Pro-Israel Groups Join MAGA to Destroy the American University
This week, Columbia University president, Katrina Armstrong was sacked by its board of trustees. Media reports say she “resigned” or that she was “replaced.” That’s a euphemism for what happened. She wasn’t quiescent enough to the power and prerogative of the trustees, and they dumped her unceremoniously.
Her sin: at a meeting of faculty, she expressed sympathy with those who objected to the deal the trustees sealed. That agreement essentially capitulated to demands of the Trump administration, agreeing to place the Middle East studies department under “receivership.” It also called for hiring security guards who had the power to arrest students, and forbade students from wearing masks at protests. According to various media reports, she either told faculty she wouldn’t enforce the mask ban or that she would “slow walk” some provisions of the agreement.
A faculty member leaked a transcript of Armstrong’s comments to Bari Weiss, who herself led a pro-Israel group when she was a Columbia student. After Weiss posted the document on her website, the handwriting was on the wall. Armstrong was out within hours.
She will be replaced by Claire Shipman, currently a co-chair of the board of trustees. She has been a TV journalist, but never a college administrator. It is unheard of for a major university to appoint a president with no prior background in higher education. Her sole qualification seems to be that she is a trustee and will do the bidding of her colleagues. Their choice bespeaks weakness, not confidence. It’s a circling of the wagons to protect what they see as the school’s interests, when they are really protecting their own wealthy white privilege and relationships with their fellow elites in politics and business.
This is a coup. A hostile takeover of a great American university by its trustees. They traditionally choose the president (the usual role of the board), but they now negotiate deals which capitulate to federal power; they agree to cede independence of academic programs, which are the lifeblood of any university. Next thing, they’ll be deciding what curriculum should be taught and how it should be taught.
Three Ivy presidents fired for alleged insensitivity to anti-SemitismThe deal they signed with the Trump administration will be overseen by the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. It will send regulators to scores of universities, raking them over the coals for alleged instances of anti-Semitism. The body is led by Leo Terrell, an African-American Los Angeles-based personal injury lawyer. He has no particular expertise in the field. His only bona fide is that he’s a MAGA Republican. This is the deal with the devil to which Columbia’s trustees have agreed.
It remains to be seen how the campus community will respond. My hope, as a Columbia alumnus (GS ’75), is that this will eventually lead to a mass rebellion and resignation of the entire board. They have lost the right to serve and represent the university. Instead of driving it, they are driving it into the ground. This calls for campus-wide resistance and votes of no confidence by both students and faculty.
MAGA and the anti-Semitism hoax
Naturally, all this disarray delights the MAGA Republicans, who have used claims of anti-Semitism and “woke” student activism as a cudgel to beat American higher education, while promoting their political agenda.
No one has come to its aid: not Democrats, who seem to have entered a deep sleep; and not even the schools themselves, who’ve failed to band together to defend each other. When a faculty member asked Pres. Armstrong why universities have not shown support for Columbia, she replied that she had tried to do so and failed. They all cower in fear that Trump will come after them as well. They ignore the old, wise saying: we live together or die apart.
The American university is dying. Academic freedom is dead. The very foundation of academia is been toppled. Rigorous inquiry and debate. Exploration of complex, contentious subjects: all are dead or dying.
The faculty has been abandoned. Columbia administrators fired a senior professor who taught there for decades. They dismissed deans. Harvard sacked directors of its Middle East studies center for offering purportedly “anti-Semitic” academic programming. Four Ivy League presidents were forced out over remarks before a Congressional committee, which were deemed insufficiently sensitive to (invented) allegations of campus anti-Semitism. Others (see video) have been hauled before academic committees to defend their teaching and respond to charges levied against them by anonymous students.
Ivy League faculty are abandoning ship for foreign universities. The latter, in turn see a golden opportunity to poach the brightest and best members of the profession. Why would any professor want to teach at a school which devalues the very traditions and values which drew him or her to the profession to begin with; or pursue their career in a country which degrades everything they hold dear?
MAGA and Judeo-fascists: manufactured sleaze
MAGA Republicans are working hand in glove with pro-Israel smear groups which have placed these professors and their students in the cross hairs. Bari Weiss, who was responsible for the assassination of Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, now claims she has taken the scalp of a university president. During her student days at Columbia, she unsuccessfully sought the firing of pro-Palestinian professors. Canary Mission has taken credit for the ICE kidnapping and attempted deportation of Rumeysa Ozturk, a beloved graduate student at Tufts University. This group was founded and funded by Adam Milstein, an ex-felon convicted of tax fraud. He funds a Murderers’ Row of Judeo-fascist groups and never met a hasbara lie he didn’t like.
Another obscure pro-Israel thug group, Betar, has been welcome in the halls of Congress, to which it brings dossiers of foreign students who’ve participated in pro-Palestine encampments; or who merely wrote an op-ed in a campus newspaper calling for university divestment from companies doing business with Israel. Advocating boycotts is as American as apple pie and goes back to the pre-Revolutionary War days. Everyone in this country, including non-citizens like Ozturk, are entitled to advocate opinions about political issues. It’s called the free speech and is protected by the First Amendment.
All three of these groups are the linchpin of the campaign against foreign students, hundreds of whom the government seeks to deport. This is yet another bullet in the Trump administration’s gun pointed at institutions of higher education. Foreign students are not ancillary figures on American campuses. They are some of the finest researchers, teachers and most diligent graduate students. Not to mention that they pay top-dollar tuition which fills the coffers of their schools. Without them, such institutions will be deprived of the oxygen needed for them to survive.
These pro-Israel sleaze groups are informants for the ascendant Trump police state. They betray “enemies of the state” on Trump and Israel’s behalf. They are little better than the collaborators whom the Gestapo deputized as bounty hunters paid to betray Jews in hiding.
Israel is delighted with the campus auto-da-fé. It weaponized false claims of anti anti-Semitism against pro Palestine activists in order to disrupt the impact of the anti-genocide movement. That puts it on the defensive and destroys its ability to impact US policy. Though their behavior is despicable, it is what we’ve come to expect of them. They are thugs. They lie. They even get their enemies killed.
But the worst are the university trustees who cower in the face of the bullies: those who abandoned administrators who attempted to uphold traditional academic values. Those who see their allies as Republicans and pro-Israel billionaires, rather than students and faculty. They have sold out their institutions. They have consigned them to mediocrity. They have sentenced them to decades of government intervention in the affairs of their institutions. Mixing politics with the academy is a fatal error, just as is mixing the former with science or medicine.