Saturday Miscellany

First, money talks. In the case of Columbia University money is the only language the school seems to understand.

Now that the Trump administration has pulled hundreds of millions in federal funding, the university has discovered that the anti-Semitic mobs that took over the campus quad and Hamilton Hall last spring need to be punished.

The New York Post reports:

Some of the anti-Israel protesters who besieged a Columbia University academic building last spring have been tossed or suspended — while some who have since graduated lost their diplomas temporarily, officials said Thursday.

The series of punishments were doled out by Columbia’s judicial board, the Ivy League revealed nearly a year after keffiyeh-clad agitators caused chaos over Israel’s battle in Gaza after Hamas terrorists’ deadly attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

The level of discipline was based on school officials’ “evaluation of the severity of behaviors,” it said in a campus-wide alert.

And also:

@Columbia reportedly just expelled the president of the grad student union for his arrests in the encampment and building takeover last spring.

Second, but that’s not all folks. If Columbia wants to get its money back, it will now have to fulfill certain conditions, laid out in a letter from the Trump administration to the university.

The Free Press reports:

The letter, sent Thursday and seen by The Free Press, states that “Columbia has. . . fundamentally failed to protect American students and faculty from antisemitic violence and harassment” and “outlines immediate next steps that we regard as a precondition for formal negotiations regarding Columbia University’s continued financial relationship with the United States government.”

Sent to Columbia’s interim president Katrina Armstrong and co-chairs of the Board of Trustees David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, the letter states that in order to get its funding back, the university must make changes to its disciplinary procedures, including enforcing actions against the protesters who stormed Hamilton Hall last spring.

“Meaningful discipline,” according to the letter, “means expulsion or multi-year suspensions.” The letter also states that Columbia must ban masking and abolish the university’s Judicial Board, leaving all disciplinary decisions to the discretion of the university president’s office.

Columbia must have seen the letter coming. An hour before it was sent, the Columbia University Judicial Board announced plans to suspend students involved in the break-in and occupation of Hamilton Hall last spring. In some cases, the university announced it will expel students and revoke degrees. Police arrested 46 people on trespassing charges for the break-in, though nearly all of the charges were later dismissed by the district attorney’s office.

The letter goes on to state that Columbia must “implement permanent, comprehensive time, place, and manner rules to prevent disruption of teaching, research, and campus life.” 

Additionally, the letter calls for the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department to be placed under “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years, meaning faculty will lose control of their department.

Third, Victor Davis Hanson analyzes the decline and fall of great American universities.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

Elite universities did not grasp that the more they began warping their curricula with diversity/equity/inclusion gut courses, radical green agendas, and postmodern race and gender theories, the less time they had to offer students their once gold-standard general education curricula of Western Civ, history, literature, philosophy, math, and science.

Soon employers started to notice that the new therapeutic courses were also married to race and sex-based admissions.

The SAT and ACT were, for a time, dropped. So were comparative rankings of high school grade point averages.

Soon, once iconic degrees were no longer any guarantee of the ability to write and speak well, think analytically, or compute competently.

Employers often began to prefer graduates from those state schools where DEI was muted, admissions were competitive, and teaching remained rigorous and non-ideological.

Finally, after October 7, 2023, growing anti-Semitism on campuses became unapologetic, overt, and violent.

Thousands of Middle Eastern guest students brazenly cheered on Hamas terrorists.

The campus Marxist orthodoxy that Jews and Israel were “victimizing white people” and Palestinians were noble “non-white victims” ensured that Jewish students were chased and physically attacked on campuses.

A disgusted public watched invertebrate administrators either greenlight the anti-Semitic violence or ludicrously deny it.

So, there was bound to be a public reckoning. And now it has arrived.

Congress will soon pass legislation that will tax the annual multimillion-dollar income from multibillion-dollar endowments at somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Fourth, on the feminism front, many of us are shocked to see feminists supporting Hamas. After all, Hamas supports honor killing, wife beating, wife rape and homophobia. And let’s not forget the horrors that Hamas visited on Israeli women and children.

Leave it to resourceful feminists to ignore all of that, and to support Hamas in opposition to those colonizing Israelis.

Sonya Michel explains, via Berkeley:

It was predictable that Hamas officials and their radicalised international supporters would deny that sexual violence against Israeli women and men was committed on 7 October 2023. But denials from the academic field of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies are more surprising because they appear to violate two of the field’s salient principles: support for women’s sexual autonomy and insistence that women who lodge charges of sexual violence should be believed. Instead, a number of academic feminists have not only rejected Israeli claims, they have also embraced Hamas, along with all the reactionary patriarchal baggage of radical Islam, thereby abandoning their own stated values.

Is this just another instance of raw cowardice?

Fifth, then there is Scott Bessent, our current Treasury Secretary, someone who is not notably MAGA.

"When I was on the other side of the wall, I never really liked the term 'Fake News.' Now that I am on the inside, and I can see what they're reporting, I think the term Fake News probably isn't strong enough.

Sixth, from the Economist, a study that shows the difference between migrants who have or do not have advanced education. Not all migrants are created equal:

A recent study of Danish data by Jan van der Beek of the Amsterdam School of Economics … finds that migration is only fiscally beneficial on average if immigrants have at least a bachelor’s degree. Migrants from parts of the world with lower human capital are likely to be a fiscal drag. The Danish finance ministry calculated in 2019 that migrants from Western countries made an average fiscal contribution of 52,000 krone, then $7800 per person. Those from the Middle East and Africa were on average costing the state 74,000 more in spending than they contributed in taxes.

Finally, I have some open consulting hours in my life coaching practice. If you are interested,, write me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.