In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Every now and then, calls appear for greater involvement of university alumni in governance and decisionmaking at their respective schools. I'm not entirely sure why alumni are especially qualified to do this, especially in light of the general decline in educational standards -- if the value of a four-year degree is decreasing, why should the university seek out the guidance of former students who are its own low-quality product? After a lifetime, I'm able to ask that question now. I didn't ask that question 25 years or so ago, when I got involved in the alumni trustee movement at Dartmouth. I think the best argument I heard was in effect that membership on university boards is dominated by very wealthy donors who are representing largely plutocratic interests, and the selection process bypasses potential candidates who may represent other points of view. In the case of Dartmouth, the unique history of its board offered a potential test case : The s...

This is in the pull quote from David Brooks's latest at The Atlantic . Yesterday it was apparently the new article for the day that The Atlantic deemed worthy of exempting from its paywall, so I skimmed it. Intending to discuss it in greater detail today, I found that it's back behind the paywall, and the task of starting a free trial so I could go back to it proved too daunting. I think the gravamen of his argument is that there are polite Ivy Leaguers, who run the world, and impolite ones, who are trying to take over. He makes the point that just about everyone in the Trump cabinet has an Ivy degree, but they're terrible people like Pete Hegseth (Princeton), Bobby Kennedy (Harvard), and Scott Bessent (Yale). Brooks tries to tie both Trump and Elon Musk to Penn, but neither has degrees from Penn's College of Arts and Sciences, the traditionally Ivy style liberal-arts school there, but The Wharton School, the business school, instead. He then goes to some leng...

The Guardian ran an "exclusive" yesterday that had nothing new on a two week old story but continued to get everything wrong: According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of Waltz, their national security surrogate. Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story. . . . According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be relat...

Just this morning I saw yet another threat to an Ivy over anti-Semitism and DEI : The Trump administration is poised to block $510 million in federal grants and contracts for Brown University over the school's response to antisemitism on campus, the New York Times reported. Following the report, Brown Provost Frank Doyle said in an email that the school couldn't substantiate the information but was aware of "troubling rumors" about federal action against its funding. The potential freeze follows similar moves by the US government against Columbia, Harvard and Princeton, Brown's Ivy League peers. As I noted yesterday, Alan Dershowitz never believed that the Ivies ever dropped Jewish quotas, they just disguised them throughout the postwar period as geographical "diversity" admissions preferences -- if you were applying to Harvard from someplace like Kansas or Montana, you got a few extra points, not least because you probably weren't Jewish. ...

Ingrid Jacques at USA Today : Money talks. That’s the message coming loud and clear from the country’s universities, as they respond to demands from the Trump administration to strip “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts and antisemitism from their campuses. College administrators who might otherwise have rolled their eyes at such demands are paying attention now that their federal funding – provided by taxpayers – is on the line. But it isn't just DEI : The Trump administration has suspended several dozen federally funded research grants to Princeton University as part of its investigation into campus anti-Semitism, according to a Princeton University email published by the Daily Princetonian student newspaper. The email, dated April 1 and sent to the campus community by university President Christopher Eisgruber, said the university received the notification from the funding agencies, including the Departments of Energy, Defense, and NASA. . . . Eisgru...

More has trickled out about the National Security Council firings yesterday following the Signal flap, along witn a couple of new firings just this morning : President Donald Trump fired Air Force General Timothy Haugh, the Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and head of U.S. Cyber Command. General Haugh, a Biden holdover who assumed leadership of both agencies in 2024, has been relieved of his duties effective immediately, the New York Post reported. General Haugh, who succeeded Gen. Paul Nakasone nearly a year ago, was informed by the White House that his tenure had concluded. His civilian deputy at the NSA, Wendy Noble, was also relieved of her duties. . . . Notably, this follows a meeting between President Trump and conservative activist Laura Loomer, who has been vocal about the need for personnel who are steadfastly loyal to the President’s agenda. The Gateway Pundit reported on Thursday that during Loomer’s meeting with Trump, Loomer asked Trump to fire s...

The thing that struck me about Trump's moves on the migration crisis was that they simply removed at least two legs of the stool that held the whole situation up -- he closed the border by eliminating the policy of paroling anyone who wanted to come in, and he ended the funding to the dozen or so faith-based NGOs that ran the migrant programs, both the ones that settled groups into small cities and towns in the interior and the ones that ran the camps at the border. That transformed the whole situation within weeks. At the same time, he's working to knock legs off the stool that's held up the Ivy League and other prestige universities . The Trump administration’s drive to clean up woke elite universities continues, with Princeton and the big tuna, Harvard, both under the microscope. Princeton reportedly faces a pause on some $210 million in federal funds as the Department of Education investigates it for allowing antisemitism to fester unchecked, concealed as ...