RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/princeton-university-president-christopher-eisgruber-anti-semitism-racial-discrimination

In 2020, Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber made headlines for declaring the university guilty of “systemic racism.” He meant systemic racism against racial minorities, but in truth, Eisgruber’s institution has practiced the opposite: systematically discriminated against supposed “oppressors,” like whites and males.

Though most Princeton faculty support Eisgruber’s “anti-racism” policy, a faction of dissenters—a few dozen in number—has grown bolder in recent months. In these professors’ telling, Princeton’s president is a vengeful administrator who punishes anyone who questions DEI orthodoxy. They have worked behind the scenes to assemble evidence of his discriminatory policies and hope the Trump administration will restore the principle of colorblind equality on campus.

I sat down with one of these professors for a wide-ranging discussion about anti-Semitism, radical ideologies, and DEI at Princeton. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Christopher Rufo: Harvard and Columbia have drawn the most attention for radical ideologies and anti-Semitism on campus. Set the stage for what’s happening here at Princeton.

Professor: Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and—as President Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration—declare that we were “systemically racist.” But if we have been systemically racist, it’s been against whites, Jews, Asians, and Indians, in favor of other demographics. We’ve always been told that we have to give special treatment to women and certain demographic minorities.

https://www.thefp.com/p/explosion-in-foreign-funding-for-american-universities?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Foreign countries such as China and Qatar have poured $29 billion into campuses over the past few years. ‘Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.’

Foreign donors have given as much to U.S. universities in the last four years as they did in the previous 40, according to a new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute shared exclusively with The Free Press. The study shows an explosion in overseas funding for American schools between 2021 and 2024, with nearly $29 billion in foreign money donated during that period.

Qatar and China are among the largest sources of funding.

That $29 billion figure is more than double the total for the preceding four years, and accounts for half of the estimated $57.97 billion in foreign funding since 1986, when the federal government began tracking the data.

“The floodgates opened during the Biden era,” said NCRI’s co-founder Joel Finkelstein. ”This isn’t just a financial issue—it’s a national security crisis. Hostile powers are buying influence on American campuses at an industrial scale.”

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/5263585-harvard-funding-civil-rights/

Earlier this month, the federal government withheld billions in funding from Harvard. Last week, the IRS considered whether the school should even keep its tax-exempt status. 

Harvard’s response? They’ve labeled these moves as somehow “unlawful.” But they can’t explain how, because they’re wrong.

First, as it relates to funding, no institution is simply entitled to billions of taxpayer dollars. The federal government has the absolute right to attach conditions to the programs it pays for, especially when it comes to compliance with applicable civil rights laws. 

Contrary to what Harvard’s leadership may believe, this isn’t a First Amendment issue. The government is not suppressing free speech but exercising its own speech. And the Supreme Court has been crystal clear about this.

In Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans (2015), for example, the court explained that “when government speaks, it is not barred by the Free Speech Clause from determining the content of what it says.” In fact, the court has persistently refused “to hold that the government unconstitutionally discriminates on the basis of viewpoint when it chooses to fund a program dedicated to advance certain permissible goals, because the program in advancing those goals necessarily discourages alternative goals.”

In short, there is no First Amendment issue here because the government is not telling Harvard what to do: Harvard is free to keep on discriminating to its own heart’s content — just not on the government’s dime.

Second, the IRS has full authority to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and it is not a close call.

Over 40 years ago, the Supreme Court in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983) ruled that the IRS could (and should) revoke a university’s tax-exempt status because its racially discriminatory practices violated public policy. In fact, in some ways, this case is even easier, because not only is discriminatory antisemitism in this context against public policy, it is also actually unlawful under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. 

https://thespectator.com/topic/harvard-intricate-china-ties/

Scratch almost any major US political story and sooner or later you’ll hit a big red nerve that belongs to the Chinese Communist party (CCP). Tariffs, energy, TikTok, the border, Fentanyl, Greenland, Panama, the Gulf of America – on all these subjects the Trump administration is, one way or another, trying to limit Beijing’s power in the West. And Donald Trump’s “war on Harvard,” it turns out, is no exception. It’s clear that the President is pushing against anti-Semitism and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion madness on America’s most famous campus, as well as in countless other colleges and universities. But the drive against woke insanity is often also a push back against the increasing influence of China in western life, especially in the many educational institutions into which the CCP has been pouring billions of dollars over the past two decades.

When Joe Biden was exposed for hoarding classified files, it soon emerged that some of the sensitive documents had been stored in the Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, at the University of Pennsylvania, which just so happened to have received $30 million from Chinese donors. But that’s small fry compared to the money Harvard has been harvesting from the world’s second superpower in recent years. In the 2010s, the massively indebted Chinese real-estate behemoth Evergrande pledged $115 million to Harvard Medical School, which may or may not have had something to do with the way America’s scientific elite, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, pivoted against the Covid lab-leak theory in 2020. In the end, it donated $12 million, according to reports.

Now it seems that Harvard’s China ties may be even more intricate than previously believed. These connections may have given the Trump administration precisely the legal cudgel it needs in its bid to force Harvard to play by its rules on DEI and other issues. The new Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has already declared that Harvard has not been “fully transparent or complete in its disclosures” concerning foreign donations. There are a number of allegations that Chinese funding – more than $1 billion worth of donations in total – has excessively influenced Harvard’s research and academic output.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/princeton-university-christopher-l-eisgruber-dei-civil-rights?skip=1

Amid the ongoing showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivy League, one university president has positioned himself as a leader of the academic resistance: Princeton’s Christopher L. Eisgruber.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants to Princeton as part of its investigation into racial discrimination and anti-Semitism at the New Jersey campus. Eisgruber, though, was defiant, telling the New York Times that he’s “not considering any concessions” and calling for other university presidents to follow his lead.

This isn’t Eisgruber’s first bid for the spotlight. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, he declared that Princeton—where he has served as president since 2013—was guilty of “systemic racism.” In a letter to students that September, he went so far as to claim that racism was embedded in the very “structures of the university itself.”

Eisgruber was right to say that he presides over a system of racial discrimination—but not in the way he imagines. The university does not discriminate against “oppressed” groups, such as blacks and Latinos, but against those seen as “oppressors.”

“At Princeton, it’s totally common knowledge that there are favored groups and disfavored groups,” one professor said. “And the disfavored groups are whites, Jews, males,” and others commonly disliked by the Left.

A City Journal investigation confirms that Princeton has, in fact, entrenched a system of racial discrimination and segregation. We have obtained more than a dozen internal documents and conducted interviews with a half-dozen employees, who confirm that the university has flagrantly violated the principles of the Civil Rights Act in the name of “social justice.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/24/bright-spots-do-exist-in-american-higher-education-are-they-the-future/

On April 8, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, did something unusual: it found and showcased bright spots in American higher education. Such hidden gems are rare, so the event and its participants deserve attention and support.

Many Americans are painfully aware of academia’s current pathologies: soaring tuition resulting in unprecedented debt for students; leftward politicization with Democrat professors outnumbering Republicans 50 to 1; grievance studies such as Women’s Studies or Queer Studies displacing real learning; and, consequently, graduates who are ignorant, especially in American civics, world history, math, and finance, as the repeated schemes to cancel student loans attest.

The humanities were the first to go bad, though the sciences have certainly caught up as politically correct “diversity” and “equity” initiatives are now common in medical schools. The liberal arts used to focus on what was common to all of humanity—hence “the humanities.” They instructed us on our shared vices and virtues, our passions and reason, as depicted in the Great Books of Western Civilization, such as those by Chaucer, Milton, or Shakespeare.

But today’s campus identity politics inverts this and encourages a focus on self, one’s tribe, or one’s pet politics—the direct opposite of the word “education,” the root of which is the Latin ducare, meaning to bring forth or draw out. Traditionally, education was never a focus on one’s own problems but rather a means to broaden the mind and one’s world, to see universals, including human nature, not to fight today’s political battles. Alas, whether they know it or not, most colleges today instead subscribe to the Communist Manifesto line that, “Philosophers have hitherto interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” Campus protests make the point.

But a few notable schools reject this Marxist norm. Presidents of four of them spoke at the Heritage panel, Reclaiming the Culture of Higher Education, introduced by Jonathan Pidluzny, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Programs in the Education Department.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/23/choosing-choice/

Texas is on the verge of becoming the latest state to embrace educational freedom. On April 17, the Texas House gave final approval to a bill that would create an Educational Savings Account program, bringing Gov. Greg Abbott’s top legislative priority very close to reality. The bill now heads to the state Senate, where it will most likely pass. With ESAs, money is deposited into a government-authorized savings account with restricted but multiple uses. Those funds can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses, and other approved customized learning services and materials.

While any student can apply, the Texas program prioritizes students with disabilities and those from lower-income families. House lawmakers also capped spending for students in families above 500% of the poverty level at 20% of program funds. With over five million students, the program can’t serve everyone at this time. The legislature, however, can appropriate more money for the program in future years.

Also new on the school choice scene is Tennessee, where parents can apply to participate in the state’s new ESA program in May. The program begins in the fall, and parents can access up to $7,295 a year. During the first year, half of the funding would be reserved for students whose families fall below an income limit that is set at 300% of the amount required to qualify for free or reduced-price meals, or $173,160 for a family of four. The other half would have no income restrictions.

Other states are also moving toward parental freedom. In South Carolina, negotiations are underway in the legislature for a program that will accept at least 15,000 students and can increase if the state’s General Assembly allocates additional money. To be eligible, families could earn no more than 300% of the federal poverty level in the first year. The income cap will rise to 500% of the federal poverty level in subsequent years.

Idaho and Wyoming also joined the movement earlier this year, and New Hampshire and North Dakota are taking steps to create universal school choice.

Nationally, 36 states now have some kind of private school choice. Patrick Wolf, a Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas who has studied school choice systems extensively, contrasted the rapid spread of choice over the last few years with the slower progress seen in the 2000s and 2010s. In particular, he said that ESAs stand out as having found their moment.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ivory-tower-hypocrite-columbia-university/

#2: Columbia University

More than any other university across the nation, Columbia has become a symbol for the lawless riot of Jew hatred and pro-terrorist sentiment that has overtaken our college campuses. And deservedly so.

During the spring of 2024, the Columbia campus became engulfed in chaos, as pro-Hamas students, aided by radical faculty and outside organizers, established an illegal encampment on the South East Lawn, calling it a “Gaza solidarity encampment” and a “liberated zone” and using violence and physical force to deny entry to anyone deemed a Zionist.

As the anti-Semitism watchdog organization, the Amcha Initiative, reports:

The protestors had defended their encampment by encircling it and chanting, “we don’t want no Zionists here,” called for an intifada, and physically intimidated Jewish students that were observing or recording. Professors spoke at a “faculty solidarity teach in,” where Professor Mahmood Mamdani stated, “The response to Zionist power is to criminalize anti-Zionism as antisemitism”… The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine group praised and promoted support for the encampment online, even going so far as to illicit donations for the protestors violating university policy.

As Amcha has documented, “multiple Jewish students were assaulted” in the so-called “liberated zone” and elsewhere on campus: “Protestors off campus threw fake blood at Jewish students. According to the House of Representatives Committee on Education and Workforce, a photographer wearing a ‘bring them home necklace’ had coffee thrown at him by a protester while simply standing nearby. A Jewish student was accosted when walking home wearing a Star of David necklace, and a hostage tag when a woman began screaming at the student, calling the Jewish student a Zionist and a murderer while banging what appeared to be a pot on the barricade, and after being told by a police officer to stop, accused Jewish students of ‘killing her people’ and said ‘We are Hamas’ which was caught on video. A Jewish Columbia student reported to the Committee that many Jewish students ‘who [live] right next to the campus couldn’t sleep due to screams of Intifada until 1AM.’”

The university response to these blatant acts of anti-Semitism and disruption was abysmal. Administrators pleaded and negotiated with the pro-Hamas agitators to disperse the encampment but refrained from taking hard line disciplinary tactics or banning the organizers from campus. As a result, the illegal demonstration persisted, eventually shutting down campus life entirely, forcing the cancellation of graduation ceremonies, and creating a rabidly hostile climate for Jewish and pro-Israel students at the university.