by | BLOG, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, Israel
“Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life…I will not condemn Palestinian resistance.” These are the words of former NYU Law Student Bar Association President Ryna Workman, issued via the association’s email list to as many as 2,000 students. The loss of life Workman so callously attributes to Israel was caused by Hamas terrorists who killed approximately 1,300 people and took hundreds more captive; these are conservative estimates. The attack occurred on Simchat Torah (October 7th), a Jewish holiday during the festival known as Sukkot, and marked the deadliest attack on Israel since 1973.
Let me be clear: Workman is a symptom of a larger disease. Workman is one person; the more damning and horrifying aspect of NYU is that she felt comfortable enough to blast it publicly, openly endorsing heinous acts. What was the response of the student body? 41% of them either approved of or applauded her position and vitriol. Sickening.
Workman believes that Hamas are freedom fighters who should be commended and encouraged in their senseless acts of brutality. Fathi Hamad, a senior member of Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas, said “…Seven million Palestinians outside, enough warming up, you have Jews with you in every place. You should attack every Jew possible in all the world and kill them.” Hamas seeks the utter destruction and eradication of the Jewish people. That is crystal clear, and these are the people that Ryan Workman, who was placed in a position of authority and prestige by her peers, idolizes.
Ryna Workman is utterly reprehensible, but perhaps the most damning is the NYU student body. Thirty-six percent voted that Workman should remain in office despite her outrageous claims. The evening of Workman’s anti-Semitic email blast, a vote of no confidence was initiated by a student-led petition. Per student affairs, each student received a voting link tied to their netID. A voting link was sent to 2,070 law students, and 1,176 votes were recorded. Seven hundred and seven students (60%) voted that the SBA President, Ryna Workman, should not remain in office. Four hundred and twenty-eight students (36%) voted that she should remain in office, and 41 (3%) abstained. It is utterly terrifying that 40% of law students attending what was once a prestigious bastion of higher education could find nothing wrong with some blatant cruelty and openly side with kidnappers, rapists, and murderers. Four hundred and twenty-eight “highly educated” men and women openly endorsed it, and 41 could care less.
Workman went on to double down on her previous statements by appearing before ABC News and refusing to condemn the murder and kidnapping of civilians, and the use of sexual violence and the separation and torture of children. Workman has been removed from her office and had a job offer from Winston & Strawn revoked over the message, but that is not enough. Everyone that endorsed her via their votes should also face consequences. These men and women are not fit to serve in a court of law. Evil is alive and flourishing within the American higher education and judicial systems.
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, Israel
A Jewish Canadian professor shares anguish over the plight of the people of Israel, but more importantly — of the students’ inabilities to understand and analyze the history and context of the current war. I have reposted it in full, as it is an open letter widely being circulated across social media in the last day or so:
“Dear Students,
I have spent the last 25 years showing you the beauty of all of the literary, cultural, philosophical, and artistic heights of the human spirit over the course of human history. Teaching you has been the most wonderful and satisfying of callings. I never wanted to do anything other than meet with you, discuss ideas with you, discover and rediscover human insights, truths, and wonders. I never regretted my career path, never hated my job, and never doubted my legacy. I felt privileged and honoured to show you how to analyse, to think critically, to weigh evidence, and to understand people and ideas, contexts and complexity, deeply and thoroughly. I thought my work was helping to make the world a better, more humane, more thoughtful place.
You have broken my heart. No: shattered it, irreparably. I don’t know how I will ever set foot in a classroom again. I don’t know how I will ever see you the same way. I know now that I was deluding myself that I ever had any impact, would ever leave any positive legacy, that my work ever made any difference.
I watch you all on social media, in the streets and the quads, marching in solidarity with a movement that seeks only to wipe me out. To exterminate me, my children, my parents, my entire family and community. I know, some of you think you’re trying to help the oppressed. You think that my kind is the white colonialist racist kind that you hate.
But I thought I taught you how to evaluate arguments. I thought I taught you the importance of understanding context, both historical and rhetorical. I thought that I taught you that the world did not operate according to dichotomies, like black and white, oppressor and oppressed, villain and victim. I thought I taught you about complexity, about judgment, and to examine your sources and not to take anyone’s statements at face value.
Zionism is the Jewish right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland. Israel is that ancestral homeland. Jews are the indigenous peoples of that land; not the only indigenous peoples of that land, to be sure. But Israel is the only land to which we are indigenous. After 2000 years of longing, the result of the Holocaust – a Nazi movement which sought to ethnically cleanse the world of Jews by systematically exterminating us – was that the international community granted us a sliver of that ancestral homeland.
It was to be shared, partitioned into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Arabs rejected the partition and attacked the Jews when they declared the state of Israel in 1948. The Jews won. Arabs who remained in Israel became citizens with full rights and freedoms. 20% of Israel’s population today is Arab. They fight in the army, they are doctors, lawyers, members of Parliament and supreme court judges. There is no apartheid. Israel’s Jewish population consists of Jews from Arab lands, whose parents or grandparents were kicked out when the state of Israel was formed, and of descendants of refugees from Eastern Europe, Holocaust survivors who had no homes to return to. Some are more recent refugees from Europe, Russia, and the Americas who either returned to Israel for religious reasons or because the Jew-hatred in their communities grew too excessive and they decided to emigrate, to head for the one place in the world Jews can go if their neighbours or governments turn against them.
The West Bank and Gaza strip – along with refugee camps that still exist in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan — were the places that the Arab nations who attacked Israel at its founding told the Arabs living in Palestine (later to be known as Palestinians) to flee. It was supposed to be temporary, because the plan was to “push the Jews into the sea.” When the plan didn’t work out, all of these states refused to absorb the Palestinians. They wanted to keep them in camps because they still planned to annihilate Israel and the Jews that lived there and then the Palestinians could return. The West Bank was in Jordan and Gaza was in Egypt until 1967, when the Arab states tried again to push the Jews into the sea. Their failure this time ended with Israel capturing these territories.
When Israel tried to exchange land for peace and give Gaza back to Egypt, Egypt didn’t want it. And so the territories remained in Israel. In 2005 Israel pulled out of Gaza and left it to govern itself. Most of the West Bank is also self-governing, but not all because of the high number of suicide bombers and other threats to Israel’s existence fomenting there, so Israel hasn’t been able to fully remove itself. The current awful Israeli government has allowed religious fanatics, “settlers,” to build settlements there, which makes everything worse.
And you see what I did there? I criticized Israel’s government. I can do that, and still support the existence of a Jewish state in our ancestral homeland.
When you say “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” this is a call to ethnic cleansing of Jews from their homeland, from the only state in the entire Middle East that would look remotely familiar to you in terms of basic rights and freedoms and a democratic system if you were to visit the region. When Hamas supporters – like those who led you all in a rally on my home campus today – talk about Jews as “occupiers,” they don’t mean Gaza. They mean the whole state of Israel. They want Jews eradicated from the entire land. Hamas actually wants us gone from the whole world, as they have stated many times. Who are the Nazis now?
But here I am, teaching again. I can’t help myself. I wish that you cared what I had to say. I wish that some knowledge, some context, some understanding, could reach beyond the slogans and chants for my death that you are repeating mindlessly and endlessly as you march to the beat of hatred across the tattered remains of my broken soul.”
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, HYPOCRISY, Israel
The latest attempt by Liz Magill to smooth over Jewish donors and save her job is absolutely pathetic. She purports to condemn hateful acts and claims they have no place at Penn, but has done nothing to actually ensure they have no place by removing antisemitism from the campus. There is no expulsion of students who actually engaged in antisemitism — even though she even described those acts! There is no removal of faculty or administration who have downplayed antisemitism and allowed its ideas to take root and grow. Penn indeed “has work to do”, and it can start there. But it won’t. And here’s why.
Liz Magill doesn’t actually believe what she says. It is apparent on the front page of her plan. She writes, “As we move forward with this important work, we will ensure that our programmatic efforts consider the interconnectedness between antisemitism and other forms of hate, including Islamophobia, so that we are fostering a welcoming community for all.”
Right there, Magill can’t help but include Islamophobia alongside antisemitism; this means she is fearful of actually taking a unilateral stand solely against antisemitism on behalf of her Jewish students, faculty, and donors. She is equivocating here by including what she calls “other forms of hate” in her statement, because she is more worried about upsetting other members of the community than she is clear about defending Jews.
Even more alarming is the fact that she calls “Islamophobia” a form of hate, but it is not. The very definition of antisemitism is hatred against Jewish, a form of racism and outright hostility toward the Jewish people. In contrast, Islamophobia is a fear (phobia), often irrational, toward Islam or Muslims. Fear and hatred are two very different things and to conflate the two is disingenuous.
But she doesn’t end there. She repeats the sentence in her Education plan, again lumping antisemitism with Islamophobia. And then further along as a Medium Term Action, she announces the commitment to hire “an experienced leader with expertise in preventing and responding to antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate.”
If this was actually about antisemitism, it would be about antisemitism. And that’s why it’s not. The need to throw “Islamophobia” in there three times (and no specific mention of any other forms of hate, mind you) is ridiculous and it cheapens anything she says. Magill is merely pandering to the Jewish community because she is actually terrified of offending the larger UPenn community as well as losing millions in donations to her school. Her action plan to combat anti semitism should start with her own resignation.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, HYPOCRISY
The continued maltreatment of Amy Wax at UPenn is egregious and unacceptable. Ted Ruger, Dean of the UPenn Carey Law School, has consistently mismanaged the entire affair; his recent change in policy effectively abandoned his prior stance that upheld the right for faculty to express their views buckling under pressure from students who clearly do not understand the concept of freedom of expression. UPenn certainly doesn’t seem to be doing its job these days.
Wax’s “crime” of expressing unfavorable views to some on the topic of immigration — off-campus and unaffiliated with UPenn, by the way — has resulted in a barrage of unrelenting criticism among her colleagues; Ruger went so far as to issue an official statement distancing the law school from her and then penned an op-ed in an act of pure posturing while thinly conceding that free speech is still a thing.
Not so anymore. Ruger bowed to student demands that Wax be sanctioned and that tenure be reformed to “ensure that tenure be consistent with the principles of social equity.” Ruger has now announced that he will indeed take action against Amy Way, a tenured professor who may face termination. This change in policy undermines the right of faculty to speak freely and UPenn’s commitment to safeguard those rights. This chilling change will undoubtedly affect anyone who espouses an unpopular idea that might be found offensive at some point. One would think that UPenn faculty would be aghast at such a prospect — for they too could be next.
UPenn has proven to be rather un-collegial in this entire sordid affair which makes me recoil at the thought of supporting such an institution any longer. Clearly gone are the days by which the highest goals of a university are the pursuit of knowledge through the debate and discussion of ideas and the defense of the free expression of those ideas.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, EDUCATION, FED, GOVERNMENT
Recently, a young PhD student came to terms with the fact that academia was no longer based on merit. Rather, as a scientific researcher interested in procuring grant funding, he was dismayed to learn that certain terms such as “equity,” “diversity,” and “inclusion” were not only social goals, but now also scientific ones; in other words, they were increasingly being used in descriptions of actual scientific work.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) awards millions in grants each year and the agency which renders their decision does so on two accounts: intellectual merit and broader impact. It is within the broader impact realm that the aforementioned social terms, among others, were being applied and interpreted. The appearance of particular terms related to identity politics in award abstracts, including “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “gender,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” and “disparity” increased substantially over the last thirty years.
In 1990, only 3 percent of award abstracts contained one of the terms, while in 2020, 30 percent of all award abstracts included at least one of those terms. Notably, the category which changed the most was Education and Human Resources, which went from 4% to 54% during that time span.
The problem with scientific research playing politics means that social causes as a scientific end are being elevated while intellectual merit and other similar criteria are being diminished.
This reminds me of the observation Rasmussen made, that “the more that scientific institutions are viewed as conduits for promulgating ideology, the less capable they will be of swaying public opinion on important issues.” Science and science funding should stick to being concerned with searching for truth among empirical evidence, not social activism.
by | BLOG, COVID, ECONOMY, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, NEW YORK, POLITICS
The NYC public schools are now supposed to begin opening on September 29, but unions continue to be apprehensive about in-person instruction. De Blasio already delayed school opening twice this year after ongoing threats of a teacher strike, citing “concerns raised by our labor partners.” On the other hand NYC charter and private schools have a variety of re-opening options other than virtual: from fully in-person to hybrid to outdoor classrooms. The contrast in competency is astounding.
The schools have been fully closed for six months because of COVID, and it’s not like educators didn’t know that their singular task of providing education to children would resume in the fall. Nor are NYC public schools the only education system to face COVID. Virtually the entire country has had to come up with plans to safely re-open schools, and yet NYC public schools continue to be unprepared and incompetent.
De Blasio has proven incapable of negotiating with the unions, and in doing so, he has let down students and parents. This inability to effectively execute a plan to help students learn is perhaps the strongest argument to date as to why charter and private schools should really be the models we move towards in order to provide quality 21st century learning to our children.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, ECONOMY, EDUCATION, HYPOCRISY, NEW YORK
I was disgusted to read Jamie Dimon’s new initiative, the “New York Jobs CEO Council,” not because I oppose gainful employment for New Yorkers, but because Dimon completely gives a free pass to the New York education system with this program. He misses an opportunity – and ignores his responsibility – to help improve a clearly broken system.
Dimon spends most of his op-ed talking about “skills-based hiring and matching,” but completely ignores the elephant in the room: New York’s education system is failing our kids. He describes how, “The council will create sustained pathways for opportunities in the city, better aligning educational programs with skills that employers need as the demands of the labor market rapidly evolve. This will alleviate unemployment—filling currently open jobs through skills training and empowering communities for the jobs of the future.” Quite frankly, this is PR-speak nonsense. New Yorkers are bereft of a decent education system, which is strangled by public school unions, and exacerbated by the fact that Mayor de Blasio is abusively hostile to charter and religious schools, even though those schools consistently outperform public schools — especially among black and Hispanic students.
If Dimon really wanted to make a difference, he would blast de Blasio on the sub-standard New York education system, but instead, he’s joining forces with him. This is an embarrassment, a detriment of rank-and-file New Yorkers. You would think Dimon would be smart enough to know that he’s in bed with New York politicians and playing politics with regular New Yorkers, but perhaps he thinks he can get away with being so political just because he’s the CEO and chairman of JPMorgan Chase.
by | ARTICLES, CONSTITUTION, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, SCOTUS
There is nothing in our Constitution about the “separation of church and state.” This phrase is often wrongly used as shorthand for the Establishment clause found in the first amendment, which states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” What that plainly states is that the government will not prefer or establish one religion over another or restrict the practice of religion. Many people who use the phrase “separation of church and state” interpret it to mean the opposite, that the Constitution requires a separation of church and state. But that is simply untrue.
Thus, if the government gives money to a group, such as private schools, it cannot discriminate against a particular school just because it is religious. The recent SCOTUS decision in Espinoza v Montana case is a clear confirmation of that important understanding.
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, OBAMA, POLITICS
It is clear, from any economic sense, that compensation paid in the private sector is more beneficial to society than that paid in the public sector. This is because amounts in the former is controlled by people risking their own money making sure it is maximizing output for a given input. (It also works for charities funded by people parting with their own hard earned money).
Federal state and local governments and government funded not-for-profits are less good for society, and they normally pay too much for what they receive in services. So how stupid must one be that we want to incentivize- by forgiving student loans – those who would take more from and contribute less to society??
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, CONSTITUTION, ECONOMY, EDUCATION, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, POTUS, TRUMP
It seems like spending reductions, smaller government, and eliminating waste are no longer Republican ideals. When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos presented a budget that did just that, Congress turned a deaf ear. What’s more, they made it difficult for her to even make some systemic changes to the Department of Education that (like most departments) desperately needs.
As part of the massive spending bill that was passed last week, Congress “awarded the department a $2.6 billion boost when Mrs. DeVos had requested a $9 billion cut. She had sought to dismantle her agency’s central budget office, a move she said would create a leaner structure, and to cut the number of field offices in the civil-rights division to four from 12. The spending package included specific measures preventing her from doing so.”
Apparently, trying to implement change caused some problems among more seasoned politicians that Congress just put a stop to by hamstringing her efforts at education and fiscal reform: “in the spending package, lawmakers forbade Mrs. DeVos from dismantling the budget office and increased the civil-rights division’s funding by $8.5 million, specifying that the additional money couldn’t be used to reduce staff, such as through buyouts. The civil-rights division is tasked with, among other things, enforcing Title IX.”
It’s a shame that politics over policy has gotten so pervasive even among Republicans. Such ridiculous behavior shows how broken our system has become — which is why it’s getting more and more likely that a huge Democrat sweep will happen at midterms.
