You know the expression money talks and (you know what) walks?
I think Harvard knows it too. And there are signs Columbia is coming around as well. Maybe they have their ears to the track and they hear the freight train a-comin’.
One day after Donald Trump took office, Harvard settled two antisemitism lawsuits, based on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that were brought against it.
Coincidence? Maybe. But Trump has publicly and repeatedly threatened to cut off federal funding from colleges and universities that tolerate antisemitism. He’s also threatened to tax their very substantial endowments.
And I’m not talking just a few bucks. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. More on that a bit later. But first, the settlement.
As part of the deal, Harvard will adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. Among the things that definition classifies as antisemitic is, “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, [for example] by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that brought one of the suits said, “The settlement agreement is a major advance for students at Harvard University…There is now a Harvard standard that other colleges will strive to meet.”
Harvard Divinity School graduate and outspoken critic of the University, Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum, was a party to one of the suits, but refused to be a party to the settlement. He says his fight has just begun.
In a statement on X, Kestenbaum wrote: “Harvard created this settlement to look like a PR win; so they can go to the Trump admin and say they fixed the problem. Nothing can be further from the truth.”
But the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association hit the nail on the head. It said, “While [the] settlements establish important frameworks for accountability, real change will require confronting deep-rooted antisemitic bias in Harvard’s academic programming, classroom instruction, and institutional relationships.”
That’s at the core of what’s going on at Harvard and other universities, including my alma mater, Columbia.
At Columbia, as winter break ended, the Jew haters were back.
A group invaded a classroom where the History of Modern Israel was being taught by an Israeli professor. They read their stupid manifesto and tried to hand out anti-Israel, anti-Zionism fliers, one showing a boot crushing a Star of David.
After the incident, Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong moved quickly, issuing a statement saying, “We strongly condemn this disruption, as well as the fliers that included violent imagery that is unacceptable on our campus and in our community”
Columbia followed-up with another announcement saying it was trying to find out who the masked marauders were and punish them accordingly. They also posted a security guard outside that classroom that was invaded.
And later in the week, Columbia said it figured out the identity of one of the keffiyeh-wrapped students and suspended him/her/they. Let’s see if they make that suspension stick and if they can figure out who the other culprits were.
Okay, so we’ve seen some action from Columbia. But it is what the Harvard alumni group says it is, that the rot runs deep. It runs deep amongst the faculty. Columbia actually has the Israel-hating and Jewish-student-intimidating Professor Joseph Massad, who called October 7th, “awesome,” teaching a course on Zionism and the history of Israel.
The pitiful way the university defended its approval of this travesty was by saying, well, his class is just one of three that students can take, and anyway, it’s limited to 60 students and it’s an elective.
After the Columbia classroom episode this past week, one of the most telling and one of the most important reactions came from the House Committee on Education and Workforce.
It posted on X, “Outrageous that masked students disrupted class at Columbia, which receives billions in taxpayer dollars, to pass out fliers calling for the murder of Jews.”
And here’s the line Columbia and all other colleges and universities that have been coddling the Jew haters should pay lots of attention to. “Does Columbia understand that failing to combat antisemitism will no longer be tolerated in the Trump administration?”
In 2023, Harvard got $676 million in money from the feds. According to the Stand Columbia Society, a group of alums and former professors that advocate for the university, Columbia got $1.3 billion in government grants and contracts.
Lots of money is in jeopardy if Trump throws civil rights violations at them.
So that may have helped prod Harvard to settle the cases against it, and spur Columbia to act like it’s never acted before.
If you don’t think Trump’s serious about all this all you have to do is learn more about Leo Terrell. I’ll call him “Mad Dog” Terrell. Trump appointed him as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights. After Terrell saw that video from the Columbia classroom, he posted, “I want antisemitic conduct to stop now! Federal action is necessary and mandatory.”
In the past he’s said the federal government should “Cut off every nickel and dime of federal taxpayer dollars to [colleges] that promote Hamas…”
If that doesn’t light a fire under these colleges and universities I don’t know what will.
Listen. We can disagree with some of the Trump executive orders of the past week. I get that. But I will stand behind his order that allows for the deportation of foreign students that support Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.
And I stand behind his pressure on universities that have been rotted out from within by Qatari money, wokeism, antisemitism and anti-Americanism.
For Columbia, Harvard and all the schools that have allowed the unrestrained intimidation, assault and triggering of its Jewish students over the past year and a half, it’s time to be woken from your radical left wing coma or lose hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money.
Yes, the Trump effect is making university bigwigs sit up and pay attention. Because when money talks, you know what starts to walk.
But the stupid terror-supporting students are just the tip of the iceberg. Real change on our campuses won’t come until these universities dig deeper and root out the women and men who are filling our students with lies and hate.