Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History
by Nellie Bowles
Posted By Ruth King
BESTSELLER
From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds—and how she almost did, too.
As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends—until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.
In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.
Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.
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When America goes hateful from the top of the educational level, the rest of the nation will eventually become Nazi like just as the Palestinians have always been because they teach hatred beginning at 4 years of age.
This is why the overwhelming number of still decent Americans must speak out to stem this tide of hate.
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Is the US higher education inherently anti-Israel? - opinion
Violent actions such as looting, destruction of property and bodily harm to pro-Israel students accompany protests in support of the Palestinians.
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A STUDENT holds a Palestinian scarf at the New York University (NYU) graduation ceremony at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City, earlier this month. (photo credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)A STUDENT holds a Palestinian scarf at the New York University (NYU) graduation ceremony at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City, earlier this month. (photo credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
On campuses of public universities like The City University of New York, and of “elite” private institutions such as New York University, Columbia, and Harvard, chaos abounds. Student activists, supported and incited by outsiders, occupy large swatches of these ivory towers preventing unobstructed passage, freedom of speech, and access to classes for their fellow students.
Violent actions such as looting, destruction of property and bodily harm to pro-Israel students accompany protests in support of the Palestinians. The American and Israeli flags are burned and replaced by the flag of the Palestinian people. Monuments commemorating important milestones in the history of the United States are wantonly defiled. Academic administrations are frozen and either do not respond or in some cases have begun to capitulate to student demands. Unrest in the Academy is at a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam War some 50 years ago.
In response to the protests, many faculty members have waved the flag of Academic freedom. A group of activist faculty members can be seen supporting protesting students who scream out “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.”
I am not impressed. These faculty members are advocates for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions and stifle dialog with Israeli and Jewish students. As a CUNY faculty member for nearly 50 years, I experienced this behavior firsthand. On my campus, I saw members of Students for Justice in Palestine refuse to shake hands or even dialog with Jewish students from Hillel. This was years before October 7. I heard a feminist lesbian professor advocate for Hamas in Gaza even though homosexuality is outlawed in this terrorist enclave and that women are subject to discrimination and unchecked brutality.
Faculty response to the Israel-Hamas war
How does one understand the anti-Zionist anti-Israel activism prevalent on college campuses? Given the violence now accompanying the student protests and their efforts to squelch civil counter protests and debates, why is the American Academy not up in arms against this behavior? To answer these critical questions, one must scrutinize the development of American higher education since World War II, particularly since the 1960s and the Vietnam War.
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Students place flags near the main lawn of Columbia University, to show support for the Jewish community on campus, for peaceful solutions, and commemorate all lives lost since October 7, 2023, across from a student protest encampment in support of Palestinians, during the ongoing conflict between (credit: REUTERS/CAITLIN OCHS)Students place flags near the main lawn of Columbia University, to show support for the Jewish community on campus, for peaceful solutions, and commemorate all lives lost since October 7, 2023, across from a student protest encampment in support of Palestinians, during the ongoing conflict between (credit: REUTERS/CAITLIN OCHS)
At about that time, a document “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” was issued by the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. The statement spoke to the issue of shared governance and the balance of responsibilities between faculty and administration. Issues such as tenure, academic freedom and the roles of staff and the professorate in the university were addressed.
Without going into detail, a playing field was established for academia and rules of conduct were put in place. Most important was the issue of who would hold the power in a university setting: the Board of Governors, the faculty, the students? After this document, the faculty fought, often through faculty unions, to wield the ultimate power on key decisions at many institutions.
For many years the curriculum and pedagogy were the sole purview of the faculty. Now, in addition, faculty often demand involvement in budgeting, hiring of administrators, and the final word on reappointment and tenure decisions. Since the 1960s, the faculty has gained significant power, especially at institutions that have faculty unions. In parallel, the number of unionized colleges has increased dramatically since 2020 and the graduate students, an important cohort of the instructional staff, have voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionization.
The concept of shared governance seems quite reasonable. If carried out on a high professional level it would benefit both the faculty and the colleges. In reality, however, shared governance often leads to mediocrity, cronyism and reciprocal back scratching. Years ago, a major scandal was uncovered in the NYC police department defined as the Blue Code of Silence. Police officers would not testify against other officers who were corrupt or delinquent in their duties. This silence was shattered by Frank Serpico who almost lost his life because of his brave stand for integrity. Al Pacino portrayed him in the 1973 film Serpico.
Although different in degree and impact, in many unionized colleges there is an unwillingness of faculty to make critical evaluations of their colleagues in a public setting. At certain institutions it is rare for a faculty member hired on a full-time budget line to be denied tenure by her/his peers. This cronyism, in my view, is a significant contributor to the failure of large numbers of faculty to stand against the activist faculty and students who are driving the anti-Zionist/antisemitic campaigns now prevalent in the United States.
The delegitimization of Israel
The SJP and BDS movements, have been waging a political war against the existence of the State of Israel since their founding in the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively. In the beginning, these groups couched their anti-Israel and antisemitic activities in language that was appealing to large numbers of academics by highlighting racism and apartheid. Although Israel is a diverse multiracial country, which by law guarantees the rights of all its citizens, the BDS and SJP have hammered on these falsities. By spreading the big lie repeatedly, and with the assistance of the media, SJP and BDS leaders made inroads among young idealistic college students.
Numbers do not lie
Arab Israeli students recently represent approximately 17%, 20%, and 40%, respectively, of the student bodies of The Hebrew University, The Technion, and Haifa University. In 2023, Arab Israelis were reported to constitute some 25%, 30%, and 60%, respectively, of the physicians, nurses, and pharmacists in Israel. There are 10 members of the current Knesset who are Arab Israelis, and an Arab party (The United Arab List) was part of the previous coalition government. Is this consistent with an apartheid, racist State? The answer is “no,” but BDS proponents repeat the lie because it gains them sympathy and support.
The real goal of BDS, however, is revealed by scrutiny of the charter that emphasizes the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. These refugees are the result of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war. That war was initiated by the attack of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq on the United Nations-established nascent State of Israel. They were numbered at about 700,000 in 1948-1949. According to various sources the number of “refugees” has now swelled to six to seven million Palestinians. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) specifically deals with Palestine, including the hereditary passage of refugee status over generations of descendants, including those holding other citizenships. Their return to Israel would end the existence of the Jewish state, which is the ultimate objective of the BDS movement.
Do the majority of US academics seek the demise of Israel?
Are the majority of the American faculty against a national homeland for the Jewish people? Are putatively highly intelligent and highly educated scientists, engineers, and humanists inclined to stand for terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and their Iranian sponsors rather than back a democratic nation struggling to survive? Are my colleagues really in favor of those who violate every principle of civil dialog and intercourse and call for murder of Jews and Israelis, while failing to criticize the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023?
Personally, I do not think so. However, by failing to stand up, by not criticizing their activist peers, and by not opposing radical members of those in the academy who gravitate to antiestablishment activities, Academia is losing its moral high ground.
The public concludes that the American professoriate has anti-Zionist leanings and we in the Academy are allowing a distorted picture to be broadcast from college campuses and classrooms. Most faculty members are primarily devoted to their research and teaching, and to pushing forward the frontiers of knowledge. I was a member of this cohort. Only a small percentage of the faculty gravitate to activism and political machinations.
Nevertheless, as demonstrated during the atrocities of World War II, remaining silent and not speaking out against students and faculty who spread antisemitic and anti-Zionist diatribes, is equivalent to supporting them. Academia must unshackle the bonds of intersectionality, political correctness, and the woke culture and reestablish its moral leadership before doing irreparable damage to itself and the societies it should be leading. The time to be heard is now.
The writer is a distinguished emeritus professor of biochemistry and chemistry at the City University of New York. He lives in Rehovot and has two grandsons in the IDF. The opinions in this article are his own.
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Universities Must End DEI and Implement DEI
Colleges must engage in meaningful outreach
to attract a more balanced faculty.
By DOV FISCHER
This is the final installment of my series proposing ways to fix the moral and educational rot that has infested American colleges and universities. Previously, I have proposed (i) enacting legislation making university trustees collectively and individually liable in tort for acts of misfeasance and nonfeasance in carrying out their fiduciary duties; (ii) implementing a two-year moratorium barring all foreign money and foreign students from entering American campuses; (iii) terminating academic faculty tenure; and (iv) ending federal and state involvement in the student-loan business. Here, I propose legislating an end to identity DEI and mandating implementation of viewpoint DEI.
For several years, universities have been imposing on faculty and students a regime of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI). In great measure, as Tablet’s Michael Lind has shown, this DEI emerged from past campus riots over any number of public issues that radical-left students used as leverage to convert their colleges and universities into left-wing indoctrination centers. They used the Michael Brown incident (falsely highlighted by the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie) in Ferguson, Missouri, and later the George Floyd incident (elevated into the fraudulent “Black Lives Matter” scam), to demand the hiring of more black faculty and student interns, the admission of more black students, the establishment of black studies majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students, even in other disciplines, to take some kind of mandatory racial studies course in pursuing their own respective majors. They used radical “climate change” issues to demand the hiring of more environmental studies faculty and student interns, the establishment of environmental studies majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students to take a mandatory environmental course in pursuing their own respective majors.
They used the #MeToo lies and defamation regarding Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and similar excuses to demand the hiring of more women faculty and student interns, the admission of more women students, the establishment of women and gender studies majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students to take some kind of mandatory course in that field. Presently, they are attempting to leverage their opposition to Israel’s rightful existential battle for survival as a launching point to demand the hiring of more “Palestinian” faculty and student interns, the admission of more “Palestinian” students, the establishment of “Palestinian” or other one-sided “Middle East studies” majors and curricula, and even the leveling of requirements on all students to take some kind of mandatory course in “Palestinian” or one-sided “Middle East studies” while pursuing their own respective majors.
In other words, even a student majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics — the “geek” majors — would be denied graduation from college or a graduate degree from a university if he or she had not attended at least one course in the demanded fields of woke “studies.” Faculty and other university employees now typically find themselves required, as part of their employment obligations, to sit through a day or more of “training” (i.e., brainwashing) in such reeducation programs.
(I once was an attorney at Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe, a once prominent but hopelessly woke major law firm headquartered in San Francisco. The company compelled the entire legal team — each and every attorney in the office, composing some 100 attorneys, many of whom were so top-notch that they billed at $500–$1,000 an hour in an era when $500 was $500 — to sit several times, for six or eight hours each session, to be “trained” by some “sensitivity expert.” None of us was racist, sexist, or homophobic. Our woke law firm had many women, BIPOC, and gay partners, and we all got along famously. But we were required to sit through the most foolish and demeaning lecturing and role playing, losing days of lucrative productivity. I still remember one of the firm’s most respected partners and main “rainmakers” (i.e., a person who brought in many of the highest-paying corporate clients) — who, also like me, was a closet conservative — telling me: “Dov, I swear, one of these days this idiotic leftist garbage is going to bankrupt this place.” And he was right. The gigantic and fabulously lucrative law firm went broke two years later. Long before Budweiser and Target, this was the original case of “go woke, go broke.” )
The idea of DEI is to require “diversity” — i.e., a diverse pool of identities: not only privileged white males but also women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, transgenders, and Native Americans. For the most part, Asians are not included and — like Jews — actually are excluded to make room for all that inclusivity. The irony is even more manifest in that women now outnumber men in the social sciences departments at most colleges and universities. That’s the “D” and the “I.”
The “E” stands for “equity.” “Equity” does not mean the same as “equality.” “Equity” means equal outcomes. Thus, “equality” means equal opportunity. With equality, everyone gets the same opportunity to compete on the same level playing field. A great example is professional sports. If you can pitch fastballs at 100 miles per hour and mix them with breaking curves, sliders, and changeups, you have a better chance of beating your competitors for a place on a major league pitching roster. That is “equality.”
Equity, by contrast, merely promises equal results blended with racial, ethnic, or gender “diversity.” So if a basketball team already has outstanding basketball players, of whom 90 percent are black and none is Asian or Jewish, equity would require a New York basketball team like the Knicks to dump five (one-third) of its 15 roster players to make room for Jews to compose approximately 16 percent of the team and Asians to compose 17 percent, even if the only dribbling they can do is at their mouths. Presumably, that would mean two Jews, two Asians, and Karl Taro Greenfield or someone else from this list of Asian Jews.
The current state of moral and academic rot in America’s “higher education” stems, in no small measure, from the enforcement of identity DEI on the campuses. As I previously have written:
[U]university millions are spent on DEI — “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” — departments, racist offices fabricated out of whole cloth. For example — deep breath — the University of Michigan reported spending $18 million a year on its DEI department and 142-person staff. DEI? More like DIE. The DEI vice provost is paid $380,000 plus all benefits imaginable. Talk about privilege. But that’s not all! A closer investigation later found that U Mich actually has more than 500 staff working full- or part-time on DEI with an aggregate salary-and-benefits annual cost of $30.68 million.
As a result, whole pockets of students are admitted into universities not for their stellar academic potential but because they meet the “diversity” targets, whether religious, ethnic, or racial. That even leads universities to admit disproportionate numbers of foreign students from Arab Muslim countries like Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia because (i) as foreigners, they are charged full freight (paid for them by their foreign governments) without eligibility for in-state tuition discounts or charitable scholarships; and (ii) they check off several DEI boxes: Muslim (minority religion), Arab (minority ethnicity), perhaps female (the DEI trifecta), and perhaps non-white skin color (i.e., Four Aces). Such students manifestly have been at the fore of the recent campus riots and lawbreaking.
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that “affirmative action” no longer is tenable (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181). Accordingly, the DEI discussion actually should be over — and that indeed is an important reason why it now is called “DEI” instead of “affirmative action.” By playing word games, a favorite manipulation played by the Left, the target keeps moving. “Quotas” are illegal? Call them “affirmative action.” You will lose your preferred medical insurance under Obamacare? Call it “affordable health.” The Left wants to facilitate keeping the families of illegal immigrants in the country? Call them “Dreamers.” The term “homosexual” is uncomfortable? Call them “gay.” It is horrifying to perpetrate barbaric sex change surgery on kids? Call it “gender affirming.” Liberalism and its failures have so ruined the country that, ever since Michael Dukakis, no one wants to be identified as a “card-carrying ACLU member”? So, “let’s stop calling ourselves ‘liberals’ because now, instead, we are ‘progressives.’” Arab Muslim countries tried to eradicate Israel from the face of the earth and to “drive the Jews into the sea” but lost in 1947, 1956, and 1967? So, let’s fabricate a new “nation” for Gaza and Judea and Samaria, and let’s call them “Palestinians,” and let’s rename those regions of mainland Israel “Palestine.” Give it half a century, and no one will be any the wiser. Don’t wanna say outright: “Kill the 7 million Jews of Israel”? So, chant “from the river to the sea.” Impossible to call openly for killing fetuses in the ninth month? That’s OK: call it “late term” and mix it with “pro-choice” (but don’t mistakenly use that latter term when inner-city families plead for government stipends and vouchers to enroll their kids in great schools).
It is not mere coincidence that so many of the incompetent university presidents now exposed all are DEI appointments: Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first black president and first plagiarizing president; Liz Magill, Pennsylvania’s third consecutive woman president; Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, Columbia’s first woman president and first Muslim-reared president. This is the price of DEI.
Identity DEI must be abolished.
But a new DEI must be implemented, by legislation if so needed: viewpoint DEI, i.e., diversity of political and social views, equality of opportunity for people of diverse views, and inclusion of varied views.
Surveys leave no doubt that college and university social science departments are top-heavy with tenured woke progressives. For example, they constitute 82 percent of faculty at Harvard. They self-select their successors because applicants must go through the respective departments to receive a tenure-track appointment. The department members review applicants’ academic credentials: schools attended, grades, life achievements. And then they review whether they are left-wing, neutral, or fascist (i.e., conservative). How can they possibly know? Easy: They look at the topics the applicants chose to study and research more deeply for their college and graduate school term papers and dissertations, their posts on social media, the people whom they adduce as references. Here, for example, is how DEI plagiarist President Claudine Gay describes her research:
My research and teaching interests are in the fields of American political behavior … [and] minority politics … My research has considered … how neighborhood environments shape racial and political attitudes among Black Americans; the roots of competition and cooperation between minority groups, with a particular focus on relations between Black Americans and Latinos; the effects of majority-minority districting on legislative responsiveness; processes of immigrant political incorporation; how political knowledge and policy cross-pressures shape partisan attachments among Black Americans; … shifts in the political representation of black voters; and a collaborative project with Jennifer Hochschild and Ariel White examining the effects of survey context on the measurement of linked fate.
Yes, she says she studied other things and even worked with someone named “White,” but anyone can tell where her viewpoints lie. Certainly, that is perfectly fine (if the research and writing are her own and not someone else’s). That is how social sciences departments figure out how a job applicant thinks and believes.
Because of the lopsided dominance of leftist-progressive-woke professors in university social sciences departments, students became indoctrinated and brainwashed. I went through four years of it at Columbia University and then three more years at the University of California, Los Angeles, Law School. Almost every college class had Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Frantz Fanon on the reading lists. Never heard of Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, or William F. Buckley Jr. At UCLA Law School, it was the same — and still is: Every single professor either was extreme liberal, outright socialist or Marxist, or — at best — agnostic as to personal beliefs. For example, my first-year torts professor promoted so much Marxist politics that we had to form study groups outside class and buy external commercial course outlines to learn the subject on our own.
Therefore, it is imperative that the federal and state governments legislatively tie funding to requirements that the universities prove diversity of faculty viewpoints. No need for precisely 50–50. Even 40 percent conservative and 60 percent progressive-woke can do. Let us be clear: The proposal is not that any individual professor modify or compromise his or her beliefs in or out of the classroom. Rather, an onus must lie on a university and its trustees to demonstrate with ample documentation that they have engaged in meaningful outreach to attract a more balanced faculty. That is what was demanded by “affirmative action” and identity DEI, and that is what is needed for viewpoint DEI.
What gives government the right to get involved? Precisely the same as what allowed government for half a century to enforce identity DEI outreach. Governments spend billions in the aggregate to fund the best education money can buy (itself a somewhat specious premise). Therefore, the best — and perhaps only — argument for identity DEI is that all students are enriched when they come into contact with classmates from other backgrounds they never encountered. The same precise argument pertains to promoting viewpoint DEI: A student’s mind will mature in the best way if presented with a variety of viewpoints, exposed to different perspectives on the same issues, and, thus, challenged to weigh all competing theses and antitheses to reach an intelligent synthesis, whatever it be.
If we terminate identity DEI, implement viewpoint DEI, and actualize the other proposals I have offered in this series — all as one comprehensive package — there would be an overnight revolution on America’s campuses, and the moral and academic rot would be replaced by an academic renaissance.
To receive Rav Fischer’s weekly extensive torah commentaries or to attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the weekly Torah portion, the biblical prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or advanced Judaic texts, send an email to: shulstuff@yioc.org.
His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the rise of modern Israel can be found here. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions, decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the Underground and videoed interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism.
His latest deeply moving weekly series of informational and inspirational programs on the Hamas Gaza war may be found here.
His 40-part Bible study series covering all of I Samuel (First Samuel) intensively with Talmudic and Midrashic commentaries, and now into II Samuel, is up here.
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Trump's Bronx speech commentary.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjkoqnkpa6GAxU6_8kDHVZnDLQQwqsBegQIDRAF&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fvideo%2F6353625650112&usg=AOvVaw2STPGCQSeRmLHh1b6YEWvI&opi=89978449
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Chuck
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