Columbia University is all about the money as they – Latest News
The screaming headline was prophetic: “Trump’s Policies Shake Academic World and May Reshape U.S. Culture.”
My first response was YES, that’s the entire level!
The president goals to shake up the smug, radical college system and save taxpayers money at the similar time.
Somebody lastly will get it, I believed.
Alas, that headline appeared in The New York Times, and author Alan Blinder undoubtedly doesn’t get it.
His article was drowning in doom and gloom.
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“If the President realizes his ambitions, many American universities — public and private, in conservative states and liberal ones — could be hollowed out, imperiling the backbone of the nation’s research endeavors,” he wrote.
Unfortunately for Blinder and others with a pornographic-like dependancy to seeing Trump by way of the darkest doable lens, their model of Armageddon is a massive step nearer.
Within hours of the article’s publication, Columbia University agreed to all of Trump’s calls for to guard the civil rights of Jewish college students and others who don’t subscribe to the college’s hard-left indoctrination in opposition to America and Israel.
By additionally agreeing to ban face masks during demonstrations, give 36 campus police officers the energy to arrest college students and appoint a senior official to supervise two school departments which can be hotbeds of antisemitism, Columbia presumably will get to keep the $400 million in grants and contracts Trump threatened to cancel.
Money talks, who knew?
Falling in line
Most important, with some 60 different faculties in the federal crosshairs for related misconduct, together with Harvard, Penn and Northwestern, a clear settlement sample has now been established.
Bet your backside greenback the different faculties will fall in line.
They can’t afford to not.
Like Columbia, they are hooked on federal money.
Without it, a lot of the analysis they do wouldn’t be inexpensive.
And with out that analysis, which ranges from the laborious sciences to social sciences, and carries world implications in such areas as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, the faculties wouldn’t be capable to appeal to the best and brightest expertise.
But even permitting for the undeniable fact that Columbia caved as a result of it could be a shadow of itself with out taxpayer funds, the settlement is a large victory for the US and for common decency.
It is obscene how far elite universities have strayed from their fundamental missions.
Many faculties have change into propaganda factories that flip impressionable younger minds in opposition to their own nation and Western civilization itself.
That gushers of taxpayer money have been essential to this abomination was a scandal that few outsiders appreciated till Trump linked the dots.
Thankfully, he didn’t merely complain about the terrorist-supporting professors and the kaffiyeh-wearing college students who known as for the elimination of Israel.
And he didn’t regard it as acceptable that lessons can be disrupted, buildings seized and Jewish college students harassed and intimidated as the crazies performed out their hateful fantasies.
Nor did Trump stop with simply threatening the money cow.
His double-barrel method turned clear with the arrest of and the plan to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia grad who led protests on its campus final yr and the Barnard campus as just lately as this month.
Although the left would have you ever imagine the bid to revoke Khalil’s inexperienced card and ship him packing violates the First Amendment, the administration cites his alleged “activities aligned to Hamas” as the purpose for his elimination.
It is additionally in search of to deport a Cornell pupil on related grounds.
Momodou Taal, who has a pupil visa, has been requested to give up to ICE.
‘Not a suicide pact’
These aren’t free speech circumstances.
They are about actions that oppose American insurance policies and pursuits and we’re not obligated to welcome those that got here right here to do us hurt.
As the late Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg eloquently declared in a 1963 case, “the constitution is not a suicide pact.”
The campus crackdown is long overdue and serves as the newest reminder that elections have penalties.
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Among the many variations between Trump and Joe Biden, this is one other very important one.
Biden ignored the radicals when he wasn’t tacitly agreeing with them that Israel, not Hamas, was the drawback in Gaza, as if the horrors of the Oct. 7 invasion by no means occurred.
Similarly, Kamala Harris, when she turned the social gathering’s nominee, seemed away from the assaults on Jews in a pandering bid to win the assist of Muslim voters in swing states.
In truth, with the exception of New York’s Rep. Ritchie Torres and a few others, almost all high Democrats concurrently denounced Israel and had been silent in the face of the antisemitic mobs at home.
While Republicans in Congress had been condemning Ivy League presidents for failing to guard Jewish college students in the face of clear intimidation, Senate minority chief Chuck Schumer was privately telling the similar people to “keep heads down” as a result of their “problems are really only among Republicans,” in keeping with a message Schumer despatched that was launched final week.
Even now, most Dems are opposing the White House bid to rid campuses of those that brazenly assist terrorists and call for the death of Jews.
The rush to guard Khalil is a continuation of a shameful sample.
But because of Trump, faculty leaders no longer have the luxurious of protecting their heads down and ignoring Republicans and the travesties unfolding on their campuses.
With a new sheriff on the town, resistance can be very, very costly.
$5B in fed contracts
Columbia, for instance, will get about 25% of its working money from Washington, and reportedly has federal contracts valued at $5 billion over a number of years.
The prospect of dropping even $400 million in a first spherical of penalties set off alarms bells and led to disputes in school conferences about who would lose their sinecures if Trump turned off the spigot.
Meanwhile, different faculties on the record imposed hiring freezes over the risk they would even have to soak up main cuts.
Already some of these faculties are going through funds issues as a result of the White House, in a bid to save lots of money, plans to restrict the overhead funds that observe federal grants.
Those added funds might be as high as 75% of the grant itself and are used to pay for every part from turning on the lights to hiring assistants.
In some circumstances, the grants are handled as slush funds for star school members and college leaders.
A Trump plan in the works would restrict these added funds to fifteen% of the underlying grant, which is including to the campus panic.
Naturally, some members of the tutorial ecosystem are dropping their minds over the adjustments and see Columbia’s give up as the finish of the world.
That implies a infantile fantasy that it’s unfair to connect situations to taxpayer money.
Baloney.
Besides, what Columbia agreed to are issues it ought to have been doing all alongside.
But nothing would have modified if Trump hadn’t dropped the hammer.
All the pleading and scolding and jawboning in the world would have come to nothing with out his menace to remove the money.
Well achieved, Mr. President.
