Monthly Archives: August 2024

Part of the Problem

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US News & World Report Executive Chairman and CEO Eric Gertler, in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, accidentally exposed a significant part of the problem in higher academia management and that management’s failure to provide for an open learning environment for the students (and too many pupils) attending their institutions.

Most college presidents have résumés that stand out in the academic world of scholarship, theory, and ceremony. That background isn’t always suited for a role that requires one to juggle the competing interests of students, donors, alumni, faculty, trustees, and community members.

This is a basic misunderstanding of what the job of a college president is.

The interest of students is to learn how to think critically and how to debate positions—including, as an important pedagogic tool, in favor of those with which they disagree—learn their course material, and learn how to get along with fellow students who have different beliefs. They have no other legitimate interest while attending the college or university.

Faculty members have no interest other than to teach those things to their students and those pupils who deign attend a class. They have no legitimate school governance interest and they have no legitimate political interest once on the school campus. That they’ve gained so much influence in school governance is a failure amply demonstrated by the disruptions and riots at their institutions over the last few years.

“Community members” have no interest in the school’s operation other than that they are paid on time and fully by the school and the students and pupils for services rendered.

The only interests to which a college president need be responsive are the following. Donors, who have an interest in their money being used as they’ve designated. Alternatively, the school’s management team is free to reject a donor’s money if the designated use is antithetical to the school’s education mission.

Alumni, to the extent they recognize that their role is to support the school’s mission and not to try to impose their personal political agenda on the school.

Trustees, who are the senior managers of the institution.

The mission of a college or university to provide an environment conducive to educating all of its students, regardless of their religious belief, and then to provide that education as outlined above.

A president who cannot do those things, or who disagrees with the narrowness of those things has no business being a president of that institution.

Separately, but closely related, Gertler identified an additional major impediment to a college’s/university’s ability to satisfy its mission.

Harvard now charges incoming students $85,000 in tuition and living expenses. It has more than 25,000 students and almost 20,000 employees, including some 2,500 faculty members.

Leave aside the enormous charge to students for tuition and living expenses by an institution with an endowment of nearly $51 billion and growing. That endowment, by the way, would pay for 596,470 student-years, or more than 23 years for class cycles of those 20,000 students, longer if we’re doing dynamic scoring on that growing endowment.

The larger problem embodied by Gertler’s statistic are those 20,000 “employees” compared with those 2,500 actual teachers. That’s badly out of whack.

A Misapprehension

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Kimberly Strassel, of The Wall Street Journal, opened her editorial with this:

Minouche Shafik is this week’s casualty of activist protesters, although her resignation as Columbia University’s president resurrects a pressing question for Democratic leaders: how long do they think they can duck their own confrontation with their angry left?

That’s her misapprehension: that “angry left” is the center of the Progressive-Democratic Party. This is the party whose leadership—Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden and Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris—actively opposes Israel in the extermination war the terrorist entity Hamas has inflicted on it and continues to pursue.

This is the party whose Presidential candidate agreed with her fellow leftists that Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Josh Shapiro was unfit to be her Vice President running mate because he’s a Jew, and chose instead Minnesota’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Tim Walz, a man who after 24 years of honorable service in our military, chose in his moment of truth to retire from the military rather than stay with his unit while it was under a Warning Order to prepare for deployment to an actual combat zone.

This is the party that is actively pursuing the nuclear armament of Iran with its begging Iran to be allowed to reenter a JCPOA that itself (as agreed by Biden’s Party predecessor Barack Obama) codified Iran’s ability to develop and deploy nuclear weapons.

This is the party that is paying only lip service to preventing Iran-backed Houthi disruption of commercial shipping through the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.

This is the party that wants to continue business as usual with the People’s Republic of China, pushing investment and associated American technology and intellectual property in that nation, never minding that that nation controls vital inputs to our economy, inputs like rare earths, lithium and processed lithium for batteries; a nation that is ramping up its threats to the Republic of China with no response by us; a nation that is rapidly expanding its military establishment, including nuclear weapons, even as Party works assiduously to reduce real spending on our own defense and to weaken through a variety of Woke policies our rump defense capability.

This is the party that is afraid to confront land-grabbing Russia, choosing instead to hamstring Ukraine in its ability to defend itself, for all that far too many Republicans support that supplication.

Domestically, this is the party that insists on increasing taxes on those of us American citizens of whom they disapprove and increasing spending on social policies that us average Americans do not want.

This is the party that demands to indoctrinate our children in its leftist ways, rather than teaching our children how to think, using our history, our language, our civics, math, and science as vehicles for that end. This is the party that opposes school choice in order to keep our children trapped in failing public schools run by Party’s indoctrination arm, the teachers unions.

As Party confronts their angry left, it is confronting itself. And agreeing with itself.

Preemption or Not?

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Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, has a piece in The Free Press in which he asks that question regarding Israel’s current situation against the backdrop of Israel’s decision to preempt at the outset of Israel’s 1967 defensive war vs Israel’s 1973 war for survival when it decided to let its enemies strike first.

I suggest the question has a broader historical scope than that. The question of preemption goes at least as far back as St Augustine’s early 5th century assertion that preemption was ipso facto immoral and so unjustified and unjustifiable. The pace of combat and the level of technology of those days gave practical support to the claim: an attacked nation could absorb the first blow and still have the wherewithal to respond and successfully defend itself.

Today is nothing like those days. Combat pacing and the technology in arms, mobility, and cyber make it very nearly suicidal for a nation under irrefutable threat of imminent attack to sit quietly and accept the enemy’s opening set of blows before responding. That opening set may well be fatal, with the attacked nation unable to respond at all. This is especially the case with nuclear weapons, which for instance, Iran is on the verge of achieving.

That makes sitting by today and accepting the enemy’s first strike, whether conventional, possibly coupled with cyber attacks, or nuclear the immoral move, as suicidal as sitting by may well prove to be.

Preemptive war does require strong evidence that the enemy intends to attack and that the enemy is about to do so. In Israel’s case, Hamas leadership has openly announced he intends to continue Hamas’ war of extermination—already underway. Iran’s leadership has announced that it intends to strike massive blows against Israel in response to the killing of a Hamas leader in Tehran. Hezbollah’s leadership is prosecuting its own lower-key war of extermination from the north.

In 1967, Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol agonized for three weeks before deciding to preempt, and when he did, Israel settled that war in six days with far fewer casualties—friendly and enemy—than would have been the case had he decided Israel should absorb that first blow. This is demonstrated by Prime Minister Golda Meier’s decision to do exactly that in 1973’s war and that war’s costs.

Certainly preemption is more difficult when striking an amorphous network entity like the terrorist entities of Hamas and Hezbollah than it is against formal nation states like Iran. It’s no less important to be done for that, and “more difficult” means “possible.”

Preemption has become the moral imperative for the nation about to be attacked. That applies today for Israel, especially in the case of Iran, where preemption is not only necessary, it may well limit Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s abilities to continue.

Hmm….

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The wonders in New York City’s government has spent some $4.88 billion on means of support for illegal aliens “migrants” in the city over the two years ending with the end of FY2024.

Imagine the benefits to the city’s residents and to their city’s economy were those billions of dollars spent on a couple of alternatives:

  • increased policing with more cops on the beat, and/or
  • increased prosecution of criminals rather than releasing them on no bail, and/or
  • recriminalizing misbehaviors like shoplifting, vandalism, assaults

Even [trigger alert] leaving some of that money in the hands of city residents through tax rate reductions.

Even Axios is becoming Aware

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The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads that make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, and other major publishers are on her side, Axios has found.

And

The ads say that they are sponsored, but it’s not immediately clear that the text that accompanies real news links is written by the campaigns and not by the media publication itself.

That obfuscation is deliberate, done as it is by the self-identified smartest folks in the nation and by folks for whom words are their stock in trade.

And Progressive-Democrats call out “disinformation” moves by those to the right of them. That’s freedom of speech the Progressive-Democratic Party way. Speech is—literally—what Party says it is, free or not.