The Trump administration brushed aside decades of precedent when it ordered Columbia University to oust the leadership of an academic department, a demand seen as a direct attack on academic freedom and a warning of what’s to come for other colleges facing federal scrutiny.
Great job by leadership who thought that not standing up for student protestors would somehow protect them from reprisals.
For being literally Academia, you would think they would be more familiar with history of all fucking things.
Anyone with a brain knows that a bully you try to please will just demand more. Trump’s hate cannot be satiated.
I mean… It kinda shows how bullshit and soulless it has become. It’s like when regular Americans that aren’t on the right act like our entire American culture isn’t to blame for where we are today.
Individualism and exceptionalism in a society that can’t be supported without the efforts of countless others and subsidized by the poorer living conditions of people who don’t even live there sounds kind of silly to me.
Because most of those institutions aren’t about teaching any more, it’s about soliciting donations from wealthy people, building fancy buildings named after billionaires, and managing all that money.
BDS threatens all of that.
The leadership of these colleges are a part of the oligarchy. They proved that when they chose to crush their students civil rights and bend the knee.
Calling most of these corporate whores “academics” is like calling Musk an “engineer”. It’s complete bullshit. They are the leadership of a for-profit corporation. Their actions sully all of their credentials and authority.
It’s usually vapid, amoral MBAs that handle the admin side that push this shit not the academics doing the actual work.
https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/cuarchives/presidents.html
That’s a nice thing to tell ourselves, but the three most recent Presidents at Columbia were a Law Professor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Bollinger), a woman with a Masters of Science in Economics and a Doctorate of Philosophy of Economics, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minouche_Shafik), and a literal fucking doctor (Masters of Science in clinical epidemiology) with a background in genetics testing for cancer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Armstrong).
Bollinger, for example, was literally named as a defendant in Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger. The school was on the side of Affirmative Action and Grutter was just a pissed off white bitch who couldn’t handle the fact that maybe there were minority students more capable and worthy than her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger
The board of trustees is mostly Juris Doctors (Lawyers), a Master of International Relations, a bunch of Masters of Science, and yes, some MBAs in there too (7 MBAs out of 22 people on the board, literally slightly less than a third of the board).
https://secretary.columbia.edu/directory
We don’t have to exaggerate and make shit up to justify how we feel. That’s what the MAGA fucktards do.
A ton or CEO’s have STEM degrees. A ton of prominent academics in history were terrible assholes. Being an “academic” doesn’t guarantee that someone is not a dangerous, selfish narcissist, or a fascist.
Why are you defending leaders who attack student protesters civil rights, and bend the knee to fascists? That should hold more weight than their credentials ever should.