By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki with Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights
After months of siege warfare, Columbia University has capitulated to the forces of President VD Amin by paying more than $200,000,000 in extortion money to him and doing a few other things too.
The exhausted Columbia General Staff is spinning the armistice as a clever bit of strategy that leaves the University largely unscathed, if you don't count Alsace-Lorraine.
A cursory analysis demonstrates that they are either deluded or straight up lying to the vast Columbia community.
Just to recapitulate how Columbia got here, the campus pretty much exploded after the Hamas terror attack of October 7, 2023 and Israel's subsequent invasion, occupation, and latterly starvation of Gaza. As you might imagine feelings ran high on College Walk. Tents were erected on the lawn. Some horrible things were said, including anti-Semitic slurs, whether articulated by students or the usual New York City hangers-on.
Following the successful coup against the United States launched on January 20, 2025, the usual Likudnik and reactionary suspects saw these incidents as their Ardennes Forest. It was the opening they needed to destroy their enemies: free inquiry and knowledge.
It didn't take much for Pres VD Amin to declare all-out war on Columbia and other great universities by hitting them where it really hurt: by cutting off $400 million of duly-awarded government grants that pay for vast swaths of research, particularly in medicine and STEM fields (with another $900 million threatened or frozen). The results were devastating, at least to the academic grandees who had gone from bathed in government riches to impoverished schnorrers overnight.
To some, including big Columbia donors and power brokers like Bob Kraft, the outcome was the usual happy ending.
To the rest of us, not so much:
Ruh-roh:
As part of the settlements struck with two Ivy League universities in recent weeks, the Trump administration will gain access to the standardized test scores and grade point averages of all applicants, including information about their race, a measure that could profoundly alter competitive college admissions.
....The release of such data has been on the wish list of conservatives who are searching for evidence that universities are dodging a 2023 Supreme Court decision barring the consideration of race in college admissions, and will probably be sought in the future from many more of them.
But college officials and experts who support using factors beyond test scores worry that the government — or private groups or individuals — will use the data to file new discrimination charges against universities and threaten their federal funding.
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| The good old days of meritocracy.... |
The Trump administration is using every lever it can to push elite college admissions offices toward what it regards as “merit-based” processes that more heavily weigh grades and test scores,...
Ah, yes, meritocracy; that's all that Republicans want, right? And if the racist goons and wrestling promoters now in charge of American higher education find that any rejected white applicant had test scores higher than any admitted Black applicant, the furies will be unleashed because using anything other than test scores or GPA's is obviously a racist attack on those poor embattled white men.
The universities who thought they were buying peace in their time by cravenly signing the armistice agreements will find out what Donald Trump's bondholders have known for decades: his promise is worth precisely bupkis.
Notice what the regime didn't ask for. They didn't ask for data about the qualifications if any of those admitted as legacies or because their rich fathers gave enough money to grease the admissions process in favor of their little bricks, like Jared Kushner's father at Harvard, or even Fred Trump and his dope delinquent offspring at Wharton. And they didn't ask to see scores broken down by gender, although colleges routinely admit men with lower scores to keep the ladies from taking over the place (despite what Larry Summers seems to think).
It's not like such non-merit-based factors like accident of birth have any real effect on getting into fancy colleges, is it?
The data say otherwise. One famous and uncontradicted study showed that 43% of the admitted white students at Harvard were legacies, jocks, children of faculty, or those whose parents might drop a wad of dough on Harvard. The comparable figure for non-white students was 16%.
So 43% of white Harvard admits got in for reasons other than “merit,” defined as test scores and GPA's. This however is not a problem for Republicans, who are OK with any rule that benefits rich white men, no matter how dim.
It kinda sounds like they're worried about something else other than merit. Can anyone find any clue as to what's really on their minds?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday announced the controversial “Reconciliation Monument” sculpture will return to Arlington National Cemetery in coming weeks, the latest move by administration officials to return symbols honoring the Confederacy to military sites.
The news came just one day after the National Park Service unveiled plans to rebuild a statue commemorating Albert Pike, a Confederate brigadier general, just a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol.
The Arlington National Cemetery sculpture...was often referred to as “the Confederate memorial” and featured a bronze woman standing on a 32-foot pedestal. Below her, details featured the coat of arms of the 13 Confederate States (and Maryland), with figures of Confederate soldiers and two Black figures implied to be slaves.
In 2022, an independent commission recommended the memorial be taken down, calling it “problematic from top to bottom.” It was removed in December 2023 and stored in a secure Department of Defense facility in Virginia for the last few years.
In a social media post Tuesday, Hegseth criticized that decision, calling critics “woke lemmings” and saying the history of the Confederacy should be honored.
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| ...they're back, baby! |
Used to be that way down south in the land of cotton, old times they were not forgotten. Now they are to be remembered and even exalted across the United States, even in a cemetery built on land confiscated from Confederate traitors.
It appears that the plan of Old Marse Robert E. Lee, who tried and failed to bring the Civil War to the North until the stuffing was knocked out of him at Gettysburg, has finally succeeded. What he couldn't achieve at Little Round Top his racist successors now in charge of the former Union Government can. They have won the Battles of Morningside Heights and Providence, and are camped out at the gates of Cambridge. They have invaded the North and their Lost Cause has triumphed.
There's no doubt that the current Republican administration is winning the battle to restore white supremacy, a cause that as recently as 2016 appeared to be gone with the wind.
Which is why despite the economic and policy chaos, including new measures that will deny health insurance and food to millions, President Jefferson Donald Trump remains consistently popular (89% in the latest Gallup Poll) with the Republican base of white bigots.
The only remaining explanation for such rock-solid support while their lives are destroyed and their economy ravaged has to be that Massah Don, for all of his corruption and dishonesty, gave his base what they wanted more than health care or life itself: white supremacy.
And if America's great universities are, like Richmond, reduced to smoking ruins, to these stalwart white Republicans, it's a small price to pay.
Anyway, we're the ones that have to pay it.
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