RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/columbia-cannot-be-trusted-to-negotiate/

When the Trump administration accused Columbia University of violating the civil rights of its Jewish students, the school risked losing both its federal funding and even its accreditation. At the time, the preferred outcome for everyone seemed to be to have both sides come to an agreement that would alleviate the government’s concerns and reinstate Columbia’s funding.

Now, however, it’s not clear at all that the university can be trusted to negotiate a deal. Nor is it clear that whoever speaks for Columbia today will still be speaking for Columbia tomorrow or next week. It might be time to step back and have Columbia get its house in order before resuming talks.

In late March, Columbia agreed to terms laid out by the federal government in order to have $400 million of federal funding restored. Immediately the faculty and students pushed back on interim President Katrina Armstrong, who had taken over for Minouche Shafik in August. Armstrong wavered. She is no longer the president of Columbia.

Claire Shipman is, having become the institution’s third president in a period of seven months. Last month, Shipman was notified that the school’s accreditation was under review thanks to Columbia’s refusal to reform its practices to bring them in line with federal civil-rights law. Welcome to the big leagues, Claire Shipman.

Before accepting the divine punishment of being made president of Columbia, Shipman was its trustee board’s co-chair, so she isn’t new to this particular fight. In fact, Shipman appeared alongside Shafik and other school officials to testify at an April 2024 congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism. Both Shafik and Shipman were very, very sad about what was happening to Jews on their campus under their watch. Meanwhile, as soon as Shafik and Shipman and Co. shipped off to Capitol Hill, the student body left behind in Morningside Heights built a tentifada encampment in defiance of Shafik’s expressed conciliation.

At that April 2024 hearing, Shipman had said: “We have a moral crisis on our campus.” She wasn’t wrong. But Shipman was part of that moral crisis. Just three months before that hearing, Shipman had argued in a text that “We need to get somebody from the middle east [sic] or who is Arab on our board. Quickly I think. Somehow.”

As the Free Beacon reported yesterday, Shipman had a plan to achieve that “somehow.” The board could get rid of Shoshana Shendelman, a Jewish trustee who’d been outspoken against anti-Semitism on campus.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/george-mason-university-president-gregory-washington-dei-anti-semitism

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell, among others, have come under fire or been forced out in recent years for failures of leadership on campus anti-Semitism and racially discriminatory DEI programs. Yet Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University, has managed to keep his job despite similar failures. Mason may not be an Ivy League school, but anti-Semitism and discrimination are problems at nonelite public universities, too. Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.

Mason’s Board of Visitors selected Washington in 2020, just as woke fever was reaching its peak. Upon appointment, Washington committed Mason to being “a national exemplar of antiracism and inclusive excellence.” True to his word, Washington built a gigantic diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, with 7.4 DEI staff per 100 tenure-track faculty members. This was the second-highest ratio among the more than 70 universities the Heritage Foundation examined

Despite President Trump’s executive order calling out DEI bureaucracies for promoting illegal discrimination, and a Supreme Court decision prohibiting racial preferences, Washington has refused to scale back his DEI efforts. His commitment to DEI surpasses his concern for the legal liability those activities impose on Mason.

Washington’s ideological commitments also eclipse his obligation to follow the law when it comes to face-coverings worn by campus protesters. Virginia law forbids wearing a mask to conceal one’s identity in public. Courts have upheld that law—created in response to the state’s experience with the KKK—as constitutional, and the state attorney general advised universities to amend their policies to prohibit face-coverings at protests.

All major public universities in Virgina complied—except for George Mason. Instead, it merely requires protesters to show identification upon request, a policy that is impractical to implement and does not actually align with the law. Washington claimed to favor this approach out of concern for free speech, even though courts have ruled that concealing one’s identity during a public protest is not protected speech.

Meantime, anti-Semitic activity at George Mason is on the rise. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has subjected the university to investigation for its failure to protect the civil rights of Jewish students during both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Mason students were arrested for planning anti-Semitic violence in two incidents last year. In the first, police searched the home of two sisters who led the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, finding an illegal gun and “pro-terror materials, including Hamas and Hezbollah flags and signs that read ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Jews,’” according to the Washington Free Beacon.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/social-media-campaign-targets-ivory-tower-hypocrites/

Over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have become cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting opinion is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.

Yet in the wake of rising anti-Semitism, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.

The Freedom Center’s Spring 2025 Campus Campaign targeted these elite universities and their leaders as “Ivory Tower Hypocrites” in a published report and a wide-reaching social media campaign.

“At far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views,” explains the report.

Universities named in the report include UCLA, Columbia, UPenn, Georgetown, Wake Forest and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, among others. These schools allowed woke leftist activists to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views.

Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill defended a blatantly anti-Semitic Palestinian literature festival on campus, claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission” but persecuted conservative law professor Amy Wax for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.