Leslie Eastman: Objectively Assessing Whether Our Colleges Have Gone Mad

Leslie Eastman: Objectively Assessing Whether Our Colleges Have Gone Mad

Legal Insurrection’s founder, William Jacobson, recently addressed the toxic atmosphere for Jewish students in today’s college campuses, which is the result of the infusion of diversity-equity-and-inclusion into nearly every aspect of higher education.

… Everybody views things through their identity, and Jews get left on the side because they create coalitions based on race and against ‘white’ Israel, which of course is a false way of describing it.

And so we’ve got a toxic atmosphere. Cornell and other schools need to consider whether this hyperfocus, this obsession with race is actually making matters worse. I know that at Cornell it’s making matters a lot worse for Jewish students. And the school needs to get a handle on this and scale it back.

This was the starting point of my interview with Silvio Canto, Jr., during his Blogtalkradio talk show.

Silvio and I review the current protests, demonstrations, and threats directed at Jewish students throughout college campuses. During the discussion, we untangled the web of reasons that this disgraceful behavior has been allowed to permeate through college campuses across the nation.

I asserted one of the many reasons that students felt empowered to engage in soulless tactics, such as tearing down posters of missing Israeli children and smearing the videos of torture and murder as faked, is that the administration and educators at colleges and universities have gotten more stridently progressive and activist in each iteration over the last few decades. Nobody who challenges the narratives or ideologies is hired or promoted. If someone with an independent conservative viewpoint happens to make it into the system, they remain silent or become targets of campaigns to remove or silence them.

The fact there have been counter-protests to the shameful Hamas-supporting disruptions is a hopeful sign that not all is lost. Pro-freedom and Western values is the new counter-culture.

At Columbia University on Thursday, two groups of hundreds of students tensely faced each other in dueling pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations, while university officials blocked public access to the New York City campus as a safety measure.

Supporters of Palestinians, many of whom wore face masks to hide their identities, held signs in a grassy area near a library that read “Free Palestine” and “To Exist is to Resist.” About 100 feet (30 meters) away, students backing Israel silently held up posters with the faces of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas.

Another point I made is that “Studies” programs should not be associated with doctorates. A doctorate should confer prestige, indicating passage through a system filled with rigorous challenges to critical thinking, using hard data and reproducible results, and reasonably interpreting evidence based on facts. As we observe in some of our stories at Legal Insurrection, too often, the research a Ph.D. does is opinion-filled, narrative-supporting blather (i.e., “Deconstructing Whiteness in Physics“). Perhaps it’s time to rethink the rewards for “Women’s Studies,” “Gender Studies,” and other vanity programs like them.

Finally, I noted that the response to the Hamas attacks on Israel on campuses across the nation has given parents, many of whom are funding their children’s education, an eye-opening lesson on the toxicity permeating through many schools. I liken this new awareness to the discoveries made by parents with children who were in elementary-, middle-, and high school during COVID closures and the discovery of America-hating, gender-bending, race-baiting discourse in classrooms that was going on.

The COVID experience is likely a big reason home-schooling is the fastest-growing form of education in this country.

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

The move toward cutting ties with elite institutions seems to be starting already. Two Modern Orthodox schools in New Jersey are now demanding that college and universities that want to recruit on their sites prove they can keep Jewish students safe.

Torah Academy of Bergen County, a boys school in Teaneck, and Ma’ayanot Yeshiva High School for Girls, located just blocks away, each told families last week that they were enacting new requirements for colleges that seek to meet with students on campus, a regular component of the college search process.

A third school in the area told families on Monday that it was “reevaluating our relationships with college admissions officers” but had not yet settled on any policy changes.

Have our colleges gone mad? Perhaps, but there are signs that the condition does not have to be permanent. Legal Insurrection readers help us help higher education with the return to sanity through your continued support…and we thank you.

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