EDUCATION Comments turned off

Yale University’s War against Alumni and Accountability By Victor Ashe

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/yale-universitys-war-against-alumni-and-accountability/

Fearful of transparency and change, Yale’s governing body has resorted to procedural tactics to keep alumni from joining that wouldn’t be out of place in a dictatorship.

Back in March 2020, I signed up to gather the 4,394 signatures required to become a petition candidate for the Yale Corporation. In a four-month period, I gathered over 7,200 signatures and won a place on the ballot for the Yale Corporation (which is the governing body of Yale University). It hires the president, grants tenure, adopts the annual budget and sets policy on whatever it wants to affect.

I ran because, as a Yale alumnus, I was tired of getting two names each year of persons I did not know, with no information on why they were running provided. All we got was a bio, and now a video lacking any comments from candidates on issues facing Yale. In my campaign, I also emphasized openness, and my opposition both to expensive administrative growth and to rising tuition during the pandemic.

While the 2021 election, for which I was a candidate, was transpiring from April 14 to May 23, the Yale Corporation, chaired by President Peter Salovey but guided by Catherine Bond Hill, former Vassar president, moved to abolish this system and give total control to the existing 19 members on filling vacancies. Regulations permit two to five candidates. A special unannounced meeting of the corporation was held May 18. Two members, the governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut, were not notified or informed of the agenda of the meeting. Why? I realize I’m a biased party, but it seems hard not to conclude that Yale, frightened by my efforts and by the possibility that either I or — since I did not, ultimately, win under the old procedures — some other committed individual might shake things up, moved quickly to secure power. Such a step is unbecoming of Yale University.

The board-selection process is distant and unfriendly. But it has existed since 1927. It produced the first Jewish member of the corporation in William Horowitz in 1965. It produced the first women to serve on the corporation in the 1970s. Now that process has been abolished, and the 160,407 Yale alumni will be able to vote for only the hand-picked choices from the Yale Alumni Association’s 14-member nominating committee in future years. This is similar to what mainland China has imposed on Hong Kong in its future “elections.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Rutgers Chancellor Apologizes for Condemning Anti-Semitic Attacks By Brittany Bernstein

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rutgers-university-new-brunswick-chancellor-issues-apology-for-message-condemning-anti-semitic-attacks/

The chancellor of Rutgers University-New Brunswick issued an apology to the university’s Palestinian community on Thursday for sending a university-wide announcement condemning the recent surge in anti-Semitic hate crimes across the country.

The university’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and provost and executive vice chancellor for research and academic affairs, Francine Conway, sent a message to students on Wednesday that brought attention to the recent rise in hate crimes against Jews.

“Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world,” the email said.

“If you have been adversely impacted by anti-Semitic or any other discriminatory incidents in our community, please do not hesitate to reach out to our counseling and other support services on campus. Our behavioral health team stands ready to support you through these challenging times,” the email said.

While the email also mentioned the recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas, the administrators did not take a position on the conflict.

“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel” it read.

Just one day later, Molloy and Conway sent students a follow up email titled “An Apology.”

The administrators apologized to the university’s Palestinian Community members and said that the first message “fell short” of their intention to be a “place where all identities can feel validated and supported.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lionel Trilling’s Warning As the great literary critic cautioned more than a half century ago, liberals increasingly reduce a complex world to black and white. Lee Siegel

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/lionel-trillings-warning

In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling published a collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination. It contained a presciently devastating critique of modern American liberalism’s grasp of reality. Liberalism, he wrote, “drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination”:

The world is a complex and unexpected and terrible place. . . . It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. . . . We must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to survive.

By “imagination,” Trilling didn’t mean the ability to invent. He meant the ability to resist simplistic, reductive, and morally gratifying explanations of reality and to see the painfully immense complexity of truth and perspective that is at the heart of life.

Consider a few test cases of the efficacy of the liberal imagination. Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently wrote in a Tweet that a grocery store chain allowing its vaccinated employees not to use masks so long as they wore a logo on their shirts was “just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” Denunciations of Greene for making such an unhinged analogy swiftly followed. Yet with a little complexity, a little modulation, and a little context, you might arrive at the conclusion that Greene is crazy like the proverbial fox. Perhaps she intuits that in American politics, celebrity almost guarantees success as a political candidate, and that notoriety is the quickest route to celebrity. But why ruin all the fun? Greene and her adversaries are linked arm in arm in a thrilling race to the bottom.

There are Holocaust analogies, and then there are Holocaust analogies. Recently, CNN fired Rick Santorum, the network’s token conservative pundit, for saying elsewhere that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian values” and that its colonists and settlers “birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” Callous? Sure, but Santorum was not denying American Indians’ death and destruction at the hands of white settlers. He was carelessly stating facts that were nevertheless historically accurate—America was founded on Judeo-Christian values; and American culture doesn’t owe much to Native American culture, if by “culture” he meant the organized expression of thought and feeling.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

When the Mob Came for the Jews of Baghdad We heard screams all through the night. Today only four known Jews remain in Iraq. By Joseph Samuels

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-mob-came-for-the-jews-of-baghdad-11622237901?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

I was 10 when mobs attacked the Jewish community of Baghdad, my community, with cruel and unimaginable violence. Rioters maimed, raped, killed and robbed the unsuspecting Jews. This massacre, which began June 1, 1941, was called the Farhud, Arabic for “violent dispossession” or pogrom.

The seeds of the Farhud had been sown two months earlier. On April 1, a pro-Nazi coup d’état overthrew the pro-British Iraqi government and seized power. The coup was staged by Rashid Ali al Gaylani, an Arab nationalist and former Iraqi prime minister, supported by four army generals, and aided by Fritz Grobba, a former German ambassador to Iraq. This dangerous group was further stoked by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, who deeply hated the Jews. Anti-Semitic propaganda began to appear in the daily newspapers and in broadcasts on Radio Baghdad. It was intended to inflame the Muslim population and rally support for the new regime.

The Jewish community bore the brunt of this explosive combination of Arab nationalism, Nazi propaganda and anti-Semitism. In the weeks after the coup my family stayed home most of the time, huddled around the large console radio. We listened with disbelief to reports of Jews being arrested and accused of anti-Iraqi sentiment and of spying for the British. I shook just thinking of the torture being carried out to extract false confessions.

On May 31, 1941, the British army arrived at the outskirts of Baghdad. The pro-Nazi government collapsed quickly, but al Gaylani and his co-conspirators escaped to Iran. The Jewish community in Baghdad felt a sense of relief, especially as it coincided with the eve of the Shavuot festival, commemorating the time when God gave us the Ten Commandments. We had good reason to rejoice.

But that high spirit didn’t last long, and joy reverted to pain and sorrow. The absence of a functioning government created a power vacuum. Across the country, chaos and lawlessness followed.

The Farhud erupted early Monday morning, June 1. Soldiers in civilian clothes, policemen and large crowds of Iraqi men, including Bedouins brandishing swords and daggers, joined in the pillage, helping themselves to loot as they plundered more than 1,500 Jewish homes and stores. For two days, the rioters murdered between 150 and 780 Jews—exact counts aren’t known—injured 600 to 2,000 others, and raped an indeterminable number of women. Some say 600 unidentified victims were buried in a mass grave. All through the night we heard their screams. We heard gunshots too, then sudden quiet. Unarmed and unprepared to defend themselves, Jews were vulnerable and helpless. I was shaken, desperate and angry.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Punished in Hong Kong for Texting the Press A pro-democracy lawmaker is denied bail for speaking to the WSJ.

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/punished-in-hong-kong-for-texting-the

China wants to silence Hong Kongers even as it persecutes them. A court judgment released Friday shows that a judge penalized former pro-democracy lawmaker and journalist Claudia Mo for speaking to Western journalists, including our own Jillian Melchior.

Police arrested Ms. Mo, along with nearly the entire opposition movement, in January. She and 46 others are charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law for organizing or participating in an informal pro-democracy primary election last July. Judge Esther Toh denied Ms. Mo bail in April, and the world learned why on Friday.

The national security law prohibits “collusion” with vaguely defined foreign forces and states that defendants may not receive bail “unless the judge has sufficient grounds” to believe that they “will not continue to commit acts endangering national security.” As a reason to keep Ms. Mo behind bars, prosecutor Maggie Yang described Ms. Mo’s WhatsApp correspondence with these pages, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the BBC.

In a court filing explaining her denial of bail, Judge Toh quotes from an Oct. 1, 2020, conversation Ms. Mo had with Ms. Melchior about 12 Hong Kongers who were captured after they tried to escape to Taiwan by boat.

Ms. Mo told Ms. Melchior: “The detention and treatment of the 12 Hong Kong protesters serve as the ultimate warning and threat to Hongkongers about what one can face if you’re caught. The new security law and the spate of arrests have worked as a scare tactic, probably fairly successfully—at sending a persistent political chill around the city.” Every word of that is true, and it was hardly a secret.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Soul of Black Conservatism Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime challenging the orthodoxy on race, economics and more—and produced an impressive body of scholarship along the way. By Jason Riley

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-soul-of-black-conservatism-11622226565?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

“Mr. Riley is a Journal columnist, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell,” from which this article is adapted.”

Economist Thomas Sowell has grown accustomed to a certain type of media query, usually from white interviewers. They want to know how, as a black conservative, he has dealt with criticism from fellow blacks. Charlie Rose once asked: “How was it, though, for you . . . to be an African-American man respected by a cross-section of your peers and yet be so against the grain of fellow African-Americans?”

Mr. Sowell, 90, usually responds by challenging the premise. “I don’t know if we can say [that I go] ‘against the grain of fellow African-Americans,’ ” he told Mr. Rose. “You mean fellow African-American intellectuals. But I don’t think African-American intellectuals are any more typical of African-Americans than white intellectuals are of whites.”

In another interview, Mr. Sowell told C-Span’s Brian Lamb that black strangers regularly stop him in public and compliment his views: “When I checked out of my hotel this morning, the black security guard came over and said, ‘Are you Sowell?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and he shook my hand warmly and we walked—he walked me the length of the corridor and talked about this and about that. . . . So, it’s not Sowell versus blacks. It’s the black intellectuals.”

There is a long history of conflating the interests of black Americans with those of black organizations, black journalists, black academics and other elites. The media lazily continues to turn to these groups, from the NAACP to Black Lives Matter, as if they speak for all black people.

In December 1980, Mr. Sowell headlined the “Black Alternatives” conference in San Francisco. Its goal was to showcase the variety of perspectives among black politicians, intellectuals and civil-rights activists. “The people who were invited,” he began his keynote address, “are people who are seeking alternatives, people who have challenged the conventional wisdom on one or more issues, people who have thought for themselves instead of marching in step and chanting familiar refrains. . . . We have come through a historic phase of struggle for basic civil rights—a very necessary struggle, but not sufficient. The very success of that struggle has created new priorities and new urgencies. There are economic realities to confront and self-development to achieve, in the schools, at work, in our communities.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Nikole Hannah-Jones considering legal action against UNC following tenure flap: by By Kate Murphy and Lucille Sherman

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article251727288.html

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is considering legal action against UNC-Chapel Hill and its Board of Trustees over the failure to give her tenure, according to a letter to state lawmakers obtained by The News & Observer on Thursday.

The potential lawsuit comes as Hannah-Jones has sparked national controversy over the past week. Some think conservative politicians may be behind the effort not to grant her tenure as UNC’s Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.

Outraged faculty, students, alumni, professional journalists and scholars have tied the decision to Hannah-Jones’s Pulitzer-Prize winning work on The 1619 Project, which explores the legacy and history of Black Americans and slavery.

Hannah-Jones is set to join the UNC-CH faculty this summer with a five-year, fixed-term contract that does not include tenure, even though previous Knight Chairs in the journalism school have been tenured.

In a letter informing North Carolina lawmakers of their duty to preserve records related to Hannah-Jones’s hiring, the attorneys from the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., Levy Ratner PC, and Ferguson, Chambers & Sumter, P.A. said they are representing Hannah-Jones “in connection with the failure of the Board of Trustees (the “Board”) to consider and approve her application for tenure,” the letter says.

“We are evaluating all available legal recourse to fully vindicate Ms. Hannah-Jones’s rights, including possibly initiating a federal action against UNC, the Board, and/or affiliated entities and individuals,” the letter says.

Lawmakers have a “legal duty to maintain, preserve, retain, protect, and not destroy, alter or manipulate any and all documents and data, both electronic and hard copy,” relevant to Hannah-Jones’s potential claims, the letter said.

UNC-Chapel Hill also received a letter from attorneys representing Hannah-Jones, but leaders had no additional comment, according to Joel Curran, vice chancellor for university communications.

‘I am obligated to fight back’

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Byron York Second thoughts about voting for Joe Biden by Byron York,

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-second-thoughts-about-voting-for-joe-biden

It was well known during the presidential campaign that many Biden voters were happier about voting against Donald Trump than voting for Joe Biden. A Monmouth University poll taken a couple of weeks after the election found that 57 percent of Biden voters reported being happy with his victory, while 73 percent said they were happy that Trump lost. So a significant number of them voted more against Trump than for Biden.

That sense of ambivalence about Biden has lasted into his presidency. A new Fox News poll asked the question, “Are you satisfied with how you voted in the 2020 presidential election, or do you wish you had voted differently?” Ninety-one percent of Biden voters said they were satisfied. Among Democrats, 89 percent said they were satisfied. Of people who call themselves liberals, 85 percent were satisfied. While those numbers are high, they are still lower than the last two winning candidates in the early months of their presidencies. In April 2017, 97 percent of Trump voters said they were satisfied with their vote, while in April 2009, 93 percent of Obama voters said they were satisfied.

There appears to be a growing concern among some voters that Biden is not governing the way he campaigned. During his run for the White House, Biden presented himself as a “centrist,” and much media coverage happily went along. But once in office, Biden has pushed massive spending proposals to remake America. He has not uttered a word of protest when admiring media commentators compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Democrats who succeeded in passing massive proposals to remake America.

In short, Biden is pushing more change than some of his voters want. The change they wanted was to get rid of Trump, not elect a new FDR.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Sinking Ship of State Drowns Everyone by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden keeps rewarding the world’s villains

Posted By on May 29th, 2021

https://nypost.com/2021/05/28/biden-keeps-rewarding-the-worlds-villains/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

President Joe Biden sure has a knack for rewarding the world’s . . . villains.

Take Hamas, which just agreed to a cease-fire for the faceoff it started by launching hundreds, eventually thousands, of rockets at Israeli civilians.

Even before that, Biden dropped the Trump policy of refusing aid to the Palestinian Authority until it ends its support of terrorism, promising $250 million in assistance — in potential violation of the Taylor Force Act, since the PA continues to pay “salaries” to imprisoned terrorists and the survivors of ones who died in the act.

This week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised more aid, upping the total to $360 million, theoretically to help rebuild in Gaza. Yet even State admits there’s “no guarantee” Hamas won’t divert the money to, for example, rebuilding its tunnels for terrorists to sneak into Israel.

And standing behind Hamas is Iran, which paid for most of the rockets launched from Gaza (and likely those launched from Lebanon and Syria during the 11-day flareup, as well). But Team Biden continues to try to restore the Obama nuclear deal with Tehran, ending sanctions and so giving the regime countless billions more to spend on sponsoring terror.

This when the deal’s better clauses — the ones that actually slow Iran’s drive to become a nuclear power — expire in just a few years, at which point the accord actually legitimizes Tehran’s nuclear work. And the International Atomic Energy Agency chief says Iran is enriching uranium up to purity levels that “only countries making bombs are reaching.”

Meanwhile, the president has seen fit to schedule a summit this summer with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as waive sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will increase Germany’s dependenceon Russian natural gas and remove Ukraine’s ability to stop Russia’s gas sales to Europe the next time he decides to chop off a piece of that country.

Quite a favor for a guy whom Biden pointedly called a “killer” and whose interference (most Democrats believe) put Donald Trump in the White House. And soon after Russia-based hackers cyberattacked a US pipeline and created major gas shortages here — followed by new cyberassaults on federal agencies by hackers linked to Russian intelligence.