I remember how it was -- JR
Jewish students at Cooper Union, a private New York City college, were locked inside a library Wednesday as pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protesters beat their fists on the doors, screamed, and tried to gain entry.
New York police, however, told The Daily Signal that officers didn’t intervene because “no threats of physical violence were made.”
Videos shot by terrified students trapped in the library initially were shared first on social media Wednesday afternoon by Jake Novak, former media director at the Israeli Consulate in New York.
Novak reported that the New York Police Department was called “as soon as the protesters stormed the main Cooper Union building, but [officers] did nothing.”
New York City Council member Inna Vernikov, a Republican who was born in Ukraine, said Thursday morning that she had spoken by that time with four Jewish students, three of whom were barricaded in the library. No one was arrested in the incident on the Manhattan campus, Vernikov said.
The NYPD responded in writing Thursday morning to a request for comment from The Daily Signal, saying that “no threats of physical violence were made.” The statement from police said:
Community Affairs Officers were present while the demonstration took place inside. The school staff allowed the demonstration to take place. The students dispersed after the incident. No property damage was reported, no criminal reports were filed and no threats of physical violence were made. Additionally there were no injuries reported.
Novak said Cooper Union librarians “bolted the doors” to prevent pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas protesters from entering the library, then told “identifiable” Jewish students to “hide in the attic if they wanted to.”
On social media, this decision drew sharp criticism and comparisons to Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis and other Holocaust situations during World War II.
Both Novak and Vernikov said an unidentified dean at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art had said he “could not stop” the pro-Hamas protest “because it was not slated to enter school property.”
The protesters, however, stormed campus buildings shortly after the protest began.
Vernikov said Cooper Union faculty members not only canceled class to accommodate a walkout for the protest, but “encouraged students to participate and even offered extra credit” for participating. She also noted that faculty members joined the protest.
The Daily Signal sought comment from Cooper Union, including information on which classes were canceled and which faculty members encouraged students to participate. College officials didn’t respond by publication time.
The Jewish students barricaded in the Cooper Union library were evacuated through tunnels Wednesday evening, while the university and police left the protesters alone, Vernikov and others said.
Campuses across America recently have been home to pro-Hamas rallies following the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 surprise attacks in southern Israel that killed 1,400 civilians, including women and children, and took about 200 hostages. Israel declared war on Hamas and began air assaults on the Gaza Strip, which the neighboring Jewish state had allowed Hamas to govern despite past armed conflicts.
Vernikov reported Thursday morning that Jewish students at Cooper Union were staying home for fear of safety, and some are dropping classes. Three students who were barricaded in the library told her that they “will never walk in there feeling alright again,” Vernikov said.
This isn’t the first time Cooper Union has been wrapped in controversy over radical politics.
In September, Cooper Union hired a professor who only months earlier threatened to “chop” a New York Post reporter with a machete. Shellyne Rodriguez, a leftist professor who also was caught on video cursing at pro-life protesters and damaging the property of pro-life activists, was fired from her job as an adjunct professor of visual arts at Hunter College. She now teaches a sculpture course at Cooper Union.
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One School District’s ‘Woke’ Curriculum Focuses on Dismantling ‘Eurocentric Framework’ in Education
Earlier this month, Townhall covered how documents showed that a California school district spent tens of thousands of dollars to create a “woke” curriculum that would focus on systems of oppression, colonialism and student activism. The curriculum would then be trained to teachers and required for high school students in the foreseeable future.
Documents obtained by parental rights organization Parents Defending Education and shared with Townhall show that a California high school’s “ethnic studies” curriculum focuses on combating “eurocentric framework” in education. In addition, the curriculum focuses on “center[ing] indigeneity, Blackness, race, ethnicity and its intersections to other social categories such as gender and class.”
The Sequoia Union High School District’s curriculum is “an academic field with existing methodologies to question dominant narratives, systems, and their creation and reestablish new ones,” according to the documents obtained by PDE (via Parents Defending Education):
The curriculum framers also suggested that the course include “restorative justice circles” and “weekly socio-emotional check-ins” to combat concerns about students feeling unsafe or ostracized.
The curriculum approval form provides more details on the focuses of the class. The curriculum identifies that two of its core goals are to “Critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society; challenge imperialist/hegemonic beliefs and practices on the ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized levels.” The proposal also intends for students to learn “how race and gender are socially constructed, and how colonial powers leveraged these constructed categories to justify colonization and patriarchal systems.”
Lessons in the curriculum explore how “Privilege + Power = Racism” and “Dominant Narrative and Counternarrative: Heteronormativity and patriarchy.” The curriculum’s second unit includes lessons on the “4 I’s of Oppression (Ideological, Internalized, Interpersonal, and Institutionalized Oppression” and gives examples like “heterosexism,” “capitalism,” and “assimilation and acculturation.”
In addition, the curriculum promotes student activism by requiring students to propose an action plan to address a local issue in their community. They will present the project to an “authentic audience” of teachers, administrators, and members of the school board. Beginning in 2025, the curriculum will be required in the district.
“Under a course masquerading as ‘ethnic studies,’ this school district is using this material to indoctrinate the next generation of Americans. They are using taxpayer resources to push hatred and division. Considering students in California are still working to recover from two years of state-mandated school closures, it is embarrassing that this school is wasting precious class time on politically charged content instead of helping students regain academic fundamentals,” Michele Exner, senior advisor at PDE, told Townhall.
As Townhall covered, the Jefferson Union High School District in San Mateo County, California, proposed “Ethnic Studies” curriculum that would focus on stories, experiences, and knowledge of people of color, challenge and dismantle racism and intersectional systems of oppression, and cultivate communities that are committed to wellness, liberation, and solidarity.”
“It should come as no surprise that American students are rallying in support of terrorists when our public schools teach ethnic studies lessons like this one from Jefferson Union High School,” Alex Nester, investigative fellow at Parents Defending Education, told Townhall. “Just 13 percent of American students have a functional grasp on history. Schools like Jefferson Union that spend time teaching divisive race ideology instead of actual history are a huge part of the problem.”
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/10/23/parents-defending-education-n2630141
*********************************************************Apollo CEO Marc Rowan hits back at UPenn leadership after antisemitism on campus
Rowan’s attacks on the school stem from what he believes is an atmosphere of antisemitism, including administrators’ failure to quickly condemn the recent deadly Hamas terrorist attacks.
Now so many potential and current donors are joining his effort that the $21 billion UPenn endowment could be deprived of as much as $1 billion in funding, these people say.
And Rowan won’t back down unless Liz Magill and Scott Bok, the UPenn president and the chair of the school’s Board of Trustees, respectively, are booted from their positions — a very real possibility given the surge in alumni support for his defund-antisemitism effort.
The details of this groundswell of support for Rowan’s plan have not been reported, and it is said to be unprecedented in the clubby world of fundraising for university endowments.
For years, top alumni fundraisers like Rowan have chosen to voice their criticism of school policy to college administrators in private; high-profile alumni have traditionally stayed out of divisive cultural debates that occur on our nation’s campuses.
That might be changing given the rampant antisemitism on college campuses that exploded in recent weeks, and school administrators like Bok and Magill failing to promptly condemn both the terrorist attacks as well as their students’ displays of support for the killing of innocents.
For Rowan and now thousands of UPenn grads and benefactors, the tipping point occurred in September when UPenn’s leadership ignored their warnings that pro-Palestinian student groups were featuring antisemitic speakers during a “Palestine Writes Literature Festival.”
The festival took place during the Jewish high holy days and featured speakers who called for “death to Israel.”
People who know Rowan say he was doubly horrified to learn UPenn student groups also supported the Hamas terrorists who on Oct. 7 killed and kidnapped innocent Israelis — beheading some infants at a kibbutz near the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
One of the worst atrocities in recent history occurred while school administrators remained initially silent.
That prompted an open letter demanding the resignations of Magill and Bok; Rowan accused the school’s leadership of fostering a climate of hate that condoned the violence and killing.
“I call on all UPenn alumni and supporters who believe we are heading in the wrong direction to close their checkbooks until President Liz Magill and Chairman Scott Bok resign,” he wrote.
The open letter has grown to include some 7,000 current and potential donors and graduates, some of whom are on the school’s Board of Trustees, people close to Rowan tell me.
They include UPenn grads Ron Lauder of the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire.
Former UN Ambassador Jon Huntsman, whose family are long-time donors to the university, joined the donor boycott as well.
A decision to oust Bok and Magill will be up to the 60-member UPenn board, and it’s unclear if there is, at least for now, the stomach to do so.
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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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