RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/columbia-university-failed-to-meet-accreditation-standards-department-of-education-finds/

Columbia University failed to meet accreditation standards due to its inability to uphold civil rights law and punish harassment against Jewish students, the Department of Education announced Wednesday.

Office of Civil Rights (OCR) officials have notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the body that sets Columbia’s accreditation standards, that the university is “in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws and therefore fails to meet standards.” Administrators’ unwillingness to address months of anti-Israel activism on Columbia’s campus created an unsafe environment for Jewish students, the department added, putting the university in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The news comes weeks after the Trump administration found that Columbia “failed to meaningfully protect Jewish students against severe and pervasive harassment on Columbia’s campus and consequently denied these students’ equal access to educational opportunities to which they are entitled under the law.”

“After Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, Columbia University’s leadership acted with deliberate indifference towards the harassment of Jewish students on its campus. This is not only immoral, but also unlawful,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said. “Accreditors have an enormous public responsibility as gatekeepers of federal student aid. They determine which institutions are eligible for federal student loans and Pell Grants. Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal antidiscrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards.”

Columbia must either comply with federal law or risk losing accreditation status.

OCR began its investigation into Columbia in February. The Trump administration has given Columbia lists of demands and recommendations on how to combat the campus’s rampant antisemitism problem, some of which Columbia has resisted. The administration has cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to Columbia as a result.

Anti-Israel protests began on Columbia’s campus directly after Hamas’s October 7 attack. The campus labeled the situation a “crisis,” even switching to remote classes for a time, after students began solidarity encampments that turned disruptive and violent. Jewish students were told by religious leaders to leave school over security concerns.

Though eventually broken up by law enforcement, student encampments kept popping back up. Students illegally occupied campus buildings and were charged on multiple counts including burglary, trespass, and criminal mischief.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is reviewing the visa status of some anti-Israel protesters involved in the demonstrations.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/04/equity-quackery/

While numerous changes are needed to improve our faltering education system, eliminating the concept of “equity” should perhaps be at the top of the list.

Grading for Equity, written by Joe Feldman, a former teacher, administrator, and “educational grading consultant,” made its arrival on the scene in 2018 and, sadly, is still used by many schools.

In the Grading for Equity regimen, teachers don’t consider homework, extra credit, or “soft-skill” behaviors, such as punctuality, attendance, timely submission of assignments, and class participation. Students are given additional time to complete tests and can retake them repeatedly to demonstrate mastery or raise their grade. Also, teacher quality is not essential. All that matters is that certain ethnicities are equally represented in various areas, making the group the focus instead of the individual.

The examples are myriad. In Buffalo, the state spent $500,000 on the Teacher Diversity Pipeline Pilot. The goal of this program is to help teacher aides become certified teachers. Eligibility, however, is based on whether the employee increases the diversity of the teaching staff, rather than on their ability to teach or their classroom experience.

In California, Palo Alto schools are eliminating honors classes. Beginning in September, first-year students will no longer have the option of taking a rigorous honors biology class. Proponents insist that removing different “lanes” for students or “de-laning,” based on achievement, will promote equity and encourage all kids to pursue science throughout their high school career.

In Illinois, state data show that only 41% of students in third through eighth grade could read at grade level in 2024, and just 31% in 11th grade. In math, 28% of third through eighth graders were proficient, and only 26% of 11th graders were.

What does State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders plan to do about the poor scores?

He wants to lower proficiency benchmarks on state assessments, claiming his plan will “right-size our benchmarks for proficiency on state assessments to provide us with more accurate data about student performance.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/04/harvard-has-brought-this-reckoning-on-itself/

In its war on Harvard, the Trump administration has dropped some serious bombs on America’s most prestigious university. It is investigating Harvard for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by tolerating racial discrimination and anti-Semitism. It has frozen more than $3 billion in federal funding and cancelled the government’s remaining contracts with Harvard. Trump himself has threatened to revoke the university’s tax-exempt status. A Republican budget bill, meanwhile, would impose higher taxes on Harvard and other universities’ endowments. Most recently, the administration has sought to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students for allegedly failing to comply with requests for information about ‘pro-terrorism conduct’ on campus (a court has temporarily halted that attempt).

These aggressive moves follow Harvard’s decision to sue the administration for threatening its funding, unless it complied with demands outlined in a letter sent in April. These demands include allowing the government to review hiring and admissions decisions, audit faculty, students and staff for viewpoint diversity, ban students ‘hostile to American values’, and provide regular updates to the administration, among other stipulations.

While Harvard has an immense $53 billion endowment, the Trump funding cuts, if enacted, could still be financially devastating. Barring foreign students would be particularly damaging, as they make up 27 per cent of Harvard’s total enrolment and an even greater proportion of its revenue. One Harvard professor has called it ‘an extinction-level event’.

Harvard and its president, Alan Garber, have refused to negotiate with the administration and instead appear to be relishing the fight. Opponents of Trump – the broader Harvard community, Democrats and sympathetic media – hail Garber as a hero, the face of a renewed ‘Resistance’. Bernie Sanders has congratulated Harvard ‘for refusing to relinquish its constitutional rights to Trump’s authoritarianism’. Garber received a standing ovation at Harvard’s recent commencement ceremony.

Harvard claims it is focussed on resisting government overreach into academic affairs, specifically the administration’s ‘demands to control Harvard’s governance, curriculum, and the “ideology” of its faculty and students’. But underlying its resistance is the belief that criticisms of Harvard are largely unfounded, and that the university does not require significant reforms. Trump, in Harvard’s view, is motivated by animus toward higher education, and the issue of anti-Semitism is merely a pretext for destroying institutions he sees as hostile. Harvard professor Steven Pinker, who has previously criticised his university on free-speech issues, recently wrote that Trump and other critics suffer from ‘Harvard Derangement Syndrome’. Trump’s ‘obvious motivation is to cripple civil-society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch’, he says.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/06/03/are-our-universities-training-our-adversaries/

Last week, the Trump administration proposed revoking the visas of Chinese students who express support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Just days later, Harvard offered a revealing counterpoint: the Kennedy School of Government selected a Chinese student to deliver the commencement address. The speaker, Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, used language strikingly similar to the CCP’s official worldview.

Let’s consider the parallels.

In 2013, shortly after assuming power, Xi Jinping introduced a new ideological slogan: “a community with a shared future for mankind.” It quickly became central to the CCP’s global propaganda efforts. A few years later, Xi elaborated:

“A community with a shared future for mankind, as the name suggests, means that the future and destiny of every nation and country are closely interconnected. We should stand together through thick and thin, share honor and disgrace, and work hard to turn this planet—where we were born and raised—into a harmonious big family, making the aspirations of people around the world for a better life a reality.”

This phrase was enshrined in both the CCP Charter and China’s Constitution. Since then, it has served as a soft-power motif for China’s global ambitions.

Now, listen to what Ms. Jiang told Harvard graduates in her speech:

“That moment reminds me of something I used to believe when I was a kid: that the world was becoming a small village. I remember being told we would be the first generation to end hunger and poverty for humankind. My program at Harvard is International Development. It was built on this exact beautiful vision that humanity rises and falls as one.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/columbias-challenge-to-reverse-years-of-antisemitism-on-campus/

The Trump administration is going after colleges and universities which, in Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s words, have “ignored relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses” since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led genocidal attacks inside Israel. Early last March, the Trump administration showed it meant business by announcing the cancellation of $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University, which became ground zero for the post October 7th campus mayhem against Jews. The Trump administration is cracking down on other institutions of higher learning as well, most notably Harvard University which has chosen to resist rather than deal meaningfully with its own antisemitism crisis.

For its part, Columbia University’s leaders early on showed callous indifference to the safety of Jewish students, faculty members, and staff caused by the antisemitic mob activities on campus. They only requested New York City police assistance as a last resort. But the university’s Task Force on Antisemitism did manage to produce two meaningless reports in March and August of last year.

The first task force report discussed disciplinary issues. However, while the task force recommended that the university should “intervene more proactively in real time” before a demonstration gets out of hand, it cautioned strongly against any physical confrontation. In other words, the university should avoid forcible removal of protesters, no matter how disruptive and threatening the protesters become. The report recommended instead such milquetoast responses as telling the offending protesters that they are violating the rules, handing them cards containing the relevant rules, and asking them to disperse within a specified time. This report makes no mention of long suspensions, expulsions, or rescinding the offending protesters’ diplomas, much less filing criminal charges.

https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/381799/harvards-double-standard-on-racism/

(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His book The Road to October 7: Hamas, the Holocaust, and the Eternal War Against the Jews will be published on October 1, 2025, by The Jewish Publication Society / University of Nebraska Press.)

    Harvard University has shown appropriate sensitivity to the African American community by agreeing to relinquish seven photographs of half-naked Black slaves, which a professor commissioned in 1850 because he believed their physique proved they were racially inferior.

    This follows other steps Harvard has taken in recent years to make amends with African Americans, including acknowledging that it once owned slaves, promising reparations to their descendants, and changing its official seal because it included the crest of a slaveowner.

    But when will Harvard finally acknowledge other racist stains on its record—such as the friendly relations it pursued with Nazi Germany in the 1930s?

    Adolf Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, was given the red carpet treatment when he visited Harvard in 1934 for his 25th class reunion. Harvard maintained strong ties to Nazi-controlled German universities, especially the University of Heidelberg—even though Heidelberg fired its Jewish faculty members, instituted a Nazified curriculum, and hosted a mass book-burning. Harvard also participated in student exchange programs with Nazi universities, even though a German official said publicly that the students who were being sent to the United States would serve as “political soldiers of the Reich.”

    Harvard also hosted the officers and crew of the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it docked in the Boston harbor in 1934. And Harvard allowed the Nazi consul-general in Boston to place a swastika wreath in the university’s chapel (in honor of Harvard alumni who fought for Germany).

    All this was exposed by Prof. Stephen Norwood in his book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower, back in 2009. Sixteen years have passed, yet Harvard still has not apologized for the pro-Nazi skeletons in its closet, even as it has been acknowledging its racist actions against Blacks. Why the double standard?

    Harvard is not the only example of an American university that has belatedly come to grips with some of its past racism, while refusing to face up to its friendliness to the racist Nazi regime.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2025/05/29/will_floridas_leaders_green_light_a_dei_radical_1113423.html

Say this about the DEI radicals who have run higher education into the ground: They’re shameless.

A case in point is Santa Ono, the president of the University of Michigan and a current finalist for president of the University of Florida. Ono has spent his entire career building DEI bureaucracies, pushing climate radicalism, and injecting left-wing politics into the universities he’s led. As the Florida Board of Governors prepares to vote on his appointment on June 3, Ono has tried to fool them into believing he’s the second coming of Ron DeSantis. With a $15 million, five-year contract on offer—which would make him the highest-paid public university president in the country—Ono is rebranding himself as a reformer. He brings to mind the Groucho Marx quip: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like ‘em… well, I’ve got others.” But the University of Florida needs a principled leader—someone who will continue its trajectory of reform with conviction.

On Tuesday, the mask slipped many times as Ono appeared before the University of Florida’s Board of Trustees. The most significant moment came when the board’s vice chair publicly admitted that Ono began conversations about UF’s presidency in February. That matters because Ono closed Michigan’s DEI department in March—one month later. This move against DEI has been touted as proof of his reform credentials, but the timing suggests that Ono ended DEI at Michigan as part of his live audition for the UF presidency, not out of principled courage. He was also a holdout on so-called “diversity statements,” banning them a full six months after Harvard. Ono took that action only after being criticized for DEI radicalism by—of all sources—the New York Times, and only after President Trump was elected.

Make no mistake: Ono is a DEI radical, having embraced that divisive and discriminatory ideology for years. Before arriving at Michigan, Ono served as president of the University of British Columbia. In 2021, he appointed a President’s Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence, later bragging he was “really proud” of the task force’s strategic plan, which had become “a standard that is emulated around the world.” What exactly was Mr. Ono so proud of? The task force’s report is littered with racism. It concludes, “Whiteness is an obstacle to achieving inclusive excellence.” But take heart: “UBC is also lucky to have a good number of White students, faculty, staff, and administrators who readily recognize how problematic Whiteness is.” The task force promised that “expanding Whiteness in strategic hires will not be tolerated.”