America's Future Depends on Trump's Promise to Punish Woke Universities
by Jonathan S. Tobin • December 6, 2024 at 5:00 am
A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that Donald Trump will make good on his vow to defund educational institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.
That is why Trump's scorched-earth approach is so necessary, even as it is being denounced by the same people who are responsible for creating or perpetuating the current mess as too extreme or even needed at all.
More to the point, it will mean that policing antisemitism on campus will be shifted away from the ineffectual Title VI complaints overseen federal education bureaucrats, to a campaign of lawsuits conducted not just by groups like the Deborah Project (valuable though they may be) but by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with all of the vast resources at its command. In this manner, a message can be sent that will likely motivate the vast majority of college administrations to discard DEI and the tolerance of hate for Jews that accompanies it.
Instead of expressing horror at his determination to enact real change, fair-minded Americans of all faiths and in both major political parties should be rooting for him to keep his word and to do everything he promised to punish colleges and universities, in addition to any other entity that promotes the sort of woke hate that has made life for Jewish students and anyone else who dissents against the new secular orthodoxy so difficult.
A leftist-dominated educational establishment and its media enablers fear that Donald Trump will make good on his vow to defund educational institutions that embrace DEI and tolerate antisemitism.
Occidental College seemingly waved the white flag last week in its efforts to defend itself against charges of tolerating antisemitism on its Los Angeles campus. The school agreed to a "sweeping settlement" with the Anti-Defamation League and the Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law that acknowledged the ongoing hardships, harassment and discrimination faced by Jewish students since the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Occidental's apathy to all this, which was little different from what has been happening at dozens if not hundreds of other American institutions of higher learning, violated its obligations to prohibit such discrimination under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
