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Category: Education

Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. So have these students’ dreams

Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. So have these students’ dreams

Sondos Fayoumi writes: Around 88,000 higher education students in Gaza were supposed to sit for their exams last month. Many looked forward to completing their final assessments and celebrating their hard-earned graduation. Thanks to Israel’s genocidal war, though, nobody wore their caps and gowns. Instead, young people are enduring devastation of unparalleled magnitude. Every university in Gaza has been obliterated. Libraries have been burned to the ground. And the aspirations of Palestinian graduates lie in tatters. In addition to the…

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American academic freedom is in peril

American academic freedom is in peril

Ryan Calo and Kate Starbird write: Academics researching online misinformation in the US are learning a hard lesson: Academic freedom cannot be taken for granted. They face a concerted effort—including by members of Congress—to undermine or silence their work documenting false and misleading internet content. The claim is that online misinformation researchers are trying to silence conservative voices. The evidence suggests just the opposite. It’s sobering to remember that the principle of academic freedom scarcely existed in the United States…

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Columbia Law Review back online after student editors threatened to strike over Nakba censorship

Columbia Law Review back online after student editors threatened to strike over Nakba censorship

  The Intercept reports: After the Columbia Law Review’s board of directors responded to the publication of an article about Palestine by taking the prestigious journal completely offline, the students who run CLR voted on Wednesday to reject an offer in a letter from the directors to reinstate the website. The Columbia Law School students who run CLR were considering a proposal to append a note to the Palestine article disclaiming what the directors, in an unsigned letter to students,…

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Ghent University severs ties with Israeli universities; calls on EU to expel Israel from academic cooperation treaty

Ghent University severs ties with Israeli universities; calls on EU to expel Israel from academic cooperation treaty

VRT News reports: Ghent University (UGent) has said that it is to halt all cooperation and joint projects that it currently has with Israeli research institutes and universities. However, the pro-Palestinian activists that have been occupying a building at the university for over 3 weeks are not satisfied. They are demanding that the university also cease cooperation with Israeli companies. Under pressure from the pro-Palestinian activists and following fresh advice issued by the university’s Human Rights Committee, UGent has decided…

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Trump tells donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests if re-elected

Trump tells donors he will crush pro-Palestinian protests if re-elected

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has told a group of wealthy donors that he will crush pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses if he is returned to the White House. The former president and presumptive Republican nominee called the demonstrations against Israel’s war in Gaza part of a “radical revolution” and promised the predominantly Jewish donors that he would set the movement back 25 or 30 years if they helped him beat Joe Biden in November’s presidential election. “If you get…

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What really happened at Columbia? Bruce Robbins, a Jewish humanities professor, speaks out

What really happened at Columbia? Bruce Robbins, a Jewish humanities professor, speaks out

  “[Columbia] deserves a better administration than they’ve got right now” This week on Real Talk, we speak to Bruce Robbins, a Jewish professor at Columbia University, about what really happened during the recent student protests on campus, their demands for divestment from Israel, and the media coverage of it all. Filmed: 14 May 2024 Real Talk is a Middle East Eye interview show hosted by Mohamed Hashem that delves into the stories and experiences of a diverse range of…

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Biden claps as Morehouse valedictorian calls for Gaza cease-fire in commencement speech

Biden claps as Morehouse valedictorian calls for Gaza cease-fire in commencement speech

HuffPost reports: Morehouse College valedictorian DeAngelo Fletcher called for a cease-fire in Gaza during his commencement speech on Sunday, receiving applause from both fellow students and guest President Joe Biden as his administration continues to face pushback from college students across the U.S. over his support for Israel. Biden sat behind the valedictorian during the ceremony at the historically Black college in Atlanta, where Fletcher spoke about the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the devastation it’s wrought. Fletcher, who…

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Arrested. Injured. Suspended. Six NYC university students say they’ll keep protesting

Arrested. Injured. Suspended. Six NYC university students say they’ll keep protesting

NPR reports: At Columbia University, word was spreading among the student protesters who’d defied the university’s order to take down their pro-Palestinian encampment on a central lawn. Police were gathering outside the school’s locked gates. Arrests seemed imminent. It was the evening of April 30. Allie Wong, a doctoral student, was off campus when she heard what was happening. She rushed there and found a way to sneak in. Before the night was over, Wong would be one among nearly…

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Pro-Israel Jewish billionaires caught secretly plotting to crackdown student protests

Pro-Israel Jewish billionaires caught secretly plotting to crackdown student protests

Middle East Monitor reports: A group of prominent American Jewish billionaires and business leaders have been privately pressuring New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, to deploy the police against pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, and even offered to pay for private investigators to assist the New York Police Department in handling the protests, according to a report by The Washington Post. The revelations, based on a WhatsApp chat log obtained by the newspaper, shed light on the group’s efforts…

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Apparently NYU has administrators schooled in the Soviet Union

Apparently NYU has administrators schooled in the Soviet Union

Ginia Bellafante writes: At one point during the demonstrations at Columbia University in 1968, protesters took the acting dean of the liberal arts college hostage. Barricading his office door with furniture, they kept Henry Simmons Coleman, a former Navy man, locked up for 26 hours. When he was finally released, he seemed unfazed; there had been plenty to eat. Retaliation was not on his agenda. So little did it interest him, apparently, that he went on to write letters of…

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Sonoma State University president placed on leave for ‘insubordination’ — an agreement with protesters

Sonoma State University president placed on leave for ‘insubordination’ — an agreement with protesters

The Press Democrat reports: Sonoma State University was rocked Wednesday afternoon when President Mike Lee announced he is stepping aside, at least temporarily, in the wake of a controversial email he sent to students and faculty regarding the demands of campus pro-Palestinian protesters. It’s not known how long Lee will be away. In a Wednesday statement, California State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia wrote: “On Tuesday evening, Sonoma State University President Mike Lee sent a campuswide message concerning an agreement with…

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This is what Bruce Robbins, a Jewish professor at Columbia, wants you to know

This is what Bruce Robbins, a Jewish professor at Columbia, wants you to know

  For over seven months, a dominant conversation in the U.S. news media has been about alleged and increased antisemitism on American campuses – culminating in the coverage around student encampments. The “Gaza solidarity encampment” at Columbia University, in particular, has received a lot of attention which sparked encampments across the country — as well as university-backed police repression and violence. In this interview, AJ+ speaks to Dr. Bruce Robbins, a Jewish professor at Columbia University who supported students protesting…

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She campaigned for a Texas school board seat as a GOP hard-liner. Now she’s rejecting her party’s extremism

She campaigned for a Texas school board seat as a GOP hard-liner. Now she’s rejecting her party’s extremism

By Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, May 15, 2024 This story was originally published by ProPublica Weeks after winning a school board seat in her deeply red Texas county, Courtney Gore immersed herself in the district’s curriculum, spending her nights and weekends poring over hundreds of pages of lesson plans that she had fanned out on the coffee table in her living room and even across her bed. She was searching for evidence of the sweeping national movement…

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New York City’s Union Theological Seminary votes to divest from Israel’s war on Gaza

New York City’s Union Theological Seminary votes to divest from Israel’s war on Gaza

  As student protests around the world call for their educational institutions to divest from companies with ties to Israel, we speak to the Reverend Dr. Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary, an ecumenical seminary affiliated with Columbia University that is one of the first schools to begin divesting from companies that “profit from war in Palestine/Israel.” Jones says divestment is an extension of Union’s “long policy of trying our best to bring our values, our core mission…

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Cambridge University’s wealthiest college votes to divest from all arms companies

Cambridge University’s wealthiest college votes to divest from all arms companies

Middle East Eye reports: The college council of the University of Cambridge’s wealthiest constituent college, Trinity College Cambridge, has voted to divest from all arms companies, Middle East Eye can reveal. MEE learnt from three well-informed sources close to Trinity’s student union that the college council, responsible for major financial and other decisions, voted to remove Trinity’s investments from arms companies in early March. According to the sources, the college decided not to announce that it would divest from arms…

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Economist Joseph Stiglitz on rethinking freedom, Trump and pro-Palestine protests at Columbia

Economist Joseph Stiglitz on rethinking freedom, Trump and pro-Palestine protests at Columbia

  Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is one of the most influential economists in the world, having advised multiple Democratic Presidents of the US and the World Bank, where he worked as Chief Economist and senior Vice President. His latest book, called “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society,” argues that the economic right’s concept of “freedom” doesn’t take into account the necessary trade-offs, that one person’s freedom often comes at the expense of another’s. And that “free”…

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