Cornell Junior Patrick Dai has been charged with making threats of violence against Jewish students at Cornell. Here is the Criminal Complaint against Dai (full embed at bottom of post).
I had a chance to discuss the culture at Cornell on with Stuart Varney on Fox Business this morning:
Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
Stuart Varney (00:00): Now this, a student at Cornell University has been arrested for allegedly making, well, he made anti-Semitic threats against Jewish students. William Jacobson is a law professor at Cornell. He joins me now. Professor, how do we counter this wave of anti-Semitism in colleges? What do we do about it?WAJ (00:21): Well, the first thing you have to do is acknowledge that it’s there, which a lot of colleges and universities don’t want to acknowledge. They want to deal with band-aids. They don’t want to look at the underlying culture at Cornell and elsewhere, which demonizes Jewish people, separates them from the rest of the student body by racializing the campus, and Cornell and others have their eyes closed.How did this student get essentially radicalized at Cornell? There’s no indication from what’s been released so far about his background that he came to Cornell with these thoughts. He learned them at Cornell.Varney (00:53): An hour ago on this program, a resident theologian told us that he was trying to be the provost, I think, no, he was the chaplain. He wanted to be the chaplain at an Ivy League University. In his interview, the interviewers spent the entire time finding out his position on Palestine. This was extraordinary. This was 10 years ago. And all they wanted to know about was how do you stand on Palestine? He’s a preacher. He wanted to be the chaplain. Is it like that all over the place?WAJ (01:25): It pretty much is. If you are pro-Israel, you’re going to have a very hard time getting hired at any university, certainly any elite university. You see this in academic associations. Multiple academic associations have adopted the boycott of Israel. The American Anthropological Association voted to boycott Israel. Aomething has gone so fundamentally wrong, particularly in the humanities, these groups like American nthropological Association are tax exempt groups. They’re supposed to be educational groups. I believe that they’re violating their tax exempt status. I’ve asked the IRS in the past to look into this, and they refuse to. It may be time for Congress to act. We are subsidizing this outright Jew hatred throughout academia, which takes place under the guise of being just against Israel. But as we see with this student at Cornell, it’s not just about Israel.Varney (02:24): What proportion of professors defend free speech the way you do?WAJ (02:30): Not very many. They defend their own free speech. I mean, that’s one of the problems we face on a campus is that some speech is protected and other speech is not. And traditionally on campuses, conservative speak speech, Republican speech, any speech that is not left wing has not been protected. And that’s the dilemma that we face. If universities want to be wide open free speech zones, I’m all for that. The problem is they highly regulate speech and manipulate speech, and that’s the problem.Varney (03:02): You’ve appeared on this program several times, defending free speech. I take it you still have a job?WAJ (03:09): I still do have a job. As of this morning, I was able to walk into my computer remotely from work. So, yeah, I mean, this is a problem. And and I’ve put out a call for the board of trustees of Cornell to get involved. They cannot close their eyes to the toxic culture that has taken place at Cornell where everything gets focused on race, and the end result is that you have Jews being demonized and students being radicalized.Varney (03:33): It’s a shocking situation. But sir, thank you very much for coming on this program and telling us what it’s really like. Professor Jacobson, I hope you come back soon. Thank you, sir.
I have had numerous media appearances the past couple of days discussing Cornell and campus antisemitism, too many to all transcribe.
Fox News Digital interviewed me, and wrote an article about the interview:
A prominent Cornell University professor has called on the school’s board of trustees to take action after a series of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents have left Jewish students feeling uncomfortable and unsafe on campus.William A. Jacobson, a clinical professor at Cornell Law School who joined the faculty in 2007, called on the Cornell Board of Trustees to pause new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism and form a special independent commission to investigate antisemitism on campus and the negative effects of DEI.”There has been a long problem at Cornell that the administration has just shut its eyes to. The faculty is extremely anti-Israel, not necessarily the majority of them, but there is a core group of faculty who agitate continuously for the destruction of Israel,” Jacobson told Fox News Digital.”They claim it’s a colonialist state, even though the Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel. They claim that you need to liberate Israel, but who are you going to liberate from the people who have the historical claim to it? But it’s nonstop. It’s all the time, and that has a very pernicious effect on campus,” he continued.”I’ve heard from a lot of students, and I’ve seen a lot of chatter that Jewish students in particular are extremely upset. They were extremely upset with the vituperative hostility towards Israel expressed by numerous student groups, expressed by faculty, and they don’t feel welcome at Cornell. They feel there’s a problem here. And I think the administration needs to get a handle on that.” …”I’ve seen this coming for a long time. I’ve covered problems at many campuses with the anti-Israel movement for over a decade at my website Legal Insurrection, including problems at Cornell,” Jacobson said. “There have been multiple instances of Students for Justice in Palestine at Cornell disrupting pro-Israel events.”Legal Insurrection features posts about anti-Israel episodes at Cornell, including a 2022 report on a panel discussion that included a professor who compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany, a 2019 Students for Justice in Palestine call to renew a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) effort and pro-Israel students being taunted in 2014.Jacobson, an outspoken critic of DEI agendas on college campuses who also founded CriticalRace.org, said he has not heard back from the Cornell Board of Trustees since his initial call for action earlier this month when Rickford made his comments.Jacobson believes the school’s glaring issues with anti-Israel sentiment are “compounded by the campus’ obsession with race” because Jewish students are seen as the “White oppressors” when everything is viewed through an identity lens.”It just creates a very toxic atmosphere that the administration has been oblivious to,” Jacobson said.Jacobson wants to see widespread changes to the culture at Cornell but feels the current senior administration at the school shouldn’t be relied upon.”They helped contribute to the problem through this hyperfocus on race and the DEI initiatives which are quasi-religious at Cornell,” he said, adding that he wants an independent commission to probe what caused such widespread antisemitism.”I think they’re sticking their heads in the sand. And now everything is, you know, in a frenzy on campus, and they have not dealt with it properly,” Jacobson said. “I call upon the university again to take up my proposal… to take up my call to action for the board of trustees to get directly involved, to take this issue over and to address it, because we can’t just continue on the way we’ve been going.”
I also appeared on the Fox News Rundown Podcast
And Real America News with John Solomon and Amanda Head:
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