A Brave Voice in the Leftist Academic Wasteland
MARK ALEXANDER
If you keep up with the leftist race hustlers who have weaseled their way into academies of “higher education,” you know the name of Ibram Xolani Kendi, a.k.a. Henry Rogers. He’s the noisy self-centric purveyor of the critical race theory fraud, which metastasized from the specious and historically fallacious 1619 Project. Over the last decade, Kendi has been employed by six universities, including the State University of New York (Oneonta), the University at Albany (SUNY), Brown University, the University of Florida, American University, and since 2020 he has been indoctrinating his lemmings as a “professor of history” at Boston University. BU now hosts his so-called “Center for Antiracist Research.”
Kendi’s most articulate and respected adversary is a name you probably don’t know — David Decosimo, a Princeton-educated scholar and now head of Boston University’s Institute for Philosophy and Religion. He is a fearless defender of Liberty against academic tyranny, and he stands among scholars on the frontlines of opposition to the suppression of free expression now plaguing our academic institutions.
David is also family, both of us being descendants of Tennessee’s George Gillespie, the Revolutionary War colonel and leader of the Overmountain Men. Thus, it should come as no surprise that among so many professorial types who have bowed to the woke leftist orthodoxies of DEI, ESG, etc., Decosimo has not folded.
While David has become a lightning rod for leftist cancel culture, until recently most of his objections to the Kendi culture at BU were confined to objections within the academic channels. That began with his remarkable objections to BU’s hiring of Kendi in a 2020 letter to then-BU President Robert Brown, in which he raises the issue: “How exactly BU defines antiracism is essential for preserving our research and educational missions and commitments to open inquiry, academic freedom, and free speech.” He notes, “If racism is defined in problematic ways, then in the name of antiracism deeply problematic things follow, not least the betrayal of a university’s research and teaching mission and its commitments to academic freedom.”
In other words, the hiring of Kendi is a full-frontal assault on free speech, another nail in the coffin of free thought in the academy.
Fast-forward to eight weeks ago, when the facade of Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research started to crumble. As our analyst Thomas Gallatin observed: “Riding the outpouring of ‘antiracism’ virtue signaling, Kendi’s center received millions of dollars in donations. Of note, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gave $10 million. … Not only was Kendi riding high off his book sales — a book in which he promoted critical race theory as if it were the Gospel — but he was also raking in millions from white leftists seeking any way to purge themselves of white guilt.”
At the time of Dorsey’s donation, Kendi declared, “Your $10M donation, with no strings attached, gives us the resources and flexibility to greatly expand our antiracist work.”
But after burning through some $43 million in donor funds in three years, Kendi has, predictably, produced next to nothing. Such is the case when race hustlers get a pass on accountability, largely because of what George W. Bush decried as “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Four weeks ago, as Kendi’s outfit neared collapse, BU launched investigations into financial irregularities.
Kendi critic and Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Rufo concluded: “It was very clear that Ibram Kendi was a fraud in 2020. His signature idea was to use the government to discriminate against people of one racial group to benefit people of another racial group, which he called ‘anti-racist discrimination.’ But for any neutral or dispassionate observer, it was simply racism in a new direction. He has nothing to offer to the debate, and I’m glad to see his research center implode. It’s the ultimate vindication for those of us who said that critical race theory was not a solution to America’s problems and that Ibram Kendi was a false prophet of a dangerous philosophy. This is really poetic justice and I think marks the end of this chapter in the left-wing racialist saga.”
Of course, anyone raising an objection over that lack of accountability risks being labeled “RACIST.”
The Washington Post’s Tyler Austin Harper was more direct, noting, “Kendi’s fall is a cautionary tale — so was his rise,” and concluding, “Though I don’t condone Kendi’s race grift, I do understand how easy it would be to become a grifter.” Grifter indeed. Even Kendi’s fans at The New York Times were ducking and covering, noting that his staff blamed Kendi for his “imperious leadership style” and “questioned both the center’s stewardship of grants and its productivity.”
Which brings me back to his BU critic, David Decosimo.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Decosimo went very public with his condemnation of Kendi, but also the leadership of BU and other academic administrations, writing: “The debacle that is Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research is about far more than its founder, Ibram X. Kendi. It is about a university, caught up in cultural hysteria, subordinating itself to ideology. … Mr. Kendi deserves some blame for the scandal, but the real culprit is institutional and cultural. It’s still unfolding and is far bigger than BU. In 2020, countless universities behaved as BU did. And to this day at universities everywhere, activist faculty and administrators are still quietly working to institutionalize Mr. Kendi’s vision. They have made embracing ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ a criterion for hiring and tenure, have rewritten disciplinary standards to privilege antiracist ideology, and are discerning ways to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative-action ruling.”
That would be the SCOTUS ruling in June against the toxic euphemism known as “affirmative action” in college and university admission practices — more accurately referred to as “affirmative discrimination.”
Decosimo concludes: “Most of those now attacking Mr. Kendi at BU don’t object to his vision. … Their anger isn’t with his ideology’s intellectual and ethical poverty but with his personal failure to use the money and power given to him to institutionalize their vision across American universities, politics and culture. Whether driven by moral hysteria, cynical careerism or fear of being labeled racist, this violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles betrays the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing. It courts disaster, at this moment especially, that universities can’t afford.”
Of course, BU found “no issues” with the management of Kendi’s Antiracist Center, and of course Kendi decried the investigation as “racist.” He complained, “It is unfortunate that individuals near and far spread a false narrative about a Black leader taking or mismanaging funds.”
Thus, I am sure BU will restore Kendi’s standing and his center will rise from the dead as some shadow of its former self, a “fellowship model” that allows Kendi to save face while still being its chief grifter.
If BU administrators had any academic integrity, they would sunset Kendi’s charade before it suffers the same fate as its kissing cousin, the race-bait Marxist front, Black Lives Matter, which also raised tens of millions but folded in disgrace.
But it will be without at least one courageous trustee, William Bloom, who recently resigned in protest, declaring: “Kendi was attracted to BU more by the socialist anarchism of Howard Zinn than the civil rights championed by Martin Luther King Jr. Critical theory, like Mr. Kendi’s ‘antiracism,’ seeks to achieve the alchemy of group equity by the law (social justice) instead of equality before the law (justice). Critical theorists want to disrupt and dismantle what they feel is a rigged system. This includes the U.S. Constitution. Until we can cure human nature, however, we had better uphold the ideals of our founding.”
In his 1901 book Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington concluded: “Great men cultivate love. … Only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.”
Six decades later, that theme would be renewed by civil rights leader Martin Luther King. In 1963, King concluded his timeless “I Have a Dream” speech by asserting the need to focus on character over color: “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. … And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.”
Today, despite the fact that the Democrat Party claims King’s legacy, and Democrats argue they are the sole protectors of his “dream,” they have turned King’s message upside down, as if King had declared people should be judged “by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.” In doing so, they also turned his dream into a nightmare. Their failed statist “Great Society” programs have enslaved generations of poor, mostly black Americans on urban poverty plantations that are plagued with violence.
Fact is, the most consequential “systemic racism” in America is the institutionalization of the Democrat Party platform, which has, by design, kept poor people in bondage to the welfare state and, consequently, is the blueprint for the most enduring racial exploitation architecture in America. Democrats are the historical architects and political beneficiaries of systemic racism.
What are the odds that Kendi will be teaching that lesson?
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/102200 ?
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Harvard as the Fourth Reich
Harvard is an entirely antisemitic university. The president says soothing words to her Jewish audiences and does not have the internal fortitude to punish the little monsters that the American educational system has created, and her university nurtures.
If there were any positive outcomes of the Covid disaster—disease and response—it might be that parents became aware of what their children were being taught. Parents casually walking behind their kids while the latter were “learning” via Zoom heard discussions of sexual orientation, the US as a terrible country, and the demented concepts of intersectionality that made those parents and their kids the bad guys. The revolution against school boards started after the Covid lockdowns as parents realized that the educational system was bending their children’s minds and filling them with gross lies and distortions.
The pinnacle of American education is the university. The US has no shortage of colleges and universities. Still, with few exceptions, all of them are left-wing bastions of American hatred, white person hatred, and a distorted understanding of history and America’s role in it. Universities consistently poll at over 90% donations to Democrats, and self-identification is overwhelmingly as liberal or progressive. In my very first Harvard lecture, a professor lamented the lack of age diversity at the university—all of the students were in their early twenties, as opposed to during the time of the GI Bill when there was an extensive range of ages and experiences associated with returning soldiers who went to college at Uncle Sam’s expense.
Today’s colleges can boast students from all fifty states and dozens of foreign countries, but there is virtually no intellectual diversity based on polling. What does it help if people from Nebraska and Alaska, as well as Italy and Australia, all support a completely open border and reparations for blacks, which ostensibly would include billionaires Tiger Woods and Oprah Winfrey? The left is obsessed with color, and maybe last name and their concepts of diversity are literally skin-deep. Joe Biden made that clear when he said that his choice for Supreme Court would be a black woman. What happened to the best candidate? What happened to meritocracy? The left does not believe in it, only in victimhood and reverse bigotry, which is bigotry.
Townhall, kindly let me share a letter that I sent to the current president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay. President Gay is completely incompetent. Students at Harvard and other universities are actively promoting the genocide of the Jewish people in Israel. “From the river to the sea…” can only mean killing all of the Jews and replacing them ostensibly with Palestinian Arabs. As seen from the violence at the University of Michigan on Saturday, the students—emboldened by a lack of any punishment—are becoming more aggressive and violent. Their calls for Israel’s eradication or a ceasefire to benefit Hamas in their eyes, justify whatever means they apply against school administrations, police, and, of course, Jewish students.
The absurdity of gays and trans marching with the same Islamists who would throw them off of rooftops to mark parking spaces below is lost on what must be the dumbest generation in American history. They refuse to understand the history of the Israel-Palestinian fight, and they’ve reached a point of denying that an attack occurred on 10/7, or yes, it occurred, but Israel instigated it, or there may have been an attack, but women were not raped, and no babies were beheaded, etc. Even when the videos come from Hamas, the clueless “cultural warriors” will always bend the facts against the Jews. My lawyer and others have pointed out that Me Too and other women’s groups have said nothing about Israeli women being raped, murdered, or taken into captivity where they are suffering who knows what horrors. Oh, they’re just Jews—who cares?
Below is a letter I once again sent to the supposed president of Harvard, and again, she did not respond. Harvard, in allowing Muslim and left-wing students to run free to express their wish for the death of the Jews, is a fully antisemitic institution. The Harvard Crimson, independent of the university but no less leftwing in its writing, should change its name to Der Sturmer. I feel sorry for the Jewish students who started or returned in the Fall and were oblivious to the hatred just under the surface of the manicured campus.
There were no doubt missed signs. Articles in the Crimson blaming Israel for Palestinian terror; new groups making antisemitic statements on their websites. But then came a massacre of Jews, and the hatred exploded like a volcano, and Ms. Gay and her equally neutered colleagues for five weeks have refused to hold the Jew-haters accountable. This is ultimately their dream—the intersectional teaching of three decades jumping from the page to the protest line: the oppressed Palestinian (terrorists) against the oppressing (murdered) Jews! If Harvard professors could, I would imagine that many of them would join the protesters, of whom they are no doubt quite proud for showing those Jews what they think of them.
Below is the letter. I would not send a dog to Harvard or any American university until they are completely taken apart and rebuilt. How long before Ten Thousand Men of Harvard is replaced with the Horst Wessel Song or Harvard Uber Alles? Maybe the Harvard Corporation should be taking measurements for black outfits with eagles and swastikas.
Claudine:
You were right. The title "President" is not appropriate for you.
I knew that you would not respond to my more recent notes. I am not some heavy donor who needs entertaining or some "thought leader" who needs to be kept on the Crimson side. Just one of tens of thousands of Harvard graduates, a little dot on the Harvard canvas.
I have been asked by several people if you would tolerate students wearing Ku Klux Klan regalia, holding signs showing a noose, and chanting, "From the Mississippi to the Sea, the East Coast must be black-free." Would you let such vile protests take place on Harvard property? If black students said that they were terrified for their lives and some even refused to leave their dorm rooms while others were cornered in the Yard, would you run to form a committee to look into bigotry and discrimination? If you can tell me with a straight face that you would let such a protest take place, I will be incredulous. If you tell me that you would shut down such bigoted displays that hurt so many with the full force of Harvard police and whatever other resources you needed, then I would beg to ask why the Jews do not merit such a courtesy from you? There are hundreds if not thousands of books and treatises on antisemitism in Widener library, if you can get past the braying crowds calling for Genocide 2 for the Jewish people. Your job is not just to keep Jewish students and donors close; your job is to do the right thing--that is what "Veritas" demands. I am afraid that if you do not punish those whose actions go far beyond any "free speech" standard, you will join the other post-Derek Bok mediocrities who never rose to greatness as presidents of what once was the finest university in the world. I have only met one person in my life who had never heard of Harvard, and fortunately she introduced me to my wife.
As is well documented, Jews marched with and supported blacks during the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Blacks have never supported Jews in great numbers in our times of need. There have always been exceptions, but for the most part large black organizations have never stood with the Jew when his future was in danger. I come from Chicago and remember Rev. Jackson's "Hymie Town" and of course Louis Farrakhan praising Hitler or Al Sharpton leading a pogrom against the Jews of Crown Heights. The original BLM charter called Israel an apartheid state, and I wrote to your predecessor about a Palestinian American rower who used his Harvard position to spread lies about Israel killing babies at a BLM rally in Washington. Some Israeli rabbis are telling Jews to leave America. I would suggest that Jewish students should leave Harvard as the administration wishes them well but will not act against those who have expressly called for their injury. I had thought of returning to interviewing students here on behalf of Harvard, but I would not wish to be culpable for sending a Jewish student to a place where a crazed fellow student in a keffiyeh can freely call for the death of my Israeli student and his family.
Leadership sometimes demands making unpopular decisions. Being forceful when hatred has taken over the campus is needed today. Cowardice is something best left for Yale.
Sincerely,
Dr. Alan Joseph Bauer
https://townhall.com/columnists/alanjosephbauer/2023/11/19/the-fourth-reich-on-the-charles-river-n2631388
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The kids broken by lockdown: How Australia's gruelling stay-at-home orders during Covid have left an entire generation of schoolchildren 'too anxious' to go outside
The implications of Australia's harsh Covid lockdowns during the pandemic are now threatening 'end the lives' of students left too anxious and afraid to go to school.
Melbourne had the longest pandemic lockdowns in the world and the city has become the epicentre of a new condition known as 'school refusal'.
Year 10 student Sarah Turner, 16, is one of those deeply affected by the Covid lockdowns in Melbourne, missing 50 per cent of school in the past two years.
'It wasn't until the lockdowns where we were at home a lot that I started not wanting to go out and find, getting really anxious about going out,' she told 60 Minutes on Sunday.
Gabby, a 13-year-old boy who also lives in Melbourne, is another child affected by this and often he just can't face the idea of going to school.
Mental health social worker John Chellew's clinic treating children with a dread fear of going to school, and their families, has never been busier. 'I'm dealing with children who have pretty much shut down and gone on strike and who are locked in their bedrooms and there's massive conflict in the home,' he said.
The situation can sometimes lead to horrifying, desperate thoughts. 'Children have lost the will to live and are really threatening to end their lives,' Mr Chellew said.
It's not that the children have lost the desire to be educated, it's that the overwhelming anxiety they feel has led to them refusing to go to school.
Sarah used to love school. 'I was very outgoing and did a lot of things before the lockdowns,' she said. But things changed. 'It felt like it was kind of impossible to go to school. It wasn't like a choice kind of thing. It was like, I just felt like I physically couldn't go for this fear,' she said. 'I feel faint and sick and weak and I get heart racing and shaking and stuff like that.
'Some of my hardest days I'd just be having panic attacks all morning and I couldn't, like, move or I'd get, even if I'd get to school in the car, I couldn't get out or I'd get out and I just felt like frozen.'
There is no one type of child affected by the condition. 'It's an issue that affects kids aged five through to 17 school age from all walks of life and from neurodiverse and neurotypical backgrounds,' Mr Chellew said.
Gabby's parents, Christel and Gabor try to keep to their cool on days when he can't face school.
His dad explained what the worst scenario is for them. 'I'll drive him (to school) but he goes into like a really bad case of anxiety, I guess. 'He bangs his head against the seat and it's, yeah, it's not a good experience.'
Though Gabby tries his best to do his schoolwork from home, it has affected his grades.
Sarah understands what Gabby goes through - sometimes she just finds the idea of going to school unbearable. 'A lot of people just telling me to push through and just do it, or a lot of accusations that it's just because I don't wanna go,' she said.
'I would say that they don't know actually what it's like, and it's a lot more physical than you think. 'It's very isolating and it stops you from actually doing things you want and it's not like you don't want to do it.'
The number of students so ridden with anxiety they can't go to school has grown substantially in recent years.
By some estimates, one in three families with school aged children are affected by it.
Sarah's mum, Kirsty, is happy that school refusal is now being openly discussed and is no longer being treated as a made-up issue with straightforward treatment.
But it has changed the Turner family's life. 'It's been a full time job sort of over and above normal parenting,' she said.
'I haven't been able to go back to work. I was pretty much a 24/7 carer besides just being her normal mum and you know, became a bit of a mind coach for her as well at times.'
She said people who tell her to just drop Sarah at the school gate and drive away simply don't understand.
'I think we're talking about a whole generation of young people here that have fallen behind, and I think the impacts will stay with them unless we do something about this quickly,' she said.
Slowly, but surely, though, things are getting better for both Sarah and Gabby.
'I'm making a lot of progress,' Sarah said. She has been going to school more lately, which she said has made her 'very proud'.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12792247/Covid-lockdowns-schoolchildren-anxious.html
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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I remember how it was -- JR
