[From article]
The Tower.org reports:
Clyde McGregor, Chair of Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees issued the following statement Saturday with regard to the social media postings of Assistant Professor Joy Karega.
At our quarterly Board meeting yesterday, the Trustees of Oberlin College discussed postings on social media by an Oberlin faculty member.
These postings are anti-Semitic and abhorrent. We deplore anti-Semitism and all other forms of bigotry. They have no place at Oberlin.
These grave issues must be considered expeditiously. In consultation with President Marvin Krislov, the Board has asked the administration and faculty to challenge the assertion that there is any justification for these repugnant postings and to report back to the Board.
From its founding, Oberlin College has stood for inclusion, respect, and tolerance. We still do.
McGregor’s statement, which does not cite Karega by name, refers to a series of posts on Facebook and Twitter, first reported by TheTower.org on February 25, in which Karega claims, among other things, that a banker named Rothschild secretly owns most of the world’s central banks, that Israel was behind ISIS and the terror attacks of 9/11 and Paris, and that Hurricane Sandy was deliberately engineered as a form of “weaponized” weather.
Colleges and universities across America (and much of the Western world) have been squandering their integrity and standards on the alter of political correctness, tolerating abuses of freedom of speech, recruiting poorly qualified faculty espousing lunatic theories, lowering standards for designated groups, ignoring the fundamental building blocks of our civilization of the classical liberal arts, and tolerating all sorts of laziness, emotional hysteria, and misbehavior. The professoriate and the administrators are incapable of self-correction, for the internal mechanisms of power and prestige in the non-STEM disciplines have been seized by the left.
[. . .]
I suspect that Oberlin has also seen some declines in the wake of multiple cave-ins to PC.
It is time the grown-ups, the trustees, take control of higher education throughout the country.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/antisemitism_at_oberlin_2__the_trustee_speaks_up.html
March 6, 2016
Anti-Semitism at Oberlin 2 – the Trustee Speaks Up
By Thomas Lifson
* * *
[From article]
Oberlin College, the small private, highly rated liberal arts institution in Ohio. Oberlin, founded in 1833 by Presbyterian ministers who were advocates of the anti-slavery and abolition cause, has a great history of which it can be justly proud. From its beginning it has been one of the country’s major educational institutions devoted to progressive causes. It was the first college to admit African-Americans, in 1844, and to grant degrees to women, in 1862. In recent times it has adopted a liberal attitude to sexuality, proving free or discounted condoms to the student body, and allowing students to room with students of any gender.
Understandably, the Oberlin student body, in addition to enjoying the Conservatory of Music, the oldest operating one in the country, is more attracted to political science than to science, mathematics, or engineering. It was therefore only a little surprising that in May 2015 the students exhibited their political engagement by taking over the college administration building to protest an increase in tuition fees.
But it is much more surprising and disturbing that Oberlin should be a locale for expositions of ignorance, bigotry, hatred, and anti-Semitism. In November 2015 the Black Students Union complained of the “cultural appropriation of ethnic foods and cultural insensitivity” in the dining hall, which in fact specialized in General Tso’s chicken, a dish created in the United States. With the same kind of twisted logic, the active pro-Palestinian students linked the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel movement to that of “Black Lives Matter.”
Those pro-Palestinian students went further by building an “apartheid wall” in front of the college library, while they or others painted Nazi swastikas on the Jewish Center and Jewish fraternities on campus.
[. . .]
The president of Oberlin, Marvin Krislov, has explained he is a practicing Jew, grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, and had lost some of his family in the Holocaust. As a political scientist with a law degree and as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Krislov could not understand how anyone could question the existence and horrors of the Holocaust.
After Karega had been criticized, Krislov defended the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech as meaningful responses to prejudice.
[. . .]
With due respect, this is an inadequate and incorrect position. What is missing in Krislov’s defense of Karega are two things. In spite of his avowed Jewishness he seemed to have made no attempt to condemn the evil anti-Semitism of so many of her statements. Similarly, he ignored her willful and deliberate distortion of facts about who was responsible for terrorist acts. It is irresponsible to attribute “open discussion of ideas” to Karega’s ignorant version of the massacres of 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo.
President Krislov’s position is unfortunately symptomatic of the liberal tendency to be tolerant of the intolerant, especially when expressed by or supposed to be on behalf of an ethnic minority. The academic discipline does depend on honest and true discussion of ideas. It should exclude virulent prejudice, bigotry, and anti-Semitism. Oberlin College knows better and should act accordingly. So should also the well-known African-American leaders who should make their voice heard and ensure that their own cause is not besmirched by anti-Semitism.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/03/antisemitism_at_oberlin.html
March 6, 2016
Anti-Semitism at Oberlin 1 -- College President Caves to Progressive Bigotry
By Michael Curtis
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