Much is being made of Ukraine’s incursion into a piece of Russia’s Kursk Oblast as being the first foreign invasion of Russian territory since World War II. That is, indeed, one interpretation.
Here’s another. Russian President Vladimir Putin has predicated his invasion of Ukraine on his premise that Ukrainians are Russian, and all he’s doing is reuniting the people. Given that, the Ukrainian move into Kursk isn’t at all an invasion.
It’s just a bunch of Russians going home.
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.
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.
The AP has confessed press arrogance, even though it likely didn’t intend its statement to be that. In David Bauder’s article concerning journalist efforts to downplay Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ ducking interviews at every opportunity, Brauder wrote
[F]or journalists, the larger lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers is probably diminishing forever.
Bauder then cited Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden:
For the teams behind candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible[.]”
Of course. They’re wresting that control away from an intrinsically mendacious guild.
Gatekeepers. Because men of the journalist guild Know Better what us average Americans should know about the political doings in our nation. These Wonders presume to censor gatekeep that information, to decide for us what we should hear and how we should understand what we hear, and they’re distressed that there are so many other means through which politicians talk to us.
Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is a woman of verbally flexible policies.
At a 2020 primary campaign town hall, Harris had this position:
There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. And starting with what we can do on Day One around public lands, right?
In today’s Presidential campaign season, she’s claiming to not be opposed to fracking. After all, [o]ne important swing state, Pennsylvania, is the second largest producer of natural gas.
Following the George Floyd murder and subsequent race riots (many of which victim neighborhoods still have not recovered from them), Harris was a zealous supporter of defunding police departments.
Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety.
…
For too long, the status quo thinking has been, you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because by the way, if you wanna look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.
Now she’s pushing funding police departments.
On illegal aliens flooding across our borders: when a debate moderator asked, in a 2019 Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential primary campaign debate, whether they [the candidates] would be in favor of decriminalizing border crossings, Harris signaled her agreement with such a decriminalization. Then, post-election, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden gave Harris the job of being border czar (the press’ term, which in their own convenient flop, they’re trying to deny they ever used), and Harris has acted on her decriminalization position by…doing nothing regarding tightening border security.
Now, during this campaign season, Harris is claiming to be supportive of tightening border controls.
Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden is in on the scheme of claiming altered positions at political convenience:
White House officials told Politico that these shifts are part of a strategy to undermine the argument that she is a leftist politician, a reputation they believe stems from the positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary, but which they say do not truly represent Harris’ positions.
Of course, they are her positions, though. Harris was saying what she actually believed when she pushed those earlier positions. Today, she’s merely covering her political behind and pretending to espouse these “changes” purely for her political gain in an election year. Keep in mind those earlier positions; they’re what she will work to implement if she’s elected.