Browsed by
Category: Education

House passes antisemitism bill over complaints from First Amendment advocates

House passes antisemitism bill over complaints from First Amendment advocates

The Washington Post reports: House Republicans are seeking to unite their unruly majority around an evergreen conservative cause, devising a strict response to the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that have roiled college campuses across the country in recent weeks. GOP leaders this week announced plans for new oversight investigations of elite universities where — in the words of House Republican Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) — “pro-terrorist anti-Semites [are] taking over.” And on Wednesday, they passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which…

Read More Read More

Gen Z sees the Gaza protests as their 1968 moment: ‘We built this on their legacy’

Gen Z sees the Gaza protests as their 1968 moment: ‘We built this on their legacy’

Richard Hall writes: Historical comparisons between the mass protests of 1968 and today’s student demonstrations in solidarity with Gaza are both imperfect and hard to avoid. It’s been just 10 days since Columbia University students pitched the first tent on the campus lawns, and already the protests have galvanised a generation of college students much in the same way the Vietnam war did 56 years ago – spreading from coast to coast. It is not just the scale of the…

Read More Read More

Columbia University faculty stand up to defend students in Gaza Solidarity Encampment

Columbia University faculty stand up to defend students in Gaza Solidarity Encampment

NOW: Columbia University faculty link arms and form a wall in front of the entrance to the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ as hundreds of students encircle the both lawns Students remaining in the encampment were told they could face disciplinary action after 2PM pic.twitter.com/C1XRgHzs8b — katie smith (@probablyreadit) April 29, 2024 My office was right by the encampment, and I cannot understand how it interferes with exams. It’s that little red circle. Not a single notable the protest in the history…

Read More Read More

‘Kill all Arabs’: The feds are investigating UMass Amherst for anti-Palestinian bias

‘Kill all Arabs’: The feds are investigating UMass Amherst for anti-Palestinian bias

The Intercept reports: The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst in response to a complaint that alleges that the school took months to address the harassment of Palestinian and Arab students. In the previously unreported civil rights complaint, 18 students said that they have “been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance,…

Read More Read More

With eyes on U.S. college campuses, students stress: ‘Gaza is why we’re here’

With eyes on U.S. college campuses, students stress: ‘Gaza is why we’re here’

Al Jazeera reports: Global attention has turned to universities across the United States, where students have erected encampments to demand action to end Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. The growing protests have taken root on the campuses of some of the country’s top academic institutions, including Columbia and Harvard. And over the past weeks, they have spurred heated debates around freedom of speech, Palestinian solidarity activism in the US, and the use of force to disperse student protesters, among…

Read More Read More

The media should be celebrating college protesters instead of demonizing them

The media should be celebrating college protesters instead of demonizing them

Dan Froomkin writes: Mainstream-media reporters covering the growing wave of college protests against Israel’s war in Gaza have adopted an overwhelmingly negative tone about something they should be celebrating: the peaceful free expression of college students understandably devastated by the pulverizing of Gaza and the slaughter of over 34,000 Palestinians by the Israeli military. The root cause of this journalistic dysfunction is that too many reporters have embraced the toxic presumption that any anti-Gaza-war protest is inherently antisemitic, and that…

Read More Read More

We visited the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Here’s what it’s really like

We visited the solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Here’s what it’s really like

New York City Council Members Tiffany Cabán, Alexa Avilés, Shahana Hanif, and Sandy Nurse write: If you only go by the recent statements from Mayor Eric Adams, Gov. Kathy Hochul, and President Joe Biden, you might conclude that a student protest against the mass killing in Gaza is worse than the killing itself. These official statements, and so many posts on social media, depict the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the Columbia University campus as a cesspit of antisemitic hatred and…

Read More Read More

Pro-Palestinian encampments and protests spread on college campuses across the U.S.

Pro-Palestinian encampments and protests spread on college campuses across the U.S.

NPR reports: Tensions are growing on U.S. college campuses, as the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have rocked New York-area schools in recent days — and the ensuing arrests of participants — spread from coast to coast. Students have launched protests and encampments at more than a dozen schools across the country, from Massachusetts to Michigan to California. They are calling for an end both to the Israel-Hamas war and their universities’ investment in companies that profit from it or, more broadly,…

Read More Read More

Protests at Columbia, Yale, and many other campuses across the U.S.

Protests at Columbia, Yale, and many other campuses across the U.S.

Bruce Robbins, the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia, writes: When Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, testified before the House of Representatives on 17 April, she didn’t fall into the traps set a few months earlier for the presidents of Penn, MIT and Harvard, two of whom are now gone. They had been asked whether they would permit genocidal talk against the Jews on their campuses – a dark discourse that lurked, according to the…

Read More Read More

How the Democratic party is hurting itself by betraying young voters and failing to defend free speech

How the Democratic party is hurting itself by betraying young voters and failing to defend free speech

The New York Times reports: It’s a nightmare scenario for Democrats: Protesters disrupt their convention this summer; they clash with the police; chaos seems to take hold. It may not be imaginary. As protests over Israel’s war in Gaza continue to intensify, especially on college campuses, activists are preparing to be in Chicago this summer for the Democratic National Convention. The very idea sends some Democrats right back to 1968, when their convention, also in Chicago, was overshadowed by infighting…

Read More Read More

Columbia University protests and the lessons of ‘Gym Crow’

Columbia University protests and the lessons of ‘Gym Crow’

Judd Legum writes: In the early morning hours of April 30, 1968, then-Columbia University President Grayson Kirk summoned the NYPD to arrest hundreds of student protestors. About 1,000 police officers arrived on campus and, wielding nightsticks, violently arrested about 700 students. Almost 150 protesters ended up in the hospital with lacerations, a few broken bones, and other injuries. The student protesters had occupied several university buildings, forcing the school to suspend classes, in protest of Columbia’s plans to build a…

Read More Read More

Columbia University faces full-blown crisis as rabbi calls for Jewish students to ‘return home’

Columbia University faces full-blown crisis as rabbi calls for Jewish students to ‘return home’

CNN reports: Columbia University is facing a full-blown crisis heading into Passover as a rabbi linked to the Ivy League school urged Jewish students to stay home and tense confrontations on campus sparked condemnation from the White House and New York officials. The atmosphere is so charged that Columbia officials announced students can attend classes and even possibly take exams virtually starting Monday – the first day of Passover, a major Jewish holiday set to begin in the evening. Tensions…

Read More Read More

Columbia University is colluding with the far-right in its attack on students

Columbia University is colluding with the far-right in its attack on students

Moira Donegan writes: The students sat on the ground and sang as police in riot gear approached them. Eventually, more than 100 of them would be arrested; their tents, protest signs and Palestinian flags were gathered into trash bags by the police and thrown away. One video showed officers and university maintenance workers destroying food that had been donated to the encampment, making sure it would be inedible. According to student journalists reporting from WKCR, Columbia University’s student radio station,…

Read More Read More

Inside the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University

Inside the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University

Lara-Nour Walton writes: Around 4 AM on Wednesday, hundreds of Columbia University students set up tents on the East Butler lawn, establishing what they called a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” in protest of the university’s role in helping fund the war in Gaza. The occupation, organized by the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition (CUAD), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), had been planned for months. The encampment was an escalation of previous pro-Palestine actions, designed…

Read More Read More

The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood

Jonathan Haidt writes: Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent. The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same…

Read More Read More

PragerU is a conservative video giant. Here’s why it’s trying to get into schools

PragerU is a conservative video giant. Here’s why it’s trying to get into schools

NPR reports: Despite the suggestive sound of its name, PragerU is not a university. It’s a content creator. The conservative media nonprofit makes short, well-produced videos crafted to appeal to college students and young people. It has polished animations and titles like “What Radical Islam and the Woke Have in Common” and “Is There Really a Climate Emergency?” Recently, news headlines have focused on its PragerU Kids content. Arizona recently became the latest state where education officials have embraced online…

Read More Read More