Tag Archives: education

Shared Responsibility

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A wide range of colleges and universities are suffering millions of dollars in damages done their facilities by pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist gangs masquerading themselves as pro-Palestinians in their destructive and antisemitic disruptions [link in the original].

California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, closed down its campus on Saturday “due to ongoing occupation of Siemens Hall and Nelson Hall, as well as continued challenges with individuals breaking laws in the area surrounding the buildings and the quad,” the northern California public university said. Classes were moved online and students who live on campus are allowed to remain in their residence halls and in dining facilities, but they are not allowed on any other parts of campus.
Students at Cal Poly Humboldt appear to have renamed one of the occupied buildings “Intifada Hall.” That building is littered with trash and debris, while the walls are covered with graffiti in support of Palestinians in Gaza, video shows.

And

“Free Palestine” and “Palestine” were graffitied on two buildings at the University of Portland, a private Catholic school in Oregon that is not facing a student occupation. Campus Safety and Emergency Management Director Michael McNerney told The Beacon, a student newspaper, that the clean-up cost is estimated to be in the thousands.

And

Protest encampments have sprung up at more than three dozen private and public schools across the United States since Columbia University students in New York City began a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” earlier this month.

It’s true enough that the schools’ pupils and no small number of interlopers are the ones proximately doing the vandalism.

However, the schools’ management teams bear at least equal responsibility for these costs—which will, most assuredly, be passed along to students, future students, and their families in increased tuition and fees charged. Those management teams, through their tacit condoning of these disruptions and attendant vandalism, through their outright cowardice in not confronting these disrupters and vandals, or both, allow and encourage the damages being done.

Those same teams could have prevented the vast bulk of these damages and costs had they confronted the disrupters at the start, permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial. Those teams—or better, their replacements—could prevent further damage by immediately permanently expelling the pupils involved and having arrested the pupils and interlopers doing the vandalism and bringing them to trial.

Responsibilities

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The subheadline illustrates the misunderstanding of where responsibility lies.

School officials reap what their politically monoculture faculties have sown.

The WSJ‘s editors then went on about how those thinking antisemitic bigotry are exaggerating are mistaken, pointing out in their examples the rampant antisemitic bigotry on college campuses.

Antisemitism has too often been tolerated within Near Eastern Studies departments. On October 8, 2023, Columbia professor Joseph Massad praised the “awesome” scenes of the October 7 massacre “witnessed by millions of jubilant Arabs.” In 2018 Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi posted on Twitter (now X) that “Every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world” could soon be traced to “the ugly name of Israel.”

Then they wrote,

The liberal elites who run these institutions seem to lack the moral self-confidence to stand up to these student bullies. College presidents have to take charge, restore order and protect Jewish students, or the trustees should fire them and find someone who will.

But that’s closing the chicken coop after the weasels have moved in and taken over. Monocultural faculties have not created the schools’ problems, including the schools’ systemic (to coin a word) antisemitic bigotry. Schools’ management teams have created their environment of bigotry by allowing—perhaps even encouraging—from the start the creation of their faculties as monocultural, and bigoted.

It’s long past time those management teams were fired for cause, and the bigots on those faculties also fired for cause. Bigotry should not be allowed to survive contracts or tenure.

Cowardice

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Columbia University’s managers have abjectly surrendered to terrorist supporters masquerading as pro-Palestinian demonstrators who are doing their best to prevent Jewish students from attending classes and to prevent Columbia from operating at all.

Columbia University was holding classes virtually Monday as protests over the Israel-Hamas war continue to engulf the campus.
Columbia president Minouche Shafik said she wanted to “deescalate the rancor and give us all a chance to consider next steps.”

Even the Wall Street Journal‘s characterization of these “protests” as being over the Israel-Hamas war is cynical and misleading. These “protestors” aren’t protesting the war, they’re objecting to Israel’s defending itself against Hamas’ war of extermination. Nor will these terrorist supporters stop. As Shafik bows down here, the “rancor” will only escalate, and the disruptors will then push for ending all support for Israel and for the “from the river to the sea” destruction of Israel.

Here’s more from Shafik:

I understand that many are experiencing deep moral distress and want Columbia to help alleviate this by taking action. But we cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view.

And yet, that’s exactly what Shafik is doing when she allows these “protestors” to disrupt to the extent that in-person classes, which are what those students and their parents have paid for and which are far more effective teaching devices than individuals participating remotely via video, are no longer being held. In-person classes that are blocked, not by these terrorist supporters, but by the cowardice of Shafik and her management team. Beyond that, Shafik is refusing to do anything to alleviate the deep moral distress that the school’s Jewish students and their supporters are experiencing, and she is empirically refusing to take any action to supply her defect.

Rather than bowing and scraping at the feet of the disrupters, Shafik should authorize and require campus police to arrest them, push for New York City’s Progressive-Democratic Mayor Eric Adams to have the arrestees jailed, expel with prejudice those disruptors who are enrolled in any capacity at Columbia, and fire for cause any COlumbia employee participating in the disruption. The only way to deescalate these disruptions is to eliminate the disruptors.

Addendum: Shafik’s perfidy goes even further than merely aiding and abetting the terrorists-supporting disrupters on campus.

A [Jewish] Columbia University professor who has been a vocal critic of the administration’s response to the ongoing anti-Israel student protests was barred from campus after he tried to lead a pro-Jewish rally at the Ivy League college.
Israel-born Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School and an outspoken supporter of the Jewish state, said that when he swiped his key card at the school’s Morningside Heights campus, it read “deactivated.”

Now Shafik is actively opposing those who disagree with her terrorist-supporting disrupters.

In Thy light shall we see light. Dishonoring the school’s motto, Shafik has turned out the lights.

Yet Another Misapprehension

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…by the Left in its favoring of and dependency on Government. This one concerns what passes for education in our public schools and is written openly by a Letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section.

The letter writer opines that since everything else is free in those schools, so should lunches be free.

We have long provided free books and transportation for schoolchildren, regardless of their parents’ income.

No, we never have. Those books and transportation means were, and are, paid for with our tax money.

We are responsible for students’ welfare from the time the free bus picks them up in the morning until the free bus takes them home at the end of the day.

Again, no we are not. “We” are responsible for students’ education from the time of their arrival at school to the end of the (too short IMNSHO) school day. Parents—the true “we”—are responsible for the students’ welfare all of the 24 hours in a day.

It makes sense that we should also be responsible for students’ nutrition while they are under our care at school.

This makes no sense at all, especially since they are not at all under “our” care at school. That “our” part is exacerbated by the sophistry that “our” care actually is educating our children.

Education and Needs

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A couple of Letter writers in The Wall Street Journal‘s Sunday Letters section expressed concern for a high school student who was suspended for violating his school’s hair length rule.

The state shouldn’t prohibit haircuts of one type or another and suspend students from school for violating the policy unless it can really show this is needed.

And

Schools need to focus on teaching kids and not worrying about [clothing and grooming standards].

Among the needs and teaching focuses in high schools, and in lower schools, is personal discipline. Clothing and hair grooming rules are badly needed milieus for teaching that badly needed skill.

There’s plenty of time for students to dress as they wish and to grow and groom their hair as they wish after they’ve graduated and are looking for work.