Billionaire donors have spent weeks behind the scenes attempting to smear students

[TomDaisy]

"Billionaire donors have spent weeks behind the scenes attempting to smear students with a definition of antisemitism that would get them laughed out of the classrooms they’re trying to purge."

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/inside-new-college-of-floridas-counter-commencement/

Inside New College of Florida’s Counter-Commencement
As Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo plunge ahead with the school’s transformation into a right-wing clown college, the students have become the adults in the room.

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Billionaire donors have spent weeks behind the scenes attempting to smear students with a definition of antisemitism that would get them laughed out of the classrooms they’re trying to purge. Perhaps that’s an acknowledgement of private universities’ function as little more than billion-dollar hedge funds with an education sideline that provides a constant stream of dollars: If too much institutional money pulls out of Israel, why, that’s bad for everyone’s investments, yours and mine, buddy!

But what they did was set about denying tenure, allowing academic fields to grow and remain fallow, tearing down transgender-inclusive signage, painting over student murals, and raiding the New College Foundation to maximize bonuses for a lifelong Tallahassee apparatchik with zero relevant experience or aptitude. And—you know what, lets get some jocks in here. They’re mostly conservative, and the governor was good at baseball. Let’s do it and be legends.

The suppression of speech in the Ivy League and on campuses around the country is more concrete and more immediate now. It has to be. It is easier to silence and marginalize a crowd demonstrating in support of critical race theory or gender studies as pedagogy than it is to silence a crowd full of people who are spending $80,000 per year to attend a school that they know will use those funds to underwrite the bombing and starvation of tens of thousands of women and children. That is an outrage birthed in blood—one that the opponents of student protests are historically illiterate enough to try to repress in the same way.

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