Heard Off Campus: Power to the Rich White Men, Right On!

By Business Editor Samuel Insull with
Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling

What's the matter with American higher education?

If you said it's that students are forced to borrow $360,000 that they will never be able to pay back to be taught by unwashed graduate students (also known as the Harvard Plan), you're wrong!

The real problem, according to the very wise suck-ups at New York Times Dealbook, is that rich white men don't have enough power over it.

This may come as a shock to anyone who has observed the death grip that such men have over the ruling bodies and fiscs of America's great and not so great universities, not to mention the destruction of formerly respectable state schools like the University of Florida at the hands of intolerant white men like Ron “These Go-Go Boots are Made for Walking” DeSantis (remember him?).

The great non-white non-rich and half-female unwashed need to get schooled:

 

Yes, the problem is that rich white male finaglers don't have enough power over what happens on college campuses.  Tell us more, Andy:

Many business leaders have told me they are deeply concerned about incidents of harassment against Jewish students that have taken place at and around universities like Columbia and appear to be increasing.

Inside corner offices, there has been a lot of hand-wringing about the most blatant examples, like antisemitic signs and chants or the assault of an Israeli student. But there has been little action from corporations, which have a synergistic relationship with the schools where they recruit employees.

Some executives are privately pondering what they can do. The most common course of action so far has been to pull back on individual donations. The New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for example, said this week that he was “no longer comfortable supporting Columbia University.” 

And there is nothing more concerning to the editors of Dealbook than the comfort of Robert Kraft, although left to his own devices he appears generally to be able to find some modest comfort in the happy ending spas found in the strip malls clinging to the swamplands west of Palm Beach.

These concerns were shared privately (which is to say publicly on condition of anonymity) with New York Times reporters on the very same day that The Times reported that Columbia had in fact, without busting heads or arresting peaceful protestors, taken action against anti-Semitic hate speech on its campus:

But don't confuse plutocrats with the facts when they're swinging their great big Master of the Universe dicks around.  Not content with cutting off donations or organizing to drive out university presidents who dare to disagree with them (see, e.g., Harvard and Penn), they are conniving new ways to impose their views on people like students and faculty who have some nutty idea that there ought to some freedom of thought on college campuses, regardless of which finagler's name is carved over the door:

But businesses have other levers that affect universities, and some of those levers would undoubtedly put more pressure on universities to take action against antisemitism.

Here’s one out-of-the-box thought experiment: Most businesses scrutinize their vendors quite carefully and maintain approved lists of vendors whose policies align with their own. Companies could scrutinize universities, a main source of their talent, as they would any other vendor. They could tell universities that they won’t hire their students unless the schools take decisive action to stem antisemitism....

To be clear, companies would need to define antisemitism and the satisfactory actions to mitigate it — currently both topics of fierce debate. 

Thanks, Andy, for the clarification. And of course if it's one thing that billionaire plutocrats are known for, it's carefully listening to all sides before taking a nuanced approach that reflects the complexities of a fraught situation. Like Elno. 

In other words, these immensely powerful creeps could punish the innocent – students graduating with a mountain of debt and looking for work – because of supposed delicts on the part of administrators at the schools from which they graduated.  That sounds fair – to Andy.

But the stupid idea that some big-buck douchebag whispered into Andy Sorkin's ear during a quiet cocktail at Manhatta got us to thinking about other uses of economic leverage to get universities to do what they should.

Consider the news from Emory University in Atlanta as reported in The Emory Wheel (as usual, the most reliable college news can be found in the student newspaper, Harvard excepted):

Heavily armed police on campus: what could go wrong?

A young woman cried into a cell phone camera as a police officer dragged her off of Emory University’s Quadrangle around 10:15 a.m. this morning, stating her birthday and her mother’s phone number. Ten minutes later, a young man yelled as another officer walked him off the Quad in handcuffs, shouting that the restraints were too tight and were cutting off his circulation. The officer looped an arm under the protestor’s leg and lifted him, carrying him away as the protestor yelled for help.

The two individuals were among several protestors detained during a demonstration this morning. Protestors gathered on the Quad at 7:30 a.m., erecting around 20 tents in an “encampment for Gaza.” They listened as demonstrators took turns stepping to the front of the group to share speeches through a megaphone, cheering for each other as they declared support for Gaza in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Within three hours, Georgia State Patrol, Atlanta Police Department (APD) and Emory Police Department (EPD) officers walked along the sidewalk before turning onto the Quad and closing in on the protestors.

Screams broke out as the protestors attempted to run away and officers began tackling some of the individuals. Less than a minute after the altercation began, officers released irritant gas on the protestors. Officers tased at least one of the protestors.

An officer outside of the Administration Building told detained protesters they were being taken to DeKalb County Jail. Multiple members of police declined to confirm this information to Emory Wheel reporters.

Police officers had gas masks and used non-lethal ammunition. Officers also tackled protestors and used zip ties to arrest individuals on the Quad.

In short, a peaceful protest that had begun three hours earlier and not interfered with the operations of the university led the Emory administrators to treat paying students like John Lewis in Selma. 

Now Emory is a perfectly OK B+ university with pretensions to Ivy League greatness.  It competes for the best and the brightest.  If I were the parent of little Ethan or Sophia, I'd have a few questions of my own for Emory officials before dropping off a $90K kiss and my pride and joy:

1.  Under what circumstances could my child be arrested for peaceful protest?

2.  Under what circumstances could my child be suspended or expelled for peaceful protest?

3.  If my child is expelled or suspended for peaceful protest, will I receive a tuition refund for the semester?

4.  Under what circumstances will your university use police forces to arrest peaceful protesters?

5.  How do you vet officers on your campus police force to make sure they have not used excessive force in the past or otherwise committed misconduct?

6.  Who decides whether to call in outside police forces?

7.  How do you confirm that the members of outside police forces you call onto campus have not been found to have used excessive force or otherwise committed misconduct?

8.  Are any officers on campus armed?  If so, how do you confirm that they have had appropriate training in the use and abuse of deadly force?

9.  Who supervises the campus police?  Who supervises the actions of outside police forces you call into your campus?

If the people who pay the bills don't like the answers they're getting from university functionaries, they are free to direct their tuition payments elsewhere.  It's not like Emory has a unique position at the zenith of the American collegiate firmament.  Far from it.

That's the beauty of the free market, amirite, Andy?

Of course the universities siccing armed police on their students already have an economic incentive to call off the dogs: the students they brutalize today are the ones that universities will be schnorring from for decades after graduation.  You'd think any university bigwig would remember this before calling in the 5-0.

And yet they don't.  Maybe, just maybe, the grandiose overpaid bureaucrats who run America's universities aren't – very smart?

SPONSORED CONTENT: Needy Columnists Depend on Your Support of the Spy's Hot Air Fund

 

Every year, the Spy, out of the goodness of its heart, generously donates its pixels to schnor from its readers for a cause that would melt a heart of stone: the Hot Air Fund.

Again this summer, exhausted columnists are depending on you to finance the summer vacation of their dreams, filled with private beaches, cocktail parties on the deck admiring the sunset over the Sound, and flattering the rich and powerful.

Did you know that 8 out of 10 hack columnists do not have a lavish summer home of their own to escape to in the summer heat of New York and Washington?  It's true.  For every Tommy F. and Pamela P. (summer cottage shown above), scores more have to content themselves with two weeks in July at someplace déclassé like Ocean City, Maryland or even New Hampshire.  I know, right?

David needs your help!

After ten months of partying with and sucking up to their rich friends, these middle-class columnists are forced through no fault of their own to unfashionable summer resorts, hoping against hope that they can score at least a long weekend in Chilmark!  That's no way for these hacks to live!  Don't they deserve a summer mingling with the same rich shits they spent all winter putzing around with?

For over 234 years, the Spy's Hot Air Fund has been transporting needy columnists to the wonderful world of elite summer vacations, empowering them to spend the following year writing columns pleasing to their patrons [Surely, empowering them to create new worlds of their own? – Ed.]

Let's meet a few of these neediest cases.  If their tales of woe don't cause you to whip out your Platinum Card, we don't know what can, except for the redecoration of your guest bathroom in Easthampton!

David

David is an elderly man who lives with his millennial second wife Stacee in modest comfort in Bethesda, Maryland.  He scratches out a living making fun of those like him who have been expensively educated but for some reason aren't filthy rich.   He enjoys a variety of indoor activities, including re-reading his own columns, reading books by experts in lobster behavior, and sampling Italian deli meats.

Your generous contribution will allow David and Stacee to spend the summer in the hills of Tuscany exploring their shared love of cold cuts.  Imagine how happy and proud David will be when he returns to Bethesda this fall, able to explain to the great unwashed (like you!) the differences between sopprassata and mortadella! 

Now that's something we can all sink our teeth into!

Maureen

Maureen can't get away in August without you!

Maureen is an elderly spinster who lives alone in Georgetown, writing fan fiction and subsisting on the caviar and crab cakes passed at the cocktail parties that lobbyists sometimes invite her to out of the goodness of their hearts.

Occasionally she is invited for weekends on the Vineyard or Malibu, but the rest of the time she sits alone at her N Street window, hoping against hope that a celebrity will walk by.

Your generous contribution will allow Maureen to rent her own home on the Delaware shore for the month of August.  Imagine how happy she will be to gambol in the surf with her beloved brother Kevin.  In the evenings, they'll sit around a cozy fire telling each other all those jokes they loved growing up in an all-white Virginia suburb and regale each other with new ones like whether Michelle Obama is really a man!

Ross

Unless you help, Ross and his fifteen children will be trapped all summer in the fetid wasteland of New Haven, Conn.  Trust us, that's no way to live!  His only relief is loading up the family and driving for occasional day trips to places like Hammonassett Beach.  Do you know what it's like for someone like Ross to have to mingle with beachgoers at a place like that?  Let's just say it doesn't remind Ross, or anyone else, of Leverett House.

Yet with your help Ross will be able to take his whole posse to Idaho for the summer.  Imagine how much fun they will have riding, fishing, mountaineering, and faith healing while Ross stays home polishing his rocket [Surely, his arguments proving that he should have the power to stick his chubby fist inside the cervices of American women and instruct them what they can and can't do with their lady parts? – Ed.]

Should Ross decide to leave the house, he'll be able to enjoy the bracing mountain air of Idaho and stimulating conversations with Constitutional sheriffs, Christian dominationists, and other rugged average Americans who think just like him!  As long as he stays in Idaho, he'll never be lonely!

Arthur

To be truly happy, Arthur needs more

Unlike these other great public intellectuals, Arthur did manage to parlay a lifetime of shilling on behalf of the rich and powerful at a Washington “think tank” into an adequate four-bedroom in Rehoboth Beach.  But his current summer place is across the highway from the beach and Arthur's not as spry as he used to be when he used to walk all the way from K Street to The Palm for lunch.

With your contributions, Arthur will be able to trade it the old shack for a better located summer place right on the beach.  Without endangering life and limb, he'll be able to open his back door, stroll across the dunes, and plant himself on the sunny sands to polish his latest advice about how true happiness doesn't depend on money.  And then he'll be able to laugh his f***in' ass off!

Just think how happy you will be knowing you made it all possible, except for the part paid for by dark money Republicans and lobbyists for giant corporations, all of whom look forward to more of Arthur's sage advice on the secret of true happiness!

************

There are so many more deserving young and not so young columnists like Nick, George, Kathleen, Gail, and Bret waiting for you to make their summers just a little brighter!  The smile on their faces when they sit down on Georgica Beach is thanks enough, but if you give generously, you'll enjoy a whole year of their brilliant insights,  Every morning, when you log on, you'll be able to remind yourself that you helped them get the inspiration to write that column about how Biden is too old!

In search of anti-Semitism on Morningside Heights

 By Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan with
Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights

We, like most media outlets, spent an inordinate amount of time and energy covering the trials and tribulations of a well-known university located in the Boston area.  Perhaps too much time.

You'd think that the only great university in our country was located on the banks of the Charles, upstream (not across) from Boston University.

You'd be wrong.

South of here, there's another academic titan ruling over New York City from its perch on Morningside Heights.  It boasts that it owns New York.  Its graduates and faculty have made immense contributions to law, medicine, philosophy, economics, physics, engineering, literature, and Hungarian pastries.  

Of course, like any great university, it has graduated its fair share of a**holes like Roy Cohn and Norman Podhoretz.  But is it fair to judge any university by its worst graduates and faculty?  Asking for Alan Dershowitz and Henry Kissinger.

We speak of course of Columbia University in the City of New York.  There's no problem too difficult, no intellectual task too complex or recondite for its great minds to resolve just by the application of the sheer force of their intellects.

Apparently, not so much:

The victor of D-Day could have handled it. 

A Columbia University task force set up to combat antisemitism on campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks is attempting to avoid one of the most contentious issues in university debates over the war: Its members have refused to settle on what the definition of “antisemitism” is.

Giving up already fellas?  What would former Columbia President Dwight Eisenhower say?  In the spring of 1944, did he say “I can't decide whether to invade France through Normandy or across the Pas-de-Calais, so let's call the whole thing off?”

Note to those of you who did not study Modern History at Columbia: he did not.

What would Chancellor Kent say?

We actually know the answer to this one.  We were graduated from one of Columbia's brightest lights, its law school.  Early in our first year, we learned one thing we've clung tightly to ever since.  When a student asked for a definition of a vague term (it might have been something like “due process”), the response from the podium was immediate and thunderous:

“Why do you ask?”

The eminent professor didn't mean that the young whippersnapper shouldn't have asked the question.  He meant that the answer to a question depends on the purpose for which it is propounded.  The question of what process is due depends on its context: what may be due process in the context of contesting a parking ticket is unlikely to suffice in a capital case (but thanks to our Republican bent Supreme Court and white power states, it usually does).

We wonder if that isn't true of anti-Semitism.

Was something anti-Semitic?  

Why do you ask?  

Is it to kick someone off campus?  ban their books?  arrest them for yelling at you in the library?  criticize them for something stupid they wrote?  take away their teaching positions for asserting that Israel has no right to exist? monitor broadly online content to determine particular threats? defend the corrupt war criminal currently acting as Israel's Prime Minister?  defend the right of your yeshiva bochers to duck military service in the IDF?

We suspect the answer to each of these questions is different.  

When the question is asked to determine if an extremist group blathering on social media is worthy of closer attention, the definition should be pretty wide, like the IHRA definition which encompasses a number of rhetorical devices used to criticize Israel including applying a “double standard” that the speaker does not use for other countries.  We thought that holding Israel to a standard higher than the Moabites, the Canaanites, and other heathen was almost the whole point of Torah, but no matter.

As Kenneth Stern explained,

the 2016 IHRA definition...was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism. Examples were the heart of the definition to guide the data collection process. There were examples about Israel, not to label anyone an antisemite but because there was a correlation, as opposed to causation, between certain expressions and the climate for antisemitism. But it was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.

So who cares what this Stern guy thinks anyway? 

Oh. That's different. 

No wonder that Columbia's brightest minds are having difficulty:

“I get letters from parents every single day, just regular people, students,” one of the co-chairs, Nicholas Lemann, a former dean of the journalism school, said in an interview. He said that many of them ask: “‘Why aren’t you listening? Why aren’t you doing anything?’”

The professors argue that their 15-member task force does not need to define antisemitism, because they don’t see it as their task to label things as antisemitic or not. Rather, they want to hear why Jewish students and faculty are upset and see if there are practical solutions that can be found to help them feel more comfortable. 

But don't you need some definition when the question is under what circumstances Jewish members of the Columbia community deserve protection from words or deeds that frighten or disquiet them? (Or, for that matter, members of its Islamic and Palestinian communities.) 

Let's see if we can help Nick, who despite his fine Harvard College education, seems at sea. Can you decide whether the following statements are anti-Semitic?

How about the frequent Palestinian chant of “From the river to the sea,” which carries with it the belief that only the Palestinian people have the exclusive and indisputable right to live in what is now Israel, leaving no place for Israelis or a Jewish homeland?

 That sounds pretty anti-Semitic to us.

Of course, that's the position of the Netanyahu government: 

The Netanyahu government’s guiding principle [is] that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all parts of the Land of Israel” and [to] the one-state reality it is implementing on the ground.

That's different then.  

How about the Palestinian position that all Israelis, even women and children, are legitimate targets for terrorist activity, because “there are no civilians in Israel?"” 

That's certainly repulsive and anti-Semitic by any measure.  Sadly, it happens to correspond to the expressed but later disavowed views of the President of Israel, not to mention other even more charming senior officials in the Netanyahu government:

Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history.

“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,” said Herzog.

He later claimed that he also said nice things about protecting innocent Gazans, should any be found.  Whether Israel's subsequent treatment of the civilian population of Gaza conforms to his remarks we will leave to the reader.

One last poser: is it anti-Semitic to demand that Israel be ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population?  (Hint: yes.)  See how it sounds the other way around:

Israel’s Minister of Finance and settler leader Bezalel Smotrich recently told Israel’s Channel 12 that he was supportive of what he called “voluntary emigration” of Gazans out of Gaza. “All we need,” he said, “is to find countries willing to take them in.” Or in the words of Smotrich’s ideological forebear, Meir Kahane, “they must go.” 

It doesn't sound too good.

Where does that leave the tender Hebraic flowers cowering in front of Low Library?  Surely every student has a right to be protected from harassment, verbal or otherwise, targeted at them that embodies hate speech based on religion or ethnicity.  And no student should be held as a captive audience for anti-Semitism or Islamaphobia expressed in class or section by someone who is paid by Columbia to teach.

Your Stats sectionman shouldn't lose his job because on their blog they posted comments to the effect that Israel has no right to exist, even though that makes you feel bad.  Be assured that if Columbia fired every faculty member and instructor who said dumb s***, the University would be a ghost town.

And if you're thinking of culling library books that contain ideas that you think are anti-Semitic, just stop.  Burning books never works out for the Jews.  You have to trust us on this.

Jay Michelson in the Forward exposed the error behind calling all speech that causes discomfort to a Jewish supporter of Israel anti-Semitic:

Who said Israel should be held to a higher standard?

This conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is far greater than a few articles. As reported in the Forward, after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria to define a much broader swath of anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic; anti-Zionist protests account for 1,317 of the 3,000-odd “antisemitic” incidents the organization tracked in the three months after Oct. 7. As Forward reporter Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization has focused on in previous years.”

The extremism of some left-wing responses to the war is indeed troubling. I agree...that “a disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not … share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.”

We are disconcerted too.  We think a lot of supposed anti-Zionism is in fact anti-Semitism.  But we don't think our view gives us or anyone else the right to dictate what can be painted on a protest sign along College Walk or expressed out of class by Columbia faculty.  Or Barnard, for that matter.

We hope that helps Nick and his fellow intellectual titans as they grapple with how to protect all members of the Columbia community. 

All of its members have a right to be free of targeted harassment, hate speech, or discrimination.  None have the right to be protected from exposure to ideas that make them feel bad.

And that's why you ask “what is anti-Semitism?”

Of course, this nuanced approach is the one expressed by former Harvard President Claudine Gay before Congress.

It turned out badly for her.  We'd submit that each time a thoughtful fair-minded scholar is forced out of her job for making a nuanced statement, it's not good for the Jews either.