Columbia University’s Apartheid Divest is hosting an academic freedom week, inviting a slew of left-wing academics, reported Campus Reform.
On Monday, Columbia students will be treated to a panel called “On the Palestine Exception,” featuring Rutgers professor Jasbir Puar, who argues that Israel harvests Palestinian organs, UCLA professor Gil Hochberg, who thinks the “militarized gaze” of Israeli soldiers is a “tool of dominance,” and Columbia’s own Joseph Massad, who has redefined anti-Semitism to also include hatred of Muslims. Yay! Diversity of opinion!
And it gets even better with Tuesday’s “White Supremacy in Academia.” Get out your pen and paper for some insightful comments from Trinity College professor Johnny E. Williams, who called whites “inhuman assholes,” using the hashtag #LetThemFuckingDie.
But if there’s a VIP of the VIPs, it’s gotta be George Ciccariello-Maher, the professor who tweeted “all I want for Christmas is white genocide” and said the Las Vegas massacre “is what happens” when white people “don’t get what they want.” Ciccariello-Maher will be paneling Wednesday’s “Academic Antifascism” panel because he is, of course, also a big fan of the men in black. Now there can only be one winner, but his fellow panelist San Diego State University prof “Ozzie” Monge deserves a shout-out for threatening to lower a white student’s grade when she dared disagree with him over the school’s Aztec mascot.
What’s really fascinating about this Columbia event is that while the pro-Palestinian student sponsors say universities have attacked and silenced these speakers, almost none of them actually were. Drexel put Ciccariello-Maher on leave and then made him teach classes remotely for security reasons until the professor chose to resign and San Diego State kicked Monge out of the classroom, but only after the California DOJ found him guilty of racial retaliation, but that seems to be it. If you want to host a real academic freedom event, Columbia, maybe you should invite fewer lefties who are a little too edgy for the in-group and more conservatives who have no hope of making it into the group to begin with.
In a recent op-ed, Columbia professor John McWhorter notes that Trump “released a tweet referring to ‘forrest fires’” — that’s with two ‘r’s — “twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump,” reported Campus Reform.
So there are a few possible explanations here. 1. Trump is probably a pretty busy guy who doesn’t have a whole lot of time to craft his tweets. 2. We know Trump has big hands. There’s definitely a negative correlation between hand size and ease with which you can type on a phone without making mistakes. 3. If it’s not Trump’s error, it could be the iPhone’s. Apple could be auto-correcting Trump’s properly spelled “forest” with one “r” to two “r”s, maybe because the president has previously referenced someone with that last name in a text. And lastly, 4. This could all just be one giant troll of the mainstream media and other public figures, to distract them from fighting Trump on topics that actually matter.
What’s really ironic about John McWhorter’s op-ed is that the professor wrote an article just last summer arguing that Ebonics is totally fine. He said “Accepting [Ebonics] as an alternative form of the language, and not a degraded one, requires being open to artists employing it in their work, even if they didn’t grow up speaking it.”
Well, John, why can’t Trump’s tweets be an alternative form of English? Riddle me that, big guy.
Four-hundred K-12 educators hailing from 24 states and 13 countries are receiving professional development credits for learning how to incorporate social justice concepts into their curriculum this week, reported The Daily Caller News Foundation. The convention, called Reimagining Education, was hosted at Teachers College, Columbia University, which is a graduate education school around Columbia but which, as a spokeswoman was quick to tell me, is a separate entity from the Ivy League school. But come on, it’s not like they aren’t related.
So let’s take a look at what I’m sure are the very scholarly, not at all biased things these teachers learned. Tuesday’s first session was “How Can Social Studies Teachers Be Agents of Social Justice?” which instructs teachers on how they can incorporate “critical race theory” into their classes to trigger “student-school-community activism.” Because in progressive academia, we’re not just going to teach what to think instead of how to think, but we’re also going to forge your 4 to 18-year-olds into political weapons. Are you excited yet?
I never understood why these loons capitalized colors like they’re countries. I mean, there’s no nation of white that I’m aware of. Oh and if holding your child back for no good reason whatsoever doesn’t appeal to you, maybe these other sessions that show you how to “decenter whiteness” and move towards “post-whiteness” at your school will be more enticing. I mean, come on, don’t you want your 10-year-old child to learn about “racial microaggressions” and how America is “a society built on institutional racism”? Noooo? What are you, a bigot?
So Tuesday at the Columbia conference was definitely the most “woke,” as they say. But Wednesday and Thursday courses did address other very valuable and not at all politically-motivated topics like a little something called “food justice,” as well as the need to discuss gender and race in kindergarten.
Teachers College spokesman James Gardner told me that the school aims “to equip educators with the research-driven and evidence-based strategies and tools to engage students from all backgrounds.” But engage them in what, James? The answer, make no mistake, is ideological warfare.
Columbia University professor Hamid Dabashi tweeted “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world just wait for a few days and the ugly name of ‘Israel’ will pup….” Will pup? Another indication of a heretic is an inability to string sentences together. Let’s take a look.
The professor has cancelled class to fulfill his “moral duty” of going to a pro-Palestinian rally. One thing that’s really insidious about Dabashi’s anti-Israel rants are the very visceral language he uses:
“Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of [Israelis],” says the professor. “The way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.”
That sounds an awful lot like something certain doctors from a certain historical dictatorship would say, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t seem like Dabashi has a lot of tolerance for disagreement with his ideas, either. The professor wrote an essay alleging racism in the Israeli military and when a Columbia grad student who had served in the Israeli military dared to object via email, Dabashi forwarded the message to Columbia admins, saying “Given the military record of this person, I also feel physically threatened” and asking for security to “protect [his] person from a potential attack by a militant slanderer.” His request was denied.
