Campus Antisemitism Monitors Will Fail in Extraordinarily Predictable Fashion

Trying to capitalize on the latest headlines, a bipartisan group of legislators is seeking to create government "antisemitism monitors" that will be dispatched to colleges and universities across the country. Fail to meet their scrutiny, and colleges could lose gobs of federal funding. If enacted, this policy will fail in spectacular fashion. How do I know? Because we have a template in state anti-BDS laws, which backfire in similarly predictable ways. The problem is that while it's conceptually possible to craft valid and legitimat anti-BDS legislation, in practice the laws will be enforced by some mixture of apathetic mid-level bureaucrats, terrified associate deans, and hotshot headline-chasing politicians. Put that cocktail together, and the result is such lovely headlines like "homeless hurricane victims can't get disaster relief until they sign anti-BDS pledge." Indeed, if the antisemitism monitors do come into play, I can predict exactly the scenario that will go down shortly thereafter at Any College, USA. A student group invites some Palestinian poet to give a talk; Canary Mission or similar digs through the poet's instagram and finds a post where they say something that many people might find troublesome: "from the river to the sea" or "the Zionist state will be dismantled" or something of that ilk. They shriek that this is a violation of IHRA and federal law and the university risks losing all its federal funding unless it acts. Some associate dean for student affairs panics and cancels the talk. There's a massive backlash from the students (possibly including protests) as well as various academic freedom/civil liberties watchdogs who call the cancellation out as censorial bullshit. Pro-Israel/Jewish groups make surprised-Pikachu face at how they once again somehow became the poster child for heavy-handed campus censorship. Who could have predicted? (Answer: Everyone. Everyone could have predicted). And for all the grousing about "only the Jews don't get ..." X Y or Z protections on campus, it's worth noting that no other campus minority currently has a monitoring program like this. A good rule of thumb for whether one is advisable here is if one also would support a similarly empowered and emboldened "anti-racism" or "anti-Islamophobia" monitoring program. If your answer is something along the lines of "while racism and Islamophobia are serious problems, I don't trust the implementation adn I'm worried about the possibility of abuse and/or chilling free speech" -- congratulations! You've identified the exact reasons why such a program is inadvisable for antisemitism as well. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/F4KqnL6

From the exam-marking trenches to the ivory tower executive suites, Premier Danielle Smith has injected nervousness throughout Alberta's post-secondary sector. It initially seemed her Bill 18, the Provincial Priorities Act, was intended to make her government play checkstop or gatekeeper whenever the federal government and mayors made deals without provincial involvement. Then it became apparent that Smith's government would apply the same scrutiny to the higher-learning sector, and the premier's remarks made it clear she had federal research grants and notions of ideological "balance" in her targets. "When the government of Alberta states that it wants to align research funding with provincial priorities, it risks colouring research coming from Alberta post-secondary institutions as propaganda," wrote Gordon Swaters, a University of Alberta mathematics professor and academic staff association president. 

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Tagging: @newsfromstolenland @abpoli

Surprise!

For the last day of our Barbie Week, we offer you... a set of interesting documents regarding J. Robert Oppenheimer!

In the mid-1950s, during the height of the McCarthy Red Scare years (and just a few years before the introduction of the Barbie doll!), the president of the University of Washington blocked the appointment of Oppenheimer as a lecturer at the school supposedly because a Communist could not engage in free inquiry due to their ideology.

The University of Washington is sharing on JSTOR some fascinating correspondence from Alfred J. Schweppe, then dean of the University of Washington School of Law, defending the decision; a statement from the American Association of University Professors condemning it—albeit with some dissenters; and a more consistent objection from the University's student committee. We wonder which side lawyer Barbie would have taken...

This is truly frightening. If DeSantis gets away with this, it will spread from Florida to other red states. And if DeSantis (or another Republican gets to the White House in 2024) he will undoubtedly attempt to impose his educational vision on all US universities that take any federal funding (i.e., all of them). Unfortunately, at this point, I have little faith in the conservative Supreme Court to declare this sort of bill unconstitutional.

House Bill 999 bars Florida’s public colleges and universities from offering gender studies majors or minors, as well as majors or minors in critical race theory or “intersectionality,” or in any subject that “engenders beliefs” in those concepts. The bill prohibits the promotion or support of any campus activities that “espouse diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory rhetoric.” This goes far beyond simply ending D.E.I. programming, and could make many campus speakers, as well as student organizations like Black student unions, verboten.

There’s more. Under House Bill 999, general education core courses couldn’t present a view of American history “contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence,” creating obvious limits on the teaching of subjects like slavery and the Native American genocide. The bill also says that general education courses shouldn’t be based on “unproven, theoretical or exploratory content,” without defining what that means. “State officials would have unfettered discretion to determine which views are ‘theoretical’ and banned from general education courses,” says a statement by the libertarian-leaning Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Finally, the bill centralizes political control over hiring by allowing faculty to be cut out of the process. Right now, some boards of trustees have the power to veto hiring recommendations made by faculty and administrators, though Young says they rarely use it. Under House Bill 999, rather than an up-or-down vote on candidates vetted by university bodies, trustees could just hire whomever they want. “They don’t even have to hire someone who applied through the regular process,” said Young. “They can just say, ‘Here’s my friend Joe, he’s going to be the new history professor.’”

This is pure neofascism. 

If the far right controls what young people learn, they can control the country.

The article above is a gift link, so even if you do not subscribe to The New York Times, you can read the entire article. I encourage you to do so.

The above is a gift link 🎁 for this excellent report/commentary by Michelle Goldberg about what is happening at the New College of Florida under Ron DeSantis. If you click on the link, you can read the entire article, even if you do not subscribe to The New York Times.

DeSantis has replaced the president of the college and the board of governors with right-wing partisans (including the far right culture warrior Chris Rufo), who want to remake this small, highly-ranked, public liberal arts college into a copy of the private, Christian, conservative Hillsdale College. 

Given the above, one of my primary questions is how can a state college be allowed to be turned into a “Christian” college? 

It’s like DeSantis thinks it is fine to just completely ignore the First Amendment’s Establishment clause, not to mention ignoring the First Amendment’s free speech protections (by attempting to limit what can be discussed/ taught at public colleges and universities).

Below are some excerpts from the article:

When I spoke to [Chris] Rufo in early January, he said that New College would look very different in the following 120 days. Nearly four months later, that hasn’t entirely come to pass, but it’s clear where things are headed.

The new trustees fired the school’s president, replacing her with Richard Corcoran, the Republican former speaker of the Florida House. They fired its chief diversity officer and dismantled the diversity, equity and inclusion office. As I was writing this on Friday, several people sent me photographs of gender-neutral signage scraped off school bathrooms. [...] Whatever New College’s administration does, this will likely be the last year classes like the ones [student Sam] Sharf is taking are offered, because a bill making its way through the Florida Legislature requires the review of curriculums “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” The sense of dread on campus, however, goes beyond what’s happening in Tallahassee.

Eliana Salzhauer, whose 17-year-old son is a New College economics student, compared the seemingly inexorable transformation of the school to Twitter under Elon Musk: It looked the same at first, even as it gradually degraded into a completely different experience. “They are turning a top-rated academic institution into a third-rate athletic facility,” she said.

Salzhauer was referring, in part, to the hiring of Mariano Jimenez, who previously worked at Speir’s Inspiration Academy, as athletic director and head baseball coach, even though there’s no baseball diamond on campus. In the past, New College hasn’t had traditional sports teams, but the administration is now recruiting student athletes, and Corcoran has said he wants to establish fraternities and sororities, likely creating a culture clash with New College’s artsy queer kids, activists and autodidacts. Before Wednesday’s board meeting, about 75 people held a protest outside. “We’re Nerds & Geeks, not Jocks & Greeks,” said one sign.

[See more under the cut.]

For many, the board of trustees meeting was the clearest sign yet that this is the last semester of New College as they know it. The pivot point was the trustees’ decision to override the typical tenure process. New College hired a large number of new faculty five years ago, and this year was the first that any of them could apply for tenure. [...] Corcoran, however, had asked all the professors up for tenure this year to withdraw their applications because of the tumult at the school. Two of the seven agreed. The rest — three of them professors in the hard sciences — held out for the board’s vote. This was widely seen as a referendum not just on the individual candidates, but on faculty independence.

Fifty-four people registered to speak at the meeting. All but one of them either implored the trustees to grant the professors tenure or lambasted them for their designs on the school. Parents were particularly impassioned; many of them had been profoundly relieved to find an affordable school where their eccentric kids could thrive. Some tried to speak the language of conservatism: “You’re violating my parental rights regarding our school choice,” said Pam Pare, the mother of a biology major. One student, a second-year wrapped in a pink and blue trans flag, was escorted out of the meeting after cursing at Corcoran, but most tried to earnestly and calmly convey how much the professors up for tenure had taught them.

It was all futile. A majority of the trustees voted down each of the candidates in turn as the crowd chanted, “Shame on you!” That’s when [faculty chair Matthew] Lepinski quit, walking out of the room to cheers. [...] “Some faculty members have started to leave already, and obviously some students are thinking about what their future looks like,” Lepinski said right after quitting. A few days later, we spoke again. “There’s a grieving process for the New College that was, which is passing away,” he said. “I really loved the New College that was, but I am at peace that it’s gone now.”

Rufo couldn’t attend Wednesday’s meeting in person, because he’d been delayed coming home from Hungary, where he had a fellowship at a right-wing think tank closely tied to Viktor Orban’s government. (This seemed fitting, since Orban’s Hungary created the template for Rufo and Desantis’s educational crusade.) Instead, he Zoomed in, his face projected on a movie screen behind the other trustees.

After Lepinski quit, Rufo tweeted that “any faculty that prefer the old system of unfettered left-wing activism and a rubber-stamp board are free to self-select out.” Turnover, he added, “is to be expected — even welcomed. But we are making rapid, significant progress.” He and his allies haven’t built anything new at New College yet. They are succeeding, however, in tearing something down.

It makes sense that Chris Rufo, the activist who spearheaded the right-wing anti-CRT crusade, has recently been taking notes on how to create a very conservative college based on a “template” from the neofascist Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

I hope that lawsuits will be filed against DeSantis and the New College president and board of governors for their assault on First Amendment freedom of speech protections and the Establishment clause by Florida’s attempts to turn New College into a state funded conservative “Christian” liberal arts college.

HB 999 outlines a system for the Board of Governors to “provide direction to each constituent university on removing from its programs any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality.”

...

Should HB 999 be passed, the hiring process would change completely. Faculty would not be involved in the search process as the Board of Trustees would be in charge of the vetting process for the candidates.

...

The bill provides instruction on general education courses and standards that promote civic literacy without mentioning diversity. Brown said that without diverse education, students would not have the experience and knowledge for the workforce.

What is academic freedom? In the American context, it means: — Faculty and students at public universities are free to investigate, study, and teach without fear of government censorship. — The state, in the person of elected politicians, administrators, and political appointees, does not determine hiring, evaluation, or curriculum content.

— Faculty determine the curriculum, hire faculty, and evaluate the performance of students and faculty.

Here's a petition to sign.

-faw

“Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate.” -- Carl Sagan

Both Puar and Larson have signed an online manifesto, Palestine & Praxis, in which they publicly assert and commit themselves to advancing a specific political ideology. As our letter to Eisgruber explains, signers are “committed to a particular political agenda.” Signers of the manifesto affirm that all their work, in the classroom and on campus centers the goals of the manifesto, to:

—Never “conduct research in Palestine or on Palestinians without a clear component of political commitment;

—Ensure that Palestinians are “sources of authority ”simply by virtue of being Palestinians;

—Advance the claim that “Israel’s sovereignty over its territory is founded on belief in the racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals”;

—Commit to “pressuring the academic institutions with which they are associated for the Boycott of Israel” and “center” the accounts of people because of who they are and not because of the validity of their analysis.

Many defenders of the course, the book and the professor, including President Eisgruber, have thrown on the sheltering cloak of “academic freedom” to justify their refusal to do anything about Larson’s course and Puar’s book. What this defense misses is that what Puar has written, and what Larson is providing to her students is not entitled to the shield of academic freedom because it is not “academic” at all: It is blatantly political.

In addition to the abandonment of truth as a goal, as a source, or as an inspiration, the activity of this professor and the use of this book violates the Internal Revenue Service Code section governing tax-exempt entities such as Princeton. IRS regulations, rephrased and enshrined by Princeton’s own internal rules, make clear that at all tax-exempt non-profit corporations, of which Princeton is one, “Studies which in and of themselves might be bona fide academic research might also be designed for partisan political purposes. The University’s resources cannot be used for such work nor to advance other causes not directly related to the mission of the University, unless it is paid for from non-University funds and at the regular rate plus the standard surcharge applicable to such work.”

This terrifies me.

Members of the Brandon University Faculty Association (BUFA) have voted in favour of a strike mandate. Nearly 87 percent of the organization’s membership – which represents around 260 full-time faculty members and 90 contract staff – cast ballots in support of taking job action as part of an electronic referendum. Ballots were cast until midnight Saturday. According to the union, negotiations have remained at a standstill following a dispute over language used in the collective agreement between faculty members and Brandon University. On Jan. 19, 2023, BUFA members ratified their negotiating team’s mandate to bargain for better equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization and Indigenization language. They have also been pushing for a better workload, compensation, academic freedom and governance, according to the union.

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Tagging @politicsofcanada

09.21.23

Day 1 of 5 days of productivity

Yeah thats right you gays— our goal isnt 100 days of productivity goddamn it, it’s 5.

You think I can keep track?? Of 100?? Whole days??

Laughable, really.

Anyways I took some notes and sat on the floor. My goal is just to pass these classes ok im SCARED THIS IS THE BEST I CAN DO.

What Kramer is essentially calling for is population control by starvation.

Felix de Rosen quoted in an article by Katherine M. Savarese in The Harvard Crimson (Feb. 2010). Weatherhead Fellow Incites Controversy

I am finding Facebook really awful these days.

One troubling part of it is that I look at posts there primarily by people I know. Before "People You May Know" seemed to be people I plausibly know. Now the suggestions are not people I know or know about or can imagine any plausible connection.

More to the point, the persistant Israel propaganda really rubs me the wrong way. I'm old, there's a history to my distress. There's so much I don't notice, but my sense is that USA political propaganda shifted prior to the Gulf War. And then went into overdrive in the lead up to the Iraq War.

I'm no scholar and don't even follow the news well, but with Martin Kramer there ought not be any controversy.

As a new generation of young people speaks out against attacks on women and children halfway around the world — this time in Gaza — college administrators from Boston to L.A. are racing to call in heavily armored riot cops to shut down protest encampments at campuses they’d sold to applicants as bastions of academic freedom, open expression, and historic demonstrations that had changed the world. They are destroying the American university in order to keep it “safe.” In a week when decades happened, the lowest moments in what became a nationwide assault on college free speech by militarized police veered from shock to tragicomical irony. [...] The most tumultuous week on U.S. college campuses since May 1970 resulted in at least 600 arrests at 15 different schools as of Saturday, with more surely on the way. It’s going to take even longer to tally all the students facing suspension and in some cases expulsion for speaking out on the bloodshed in Gaza, or the now-ruined careers of principled professors who stood between their students and a nightstick. Not to mention the lasting psychological scars for young people who saw their dream college summon cops to arrest them or even fire rubber bullets or canisters of tear gas at them, which would be considered a war crime if used in Ukraine but is apparently OK in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s hometown of Atlanta. The notion of college as the American dream — fostering not just upward economic mobility but a nation of informed citizens taught to think critically — has been steadily dying since the original right-wing backlash against student protest in the 1960s triggered the end of taxpayer support for low tuition, which caused a $1.75 trillion student loan crisis. The maelstrom around the war in the Middle East has given the enemies of higher education — and they are many — a chance to move in for the kill. [...] Their ammunition is the complicated relationship between student protests for Palestinian liberation and against Israel’s current conduct in Gaza, where its more-than-six-month assault has killed at least 33,000 people — the majority of them women and children — and the constant scourge of antisemitism. Even though some advocates lump political criticisms of the state of Israel under an overly broad definition of antisemitism, there’s no question that the despicable harassment and assaults on Jews on or around college campuses have risen since the Oct. 7 start of the war (as they also have for Muslims). A few of the claims linking the worst antisemitism to the student protests have been disingenuous, such as when some journalists cited a nonstudent and well-known antisemite stationed a block from the Columbia University main gate as an example of protester hate speech. At Boston’s Northeastern University, administrators sent in police Saturday who detained 100 students based on a shout of “Kill all the Jews!” that veteran journalists on the scene said came from a Jewish demonstrator waving an Israeli flag, apparently seeking an escalation. But there has also been some instances of antisemitism that are indeed the fault of pro-Palestinian student protesters.

[...]

The biggest driver is right-wing authoritarianism. Red-state governors like Abbott in Texas or Georgia’s Brian Kemp have watched the new hero of U.S. conservatism, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, make crushing his homeland’s once freethinking universities the centerpiece of his strongman governance. Now they are importing the strategy. The Gaza protests have given governors and their fellow travelers on Capitol Hill a golden opportunity to squelch the notion of a liberal education while squeezing out a few more tax-cut dollars for their billionaire donors, and creating a nightly Two Minutes Hate of young people on Fox News that distracts from the 88 felony counts against their presidential candidate. [...] The complexities of never-ending conflict in the Middle East is what allows the cynical Greg Abbotts of America to get away with this. Too many would-be Democratic critics are too wedded to years of deep support for Israel, ignoring that a) the right-wing extremism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies is not your father’s Israel and b) the assault on campus free speech has much deeper implications than the current crisis. Too many college presidents have displayed extreme cowardice, caught in the headlights between Republican bullying and billionaire donors, who likely fear the protesting students might eventually question the brand of capitalism that made them billionaires.

Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer on the violent crackdowns of student protests against Israel's genocidal campaign against Gaza on college campuses orchestrated by police (04.28.2024).

Will Bunch wrote a solid column in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how the recent violent crackdowns on student protests against the Gaza Genocide and Israel Apartheid are a prelude to the fascist hell that America will be under should Donald Trump be elected come November. The violent crackdowns on student protests are also an excuse for right-wing reactionaries to wage war on higher education, academic freedom, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech.

Make no mistake about this. This is a white nationalist attack not only on any sort of affirmative action (even for low income people of ANY race or ethnicity) but also an attempt to prohibit discussions of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. on university campuses. The United Daughters of the Confederacy who pushed the “Lost Cause” whitewash of the Civil War in textbooks in the early 1900s would be thrilled at the kind of legislation that DeSantis has been able to pass in Florida. What is truly frightening is if he makes it to the White House, he will try to pass the same kind of legislation nationally.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

Florida’s new law prohibits public colleges from spending state or federal money on DEI efforts. These programs often assist colleges in increasing student and faculty diversity, which can apply to race and ethnicity, as well as sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status.

The law also forbids public colleges from offering general education courses — those that are part of a required curriculum for all college students — that “distort significant historical events,” teach “identity politics,” or are “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, or economic inequities.”

The Florida legislation has been met with backlash at both the state and national level, where higher education experts and First Amendment advocates say the state is trampling on academic freedom. “It’s basically state-mandated censorship, which has no place in a democracy,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said in a recent interview with The Washington Post.

[emphasis added]