. And it is almost all American universities. Even Yeshiva University, with its remarkably leftist secular faculties, and NCSY have moved toward political correctness. Touro College is all that is left. The non-Ivy League universities are no less evil than the Ivies. It is just that the Ivies are more prominent, have a longer and more storied history, and therefore live off their reputations.
The Ivies get away with so much that would plunge other universities into oblivion. Because they have names like Harvard and Yale, Columbia and Penn, Princeton and Cornell, and Dartmouth, they are deemed above reproach. Not to mention Brown — the perfect Ivy name in the Age of DEI: Brown. Poor Stanford and Berkeley barely get mentioned, having arrived later on the West Coast and apparently unable to grow ivy on their walls as easily as weed in their dormitories.
Some of America’s smartest kids pay insane amounts of money — or, more accurately, their parents do — not for a Harvard or Yale education but for a Harvard or Yale degree. That is what they are paying for: the degree. Eight Poison Ivies. Eight Degrees of Separation — from reality.
Ivy League educations are marked by artificially inflated grades, as are all colleges’ and universities’ grades in this era of the Participation Trophy: just show up, and — Mazal Tov! — you have a law degree from Harvard and Yale, and now are Supreme Court eligible.
The entire situation in academia is rotten. Rot from the bottom to the top. Rot in the faculties. Rot in the reading lists. Rot in the course requirements. Rot in the “majors” now offered. Rot in the administrations. Rot among the presidents. Rot among the boards of directors who oversee the rot.
It started with beating up the Jews, the canaries. But it has exposed that DEI and woke ideology have destroyed academia. And the billionaires whose larger-than-life egos fund the garbage, knowing full well that it is garbage, but desperate to see their names on a dorm building or a students’ union or, at least, some campus toilet somewhere, lack the decency to stop funding it.
Each and every one of them who made his billions by virtue of American capitalism is a mini-George Soros wielding his money to destroy America.
At least Israel’s colleges, even the Toxic Trio, are not bought and paid-for by Arab countries. Small comfort when their faculties are pocked and poxed with self-hating Jews whose intensity of Israel hatred would embarrass even a Norman Finkelstein.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
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