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Gabe Levin
The Nation
Excerpt: Dr. Eric Cheyfitz, a professor of American studies at Cornell, said the university has canceled the two classes he was set to teach this semester. It comes as the provost is recommending that he be suspended for two semesters without pay on the grounds that he violated federal antidiscrimination laws, The Nation has learned.
Cheyfitz’s lawyer, Luna Droubi, said it’s the latest turn in months of investigations—carried out by different university bodies—into whether Cheyfitz, 84, told a graduate student last semester to drop a class he was teaching about Gaza because the student is Israeli. Cheyfitz, who is Jewish and whose daughter and grandchildren live in Israel, denies the allegation.
Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
Excerpt: Two days after Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voice mail messages from numbers she did not know.
Ms. Swierc (pronounced swirtz) discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.” Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Henry F. Haidar
Harvard Crimson
Excerpt: Out of all the faculty The Crimson recently surveyed, only one percent described their political beliefs as very conservative. Think about that: someone is three times more likely to get into Harvard than to encounter a conservative faculty member here.
Much can be — and has been — said in favor of viewpoint diversity in higher education. Yet those decrying the relative lack of conservative faculty overlooks a basic point: The structure of universities themselves lends itself to a professoriate whose politics do not perfectly map on to that of the public writ large. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Hugh E. Brennan
October 12, 2023
Well, Duh! We far-right, hard-right, ultra-conservative, and now, ultra-MAGA radicals, have been yapping about this for five decades or more. If you haven’t heard from birth up that you won the lottery by being born in good old USA and that that magical place was made possible by a long, slow, grindingly difficult, and often bloody political evolution. Repeated exposure to the ideas, events, and personalities that brought to life this cornucopia of comfort and security is the only possible way to generate mass comprehension of the duties and privileges of citizenship in our federal republic.
However, we have reached the sad point that knowledge of civics is insufficient. The fundamentals of fairness, reasonableness, and comity are absent in the worldview of too many. Notions of honor, integrity, and virtue aren’t even sufficiently considered to be dismissed. They are the vocabulary of an unknown and unstudied language. The mob yowling for cancellation and executing their heckler’s veto believes that free speech is, in itself, a criminal tool of oppression and exploitation. Clearly, they would, if afforded the opportunity run the camps.
Education, faith, and the family falling apart at the same time is the greatest test the Republic has ever faced. We’ve got iconoclasm without any icons. I’ve never met a statue-killer who knows anything in particular or who has read a “whole book” about the subject of their furor.