Get Out: Liel Leibovitz, Tablet, May 6, 2019 — When I immigrated to America, 20 years ago this fall, I had just over $2,000 in my pocket that I’d saved working as a night watchman at a factory back home in Israel.
Cambridge’s Shameful Treatment of Jordan Peterson: Stephen Blackwood, Quillette Apr. 4, 2019 — On Wednesday, March 20, the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge sent the following tweet:
Perspective: Winning the Campus Free Speech War: J. Grant Addison, The Gazette, Apr. 21, 2019 — In the midst of a lively, rambling speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month — a two-hour, improvisational performance full of typically Trumpian insults, bravado, and self-aggrandizement that began with the president giving a bear hug to an American flag — President Donald Trump decided to make a serious policy announcement.
‘Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History’ Review: The Outsider as Insider: Richard Aldous, WSJ, May 3, 2019 — Early in 1998, the historian Eric Hobsbawm went to Buckingham Palace to be made a Companion of Honour, thereby joining one of the most distinguished orders in British public life.
On Topic Links
Rex Murphy: Campus Social-Justice Maoists Dared to Come For Camille Paglia. Big Mistake: Rex Murphy, National Post, May 3, 2019 — Applying for university enrolment is obligingly confessional and constitutes a noble act of candour and an absence of stifling ego.
Life Among the Academic Radicals: Evan Osbourne, Martin Center, Mar. 15, 2019 — For almost a quarter century I have been a professor of economics at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. After years of working there, I have learned something about how my department’s academic radicals, who by dint of personality but not numbers have near-decisive control over many departmental decisions.
Rabbi: ‘New York Times Has No Place In Our Home’: Haskel Lookstein, The Algemeiner, May 14, 2019 — On Wednesday morning, May 1, a couple of hours after returning home from a glorious Passover in Israel, my wife and I called The New York Times and explained to a very respectful representative why we wanted to end 60 years of on-and-off home delivery of the paper.
Why Don’t You Support Israel?: Stephen Harper, Prager U, May 13, 2019, Video –Israel is one of the mostfree and most prosperous countries in the world. Not only is Israel a booming economy and a wellspring of innovation, it is the only democracy in the Middle East
Get Out
Liel Leibovitz
Tablet, May 6, 2019
When I immigrated to America, 20 years ago this fall, I had just over $2,000 in my pocket that I’d saved working as a night watchman at a factory back home in Israel. I also had an inflatable mattress on the floor of a friend’s one-bedroom in White Plains, New York, and a promise that I could stay for two weeks, maybe three, until I found a place of my own. But most importantly, I had a story about my future.
As soon as I woke up that first morning, I took the train to 116th and Broadway, got off, strolled through the gates of Columbia University, and stood there gazing at the bronze Alma Mater sculpture guarding the steps to Low Library. Her face was serene, her lap adorned by a thick book, and her arms open wide, to embrace, or so I imagined, folks like me who were reasonably smart and wildly motivated and ready to work as hard as was needed to make something of themselves. In a year, maybe two, I thought, I’d find my way into the ivied cloister, and when I emerged on the other end I’d no longer be just another impoverished newcomer: A Columbia degree would accredit me, would validate me and suggest to those around me, from members of my family to potential employers, that I was a man in full, worthy of my slice of the American pie.
It wasn’t a story I had made up on my own. It was, in many ways, the foundational story of American Jewish life in the 20th century. Surveying the student body in major American universities between 1911 and 1913, the newly founded intercollegiate Menorah Association discovered 400 Jews at Cornell, 325 at the University of Pennsylvania, and 160 at Harvard; by 1967, The New York Times reported that 40% of the student body in both Penn and Columbia were Jewish, with Yale, Harvard, and Cornell lagging behind with a mere 25%. For a minority that today is still just three or four generations removed from the deprivations of the old continent and that never rose much further above the 2% mark of the population at large, education—especially at renowned universities—was a magical wardrobe that led into a Narnia of possibilities. All you had to do was open the door.
Sadly, that door is now closing. It’s not just that the number of Jewish students in the Ivies are plummeting—Harvard’s class of 2020, for example, is only 6% Jewish. It’s that the universities themselves, responding to a host of larger cultural, social, and political trends, have divested themselves of the values and practices that have made them mighty engines of American intellectual and economic growth as well as a springboard for striving Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike.
Jewish students from well-heeled American families may still vie for places at Yale or Princeton; proud Jewish parents may still giddily direct the family minivan to Cambridge while touring prospective colleges, and wealthy Jewish philanthropists may still give generously and gratefully to the institutions that helped make their success possible. These people are well-intentioned, but the evidence has become overwhelming that they are now throwing good money after bad: The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.
American universities are openly breaking their bonds with the Jewish community by embracing active discrimination against Jewish students and rejecting their intellectual, emotional, and moral attachments to the values of equal human dignity, universal rights, critical inquiry, and rational thought. Last month, the student-run College Council at Williams, one of the nation’s top-rated liberal arts colleges, denied the request of a new student-run group to be recognized as a Registered Student Organization. The group, Williams Initiative for Israel, is dedicated to promoting Israeli culture and the Jewish state’s right to exist. The council provided no reason for its refusal, and, breaking with protocol, allowed anonymous voting, scrubbed names of participants from the protocol, and disabled the livestream of the council’s meeting, deeply compromising the transparency of the voting process. The decision violates Williams’ own Code of Conduct, which states that the school shall be “committed to being a community in which all ranges of opinion and belief can be expressed and debated. … The College seeks to assure the right of all to express themselves in words and actions, so long as they can do so without infringing upon the rights of others or violating standards of good conduct or public law.”
Jewish students should take note. What the undergraduate Jacobins at Williams hate isn’t Bibi Netanyahu, or “the occupation,” or even Zionism. What they hate are the values that used to make American universities great, and that made Jews such a great fit for American universities. In an intellectual environment increasingly governed by fear—adopt our rigid worldview or be labeled racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, ableist, or worse—and living almost entirely in the shadows, away from public scrutiny, the true intellectual seeker is not an asset but a liability. There’s nothing Jewish students, at Williams or anywhere else, can do to change that. They should realize, as many already do, that they’re not disliked and targeted because of the views they hold, which they might conceivably change; they’re disliked and targeted because of who they are. Paying for teenagers to be subjected to this kind of rejection and abuse is an act of communal self-destructiveness that we would be smart to eschew… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
CAMBRIDGE’S SHAMEFUL TREATMENT OF JORDAN PETERSON
Stephen Blackwood
Quillette Apr. 4, 2019
On Wednesday, March 20, the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge sent the following tweet:
Faculty of Divinity
@CamDivinity
Jordan Peterson requested a visiting fellowship at the Faculty of Divinity, and an initial offer has been rescinded after a further review.
The circumstances around this event bear careful examination. For they reveal not only a betrayal of the university’s fundamental purpose but also the loss of something far more wide-reaching, something without which no higher civilization can survive: a shared understanding of ourselves.
First, a little background.
Jordan Peterson is an academic and clinical psychologist who has taught at two of North America’s most prestigious research universities (Harvard University and the University of Toronto), and whose academic work is prominent, widely-cited, and non-controversial in his field (see a list of his research publications here). His courageous and articulate defense of free speech, of our political, cultural and religious inheritance, of unpopular but incontestable truths of science—especially biology—and his radical opposition to identity politics of any kind, including that of both Right and Left, have made him an iconic figure. But what is by far the most significant thing about Peterson is that he reaches vast numbers of young people, often through Biblical stories and ancient myths, with perennial truths—of freedom, responsibility, the dignity of the individual, the transcendence of beauty and suffering and, above all, the liberating nature of Truth itself.
On November 2, 2018, I spent the day with Peterson in Cambridge, England. He had given a sold-out lecture at the fabled Corn Exchange the day before, and there was a full day planned for him at the University ahead of the next city stop on his lecture tour.
I met Jordan and his wife, Tammy, at their hotel at 9:45 a.m. We walked from there to King’s College (one of the 31 colleges of the University of Cambridge, est. 1209) so that they could see the Chapel, one of the great buildings of Europe. Then we went to another college for a discussion about higher education, then to still another college for lunch with a group of theologians and philosophers, then back to the first college for a conversation with Sir Roger Scruton, then to a local restaurant, then to St John’s College Chapel to hear its Choir sing Duruflé’s Requiem; then I dropped him at the Cambridge Union, where he was interviewed by a student before a large student audience; we met again later in the evening for a lively dinner with an eclectic group; and finally said goodbye around 11 p.m. when the Petersons walked back to their hotel. It had been an intellectually exhilarating and aesthetically inspiring day, the kind of day that I have come to expect in Cambridge, where architecture, Evensong, and intellectual vivacity seem to speak, even to the visitor, of 800 years of learning, of achievement, and of aspiration for deep and worthy things.
Media reports of Cambridge’s decision to rescind Peterson’s Visiting Fellowship made it seem as if he was widely disliked at the University—a controversial, divisive figure. That wasn’t my experience. During the day we spent together, walking around the busiest parts of campus, four colleges, two chapels, a restaurant, and through the city’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfares in broad daylight, there was not a single hint of negativity: no heckling, no awkward encounters, not a peep. To the contrary, we could generally not make it between any two places without someone—the man working the hot dog truck next to the Cambridge Union, a soft-spoken female student, a young woman in a restaurant—reaching out to him politely, often with shyness, to express gratitude, to shake his hand, to ask him to sign their books. Every interaction, without exception, was friendly and warm…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
PERSPECTIVE: WINNING THE CAMPUS FREE SPEECH WAR
J. Grant Addison
The Gazette, Apr. 21, 2019
In the midst of a lively, rambling speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this month — a two-hour, improvisational performance full of typically Trumpian insults, bravado, and self-aggrandizement that began with the president giving a bear hug to an American flag — President Donald Trump decided to make a serious policy announcement.
Joined on stage by Hayden Williams, a right-wing activist who was recently assaulted on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, Trump vowed that he’d issue an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars.” If colleges and universities “want our dollars, and we give to them by the billions, they have to allow people like Hayden and many other great young people and old people to speak,” the president declared.
Trump is an imperfect messenger for free speech, to put it lightly. And the CPAC stage was a terrible venue to announce such a policy, to put it generously. Moreover, Trump gave no further details about the order in his speech.
With his declaration and subsequent order, signed March 21, Trump hit on one of the few, if not only, practicable methods by which the federal government might protect campus free speech and promote academic freedom without undue interference into higher education. In principle, tying federal research funding to schools’ free speech commitments is a reasonable, restrained policy mechanism that upholds First Amendment principles in a manner consonant with the fundamental mission of the university and the responsible management of taxpayer dollars.
For conservatives and others of limited-government persuasion, who worry about unintended consequences, top-down mandates, and sweeping reforms, when it comes to policy, there is ever-present tension between identifying significant problems and crafting appropriately moderated approaches to tackle them. In contemporary debates about higher education, this tension exists between legitimate concerns over issues such as the state of free speech, free inquiry, and viewpoint diversity on campus, on the one hand, and a legitimate wariness of meddlesome government intervention, on the other.
Nevertheless, this divide is not unnavigable. Indeed, making eligibility for federal research dollars contingent on colleges and universities upholding free speech offers a way forward.
Last spring, in an essay for National Affairs, my former American Enterprise Institute colleague, and then-boss, Frederick Hess and I suggested what such a policy could look like, along with the potential benefits and pitfalls of this type of federal action.
Colleges and universities are not only degree-granting institutions of teaching and learning but also vast research enterprises, generously supported by taxpayers. And while most funding discussions in this area focus on federal aid for student loans, federal research grants and contracts represent a separate, quite substantial stream of public money flowing to colleges and universities.
Since World War II, when the Roosevelt administration wisely chose to eschew government-run laboratories in favor of patronizing outside research efforts, the federal government has used colleges and universities as subcontractors, disbursing billions every year for research in defense, energy, medicine, and more. In fiscal year 2017, for example, Washington spent more than $40 billion on research and development at higher education institutions alone, according to the National Science Foundation. The American Association for the Advancement of Science calculates that federal dollars represent roughly 60 percent of all university-based R&D funding…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
‘ERIC HOBSBAWM: A LIFE IN HISTORY’ REVIEW: THE OUTSIDER AS INSIDER
Richard Aldous
WSJ, May 3, 2019
Early in 1998, the historian Eric Hobsbawm went to Buckingham Palace to be made a Companion of Honour, thereby joining one of the most distinguished orders in British public life. As always with Queen Elizabeth II, few if any knew her thoughts, but the palace building made its own feelings clear enough. As the queen presented the order’s official insignia, a piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, missing the historian and thereby narrowly avoiding what the British might understatedly term “an unfortunate incident.”
The irony was unavoidable. Hobsbawm could lay claim to being the most popular and well-known historian in the world. But he was also a Marxist who remained unapologetic about his decades-long membership in the Communist Party. Asked later whether the crimes of the Soviet Union were enough to abandon the cause to which he had given his life, he replied chillingly: “Do I regret it? No, I don’t think so.” His critics fumed that his admirers would have been less forgiving had he been an unrepentant fascist.
Hobsbawm was always open to the charge of hypocrisy, even at a superficial level. A lifelong leftist, he managed to enjoy the many prerogatives and comforts of British elite society along the way. “He liked his outsider status,” his friend the Irish historian Roy Foster observed, but he “accumulated privileges.” Hobsbawm was a cliché version of the champagne Marxist, with a nice house next to Hampstead Heath in North London and membership in the exclusive Athenaeum club. Asked by the literary biographer Claire Tomalin, a frequent guest in his home, how he managed to square his cushy life with being a communist, Hobsbawm blithely told her: “If you are on a ship that’s going down, you might as well travel first class.”
In fairness, his life had not always been so easy. Born in 1917 to British and Austrian parents, he grew up in Vienna until he was 14, when he suddenly found himself an orphan, with a younger sister to care for and no means of support. The siblings went to live with an aunt and uncle in Berlin, where Eric discovered the secular faith and political family that would define the rest of his long life (he died in 2012 at age 95).
In happier times in Vienna, the group he joined with evident enthusiasm had been the Boy Scouts. In Berlin, it was the Communist Party. The conversion was total—not only political and intellectual. As Richard J. Evans observes in “Eric Hobsbawn: A Life in History,” a comprehensive and thoroughly researched biography, the young Hobsbawn, “emotionally adrift after the death of his parents,” had found in the party “a substitute family, giving him a sense of identity that was to prove over the long run a central part of his emotional constitution.”
As Mr. Evans relates, Hobsbawm witnessed the Nazis coming to power in January 1933 and that month marched in the last mass demonstration by Communists in Berlin. But he soon moved to London, where his uncle had found work. Given his father’s British background, Eric was recognized as a citizen, taking up residence for economic reasons. Given that he was Jewish, it was, at such a time, the luckiest of breaks.
England proved to be a place of genuine refuge and comfort. Despite his foreign accent, Mr. Evans notes, Hobsbawm was accepted into his grammar school’s milieu from the outset and never seems to have been bullied. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, whose combination of Old Etonian establishment credentials and Bloomsbury left-wingery evidently appealed to him. He flourished, soon gaining a reputation as one of the brightest minds of his generation. “The usual rumors started,” a contemporary recalled. “ ‘There’s a freshman in King’s who knows about everything.’ ” Cambridge’s elite secret conversazione society, whose members were known as the Apostles, soon came calling. Previous members (the “Angels”) still regularly attended dinners and included at the time E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and, tantalizingly, the “Cambridge spies” Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt.
Mr. Evans is a historian of great distinction, the author of a fine trilogy of books on the Third Reich. He is especially good on Hobsbawm’s life in Berlin, but at other times the narrative flags. Of course, the research is meticulous, but it can be over-detailed, dragging us into every piece of student journalism Hobsbawm wrote and the line he took at every political-society debate. Later there are the minutiae of academic conferences and the bons mots from North London dinner parties. Less might have been more…. [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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