RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-empowering-black-leaders-seminar-race-trump

The effort to extirpate identity politics from universities will be a slog. Even as the Trump administration scrutinizes Harvard University for its racial preferences and cuts another $450 million in federal grants, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is offering a three-day seminar called “Empowering Black Leaders: Strategies for Personal and Professional Success.” Topics include “Navigating bias in the workplace,” “Intersectionality in its various forms,” “Racial equity in policing,” and “Employee resource groups.”

That last phrase is a euphemism for affinity groups, those identity-based organizations in schools and businesses that came into vogue over a decade ago. Affinity groups allegedly allow intersectional individuals to collectively protect their identities against bias. Kennedy School organizers and other human-resources types are hoping that a new name will shake off the separatist associations from the original term.

Empowering Black Leaders is led by a diversity consultant, “one of the world’s leading experts,” as the program brochure puts it, on the “science underlying bias and racism in organizations.” Robert Livingston encapsulated his world-class expertise on institutional racism in a 2022 book, The Conversation: How Seeking and Speaking the Truth about Racism Can Radically Transform Individuals and Organizations. Speaking the truth about racism in a corporate leadership seminar means addressing the topic “Racial equity in policing,” since racist police, one is to assume, impede black managers’ ability to climb the corporate ladder.

The Kennedy School has tried to Trump-proof Empowering Black Leaders by noting that a “person’s race/ethnicity is not a criterion for admission.” The program materials even posit a scenario where non-black allies (another academic coinage) enroll in the program so as to “allow them and the Black colleagues they are supporting to thrive.” Such allyship doesn’t come cheap. The course costs $6,900. Are businesses going to shell out close to $7,000 a head to send their black managers and their white allies to learn about the businesses’ alleged racism? In the pre-Trump world, quite possibly. Today, less so. Though the application deadline was April 29, 2025, as of May 14, the Kennedy School was still soliciting applications.

Despite the effort to be just sufficiently color-blind enough to pass muster from an anti-DEI federal funder, assumptions about racial hierarchy are baked into the program. The seminar is designed for “mid-senior level leaders in North American, Europe, and similarly structured societies,” according to the program brochure. What “similar structure” might that be? Elite-dominated? Welfare-statist? Demographically self-cancelling? No, the common link between North American and European “societies” is their embrace of white supremacy. Thus, any black professionals living on those “similarly structured” continents need consultant-provided tools for overcoming what the program refers to as “commonly shared obstacles” to advancement.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-university-discrimination-dei-hiring-trump?skip=1

The Trump administration has escalated its battle with Harvard University, freezing all future grants and threatening to strip the school’s tax-exempt status. In response, Harvard has adopted some conciliatory measures— rebranding its DEI office and cancelling its racially segregated graduation ceremonies—but, behind the scenes, the university’s discrimination machine continues to operate at full capacity.

We’ve obtained a trove of internal documents that reveal Harvard’s racial favoritism in faculty and administrative hiring. The university’s DEI programs are more than “unconscious bias” training. They are vectors for systematic discrimination against disfavored groups: namely, white men. As one Harvard researcher told us, “endless evidence” suggests that the university continues to discriminate against the supposed oppressor class in hiring and promotions.

For years, Harvard’s DEI department has explicitly sought to engineer a more racially “diverse” faculty pool. The university-wide Inclusive Hiring Initiative provided “guidelines and training” for those involved in the hiring process and was explicitly tied to Harvard’s DEI goals. The stated mission of the initiative is to “[i]nstill an understanding of how departments can leverage the selection process” to build “an increasingly diverse workforce.”

In another hiring guide, “Best Practices for Conducting Faculty Searches,” the university recommends several discriminatory practices. At the beginning of the hiring process, Harvard instructs search committees to “ensure that the early lists include women and minorities” and to “consider reading the applications of women and minorities first.” The university counsels that committee chairs should “continually monitor” the racial composition of the candidate list and, as they narrow it down, “attend to all women and minorities on the long list.”

Harvard deliberately factors race into the hiring process. The university gives committee chairs privileged access to “self-identified demographic data, including gender, race, and ethnicity” and encourages chairs to “use this information to encourage diversity in the applicant pool, long list, and short list.” Harvard admits that some of its hiring programs have explicit “placement goals” for women and minorities—which, despite the university’s denial, function as a soft quota.

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/columbia-exposes-the-academic-freedom-hypocrites/

There wasn’t much learning going on at Columbia  but the school provided an important lesson in hypocrisy for those paying attention. A key talking point from defenders of the universities against the Trump administration’s enforcement of civil-rights law has been: If the schools crack down on pro-Hamas protesters at the government’s behest, it will destroy academic freedom as we know it.

I’ve explained in the past why that argument is specious: The anti-Zionists have been erasing academic freedom on campus for decades and punishing the offenders will help to restore it. But honestly I couldn’t have made it much clearer than the fanatical tentifada mobs just did themselves when they stormed Butler Library and forced nearly a thousand students to stop studying for their final exams.

The first characteristic of yesterday’s chaos was that it was nothing new: It was far from the first time students, even at Columbia specifically, had taken over buildings. It was far from the first time these crowds had disrupted academic environments: Classes have been invaded and hijacked, students taking exams have been disrupted (try concentrating on your exam while a rabid mob outside your classroom window is psychotically chanting that you deserve to be murdered because you’re a Jew), libraries have been taken over by protesters, students have been blocked from attending class and moving freely about the campus.

What these groups did yesterday at Columbia is, simply, what these groups do. There was no escalation, in other words. This is just what defenders of the tentifada groups have been defending all along.

Here is how new Columbia President Claire Shipman described the scene she witnessed:

“I spent the late afternoon and evening at Butler Library, as events were unfolding, to understand the situation on the ground and to be able to make the best decisions possible. I arrived to see one of our Public Safety officers wheeled out on a gurney and another getting bandaged. As I left hours later, I walked through the reading room, one of the many jewels of Butler Library, and I saw it defaced and damaged in disturbing ways and with disturbing slogans. Violence and vandalism, hijacking a library—none of that has any place on our campus.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-spoiled-brats-of-academe/

President Trump’s campaign to restore Constitutional order and common sense to our government has rightly targeted our educational institutions, keeping the pledge he made on the campaign trail “to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left.” These institutions, like a fish, rot from the head down, and so the corruption of our universities must be reduced by starting with their administrations and faculties.

That corruption became obvious during the campus protests celebrating Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The despicable anti-Semitism of the students and faculty of some of our most prestigious universities, as well as violence directed at Jewish students, replete with genocidal chants and rhetoric, were tolerated by campus authorities and met with shameful appeasement, if not encouragement, rather than arrests and expulsions.

Trump has responded by garnishing some of the billions of dollars that taxpayers provide to universities, which use these funds to finance politicized or dubious research, create anti-American programs, and graduate majors rife with leftwing curricula filled with postmodern “higher nonsense,” but lacking any prospects of employment other than political activism. Indeed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Wall Street Journal reports, “You have a higher chance of being unemployed these days if you go to college.”

In response, these institutions have been caterwauling like a spoiled, entitled brat whose rich father has reduced his exorbitant allowance. Typical are the comments of Princeton’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, who blustered, “The attack on Columbia is a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research . . . Universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

So how did private universities with multi-billion-dollar, tax-free endowments get a “right” to taxpayer money? And how did the common-sense wisdom that “He who pays the piper calls the tune” disappear? Aren’t there conditions the feds impose on how public funds are spent? Are not politicized curricula, programs, and majors verboten?

But the left-wing’s “long march” to politicize universities is just one example of the left’s corruption of our schools. Postmodern and poststructuralist ideologies––the idiot children of Marx’s malign ideas such of “false consciousness” –– incorporate other sophistic ideas such as the simplistic, radical materialist determinism and relativism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-universities-dei-diversity-center-right-critics

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration has taken decisive action against DEI in universities, threatening to investigate, punish, and withhold funding from higher education institutions that discriminate in the name of diversity. Most conservatives, who correctly see DEI as a threat to colorblind equality, have celebrated these maneuvers. But some center-right intellectuals, who claim to oppose DEI in theory, have criticized the White House for using administrative power to eliminate it in practice.

One such figure is Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, who has gained attention in recent years as an insider critic of DEI. He has been mildly critical of diversity statements in faculty hiring, which he claims infringe on “academic freedom” and diminish “the true value of diversity.” Some conservatives praise him as a reformer, but the truth is more complicated: as dean, Flier was not a critic of DEI at all. In fact, he oversaw its rapid expansion and became a critic only after he retired from that position.

Last month on X, I asked Flier to substantiate the facts about his opposition to DEI. “When you were Dean of Harvard Medical School, what did you do to stop racial discrimination in admissions, hiring, and programs?” I asked. “Why can’t I find any record of you speaking out against your department’s illegal DEI practices when you were in charge?”

Flier attempted to duck the question but eventually relented. “[W]hen I was dean, affirmative action in admissions and various DEI programs were not illegal,” he replied.

This approach distorted the law—discriminatory hiring programs have always violated the Civil Rights Act. And Flier’s reply was an evasion. He would rather quibble over legal technicalities than grapple with his conduct as an administrator.

After resigning as dean, Flier himself admitted that he knew requiring diversity statements in faculty hiring was wrong but could only publicly express his criticism once he was out of power. “As a dean of a major academic institution, I could not have said [that I oppose requiring diversity statements]. But I will now.” In other words, Flier knew that these initiatives violated his principles but refused to voice his opinion at the time, not because of legal technicalities—a post hoc rationalization—but because it would have jeopardized his career. He could have opposed DEI, but chose not to, out of fear.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/06/toward-a-negotiated-settlement-of-the-trump-harvard-showdown/

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.

In the high-stakes clash between the Trump administration and Harvard – fraught with peril for the White House, for America’s oldest and most famous university, and for higher education in America – both sides have hardened their stances. In an April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded supervision over reform of the university’s admissions, hiring, curriculum, and internal governance. In an April 14 email to the Harvard community, President Alan Garber rejected White House demands. The Trump administration promptly froze more than $2 billion in federal grants to Harvard and $60 million in contracts, and threatened to eliminate the university’s tax-exempt status. On April 21, Harvard sued several Trump administration officials.

Conservatives, who have been sounding the alarm about higher education’s failings for decades, have divided over how best the Trump administration should hold Harvard accountable.

On the one hand, the federal government has considerable leverage: It provides Harvard more than $500 million annually with billions in the pipeline. On the other hand, the Trump administration must respect constitutional and statutory limits on executive power. Political prudence dictates, moreover, that the president and his team consider that a sizeable majority of the public opposes increasing the federal government’s oversight of universities and that the federal government is ill-suited to the task.

Best for both sides would be a negotiated settlement. The settlement should minimize the federal government’s role in managing Harvard while ensuring that the university obeys civil-rights law, curbs progressive indoctrination, and bolsters traditional liberal education.

Harvard precipitated the crisis. The proximate cause of the Trump administration’s drastic intervention was the university’s violation of civil-rights law by indulging antisemitism and discriminating based on race.

Harvard’s indulgence of antisemitism stands in marked contrast to the alacrity with which it has protected non-Jewish minorities and women. For decades, Harvard has been narrowing the boundaries of permissible campus speech to shield students – particularly favored minorities and women – from supposedly offensive utterances, the offense of which often consists in departure from progressive orthodoxy. Yet following Iran-backed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, former Harvard President Claudine Gay discovered that campus free speech is wide and flexible enough to sometimes protect calling for the genocide of the Jews. Furthermore, as the university has acknowledged, it has harbored antisemitism and has been slow and ineffective in responding to campus antisemitism’s post-Oct. 7 surge.