Tag Archive for: ivy league

DHS Just Added Itself To Harvard’s List Of Trump Admin Adversaries

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Wednesday revoked its own grants from Harvard University over its alleged failure to address antisemitism.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced the department is canceling two grants totaling $2.7 million to the school as part of a continued crack down against antisemitism on campus, according to a press release. Noem said the school is “unfit to be entrusted with taxpayer dollars.”

“Harvard bending the knee to antisemitism — driven by its spineless leadership — fuels a cesspool of extremist riots and threatens our national security,” said Secretary Noem. “With anti-American, pro-Hamas ideology poisoning its campus and classrooms, Harvard’s position as a top institution of higher learning is a distant memory. America demands more from universities entrusted with taxpayer dollars.”

The Secretary wrote Harvard a letter demanding details on any violent and illegal activities committed by foreign student visa holders. The letter warned that, if the records were not turned over by April 30, Harvard would lose its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification and be unable to admit foreign students altogether.

Noem claims the $800,303 Implementation Science for Targeted Violence Prevention grant “branded conservatives as far-right dissidents in a shockingly skewed study,” while the $1,934,902 Blue Campaign Program Evaluation and Violence Advisement grant “funded Harvard’s public health propaganda.”

“Both undermine America’s values and security,” the press release stated. “With a $53.2 billion endowment, Harvard can fund its own chaos—DHS won’t.”

The Trump administration on April 11 demanded Harvard agree to a list of reforms to the way it handles antisemitism after a September congressional investigation found “Harvard failed” to enforce meaningful punishment on nearly 70 students who were involved in a multi-day pro-Hamas encampment during the previous spring semester. The changes asked of the school included reforming and better enforcing disciplinary processes for students who participate in antisemitic protests, improving screening of international students for “hostile” views towards America and auditing “programs with egregious records of antisemitism.”

In a public statement Monday afternoon, Harvard declared it “will not surrender” and refused the proposal. The Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, made up of the Department of Education (ED), Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) swiftly revoked over $2 billion in grants to the university hours later.

“Harvard is aware of the Department of Homeland Security’s letter regarding grant cancellations and scrutiny of foreign student visas, which—like the Administration’s announcement of the freeze of $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts, and reports of the revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status—follows on the heels of our statement that Harvard will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” a Harvard spokesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We continue to stand by that statement. We will continue to comply with the law and expect the Administration to do the same.”

“Harvard values the rule of law and expects all members of our community to comply with University policies and applicable legal standards. If federal action is taken against a member of our community, we expect it will be based on clear evidence, follow established legal procedures, and respect the constitutional rights afforded to all individuals,” the spokesman continued.

AUTHOR

Jaryn Crouson

Contributor.

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All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

‘Will Not Surrender’: Harvard Scoffs At Trump Admin’s Demands To Address Antisemitism

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Harvard University announced Monday it will not agree to the Trump administration’s demands to address antisemitism on campus.

The Department of Education (ED) sent a letter to the Ivy League school April 11 demanding the school agree to a host of reforms, including adjusting and enforcing disciplinary processes, improving screening of international students for “hostile” views and auditing “programs with egregious records of antisemitism.” Harvard cited academic freedom concerns and free speech rights in its announcement rejecting ED’s demands.

“We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement,” Harvard president Alan Garber wrote in the announcement. “The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

ED, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the General Services Administration (GSA) initiated in late March a review of more than $8.7 billion worth of grants to Harvard after a September investigation by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce found that “Harvard failed” to discipline students who engaged in antisemitic campus protests. Harvard demonstrators disrupted classes, occupied a campus building and a set up a multi-day encampment.

At the time of the Committee’s investigation, none of the 68 students referred for discipline action regarding their role in the spring semester encampment were suspended.

In its letter to ED, Harvard stated it “is committed to fighting antisemitism and other forms of bigotry” on campus and that it “has undertaken substantial policy and programmatic measures” to address such incidents.

Following the Trump administration’s announcement of Harvard’s grant review, the university preemptively ran to Wall Street, issuing bonds to the tune of $750 million. Harvard has an endowment of over $53 billion.

“Harvard has served as a symbol of the American Dream for generations – the pinnacle aspiration for students all over the world to work hard and earn admission to the storied institution,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in March when announcing the review of the school’s grants. “Harvard’s failure to protect students on campus from anti-Semitic discrimination – all while promoting divisive ideologies over free inquiry – has put its reputation in serious jeopardy. Harvard can right these wrongs and restore itself to a campus dedicated to academic excellence and truth-seeking, where all students feel safe on its campus.”

ED has already revoked funding from several other Ivy League universities over their noncompliance with civil rights laws and federal directives, slashing millions from Columbia, Cornell and Princeton.

The Trump administration has been committed to rooting our antisemitism on college campuses after violent protests were allowed to go on for over a year unchecked. In February, the administration assembled the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, made up of the ED, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and HHS. The task force stated its “first priority will be to root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses” and has since begun its review of schools’ compliance with civil rights enforcement.

The following month, ED sent letters to 60 universities warning them of “potential enforcement actions” if they did not step up to protect Jewish students from harassment and discrimination.

A Harvard spokesman referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to the university’s announcement in response to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

Jaryn Crouson

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Elite University Hosting Biden Center Took Money From School That Settled With US Gov’t Over Alleged Hezbollah Ties

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The University of Pennsylvania, which hosts the Penn Biden Center, took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American University of Beirut (AUB) in 2022, roughly five years after AUB paid a settlement to the United States government in connection with its alleged ties to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terror organization.

UPenn received $474,947 from AUB in 2022, with the donations earmarked as “Education/Tuition/Scholarship,” according to a 2021-2022 foreign gift disclosure obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. AUB settled a lawsuit with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, paying $700,000 and promising to revise its policies, following a suit alleging the university assisted organizations linked to Hezbollah, Reuters reported.

Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed terror organization that has attacked U.S. and Israeli embassies, was implicated in the assignation of a Lebanese prime minister and has carried out suicide bombings, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States designated Hamas as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997, according to the State Department.

Federal prosecutors said that AUB admitted to training members of al Nour Radio and al Manar TV, media outlets designated by the U.S. Treasury Department as branches of Hezbollah in 2006. “Al Manar and al Nour are the media arms of the Hizballah terrorist network and have facilitated Hizballah’s activities,” a press release from the Treasury Department reads.

“Hizballah” is an alternative way to transliterate “Hezbollah.”

The media organizations solicited donations for Hezbollah, aided in the terrorist group’s recruitment efforts and had their budgets managed and overseen by the secretary general of Hezbollah, according to the Treasury Department.

Prosecutors also said that AUB connected students to Jihad al-Binaa, a construction company the Treasury Department says was “formed and operated by Hizballah.”

AUB provided video production and blogging training to representatives of terrorist-linked groups alongside journalists, Reuters reported.

Some American universities have partnered with Israeli-designated terror organizations or had ties with Palestinian colleges that released pro-Hamas statements. Nonprofits financed by George Soros paid out millions to fund a partnership between Bard College and a Palestinian university that praised Hamas the day after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks, law schools encouraged their students to work at organizations deemed to be terrorists by the Israeli government and Georgia State University cut ties with a college in the West Bank after the Daily Caller News Foundation reported on it praising deceased Hamas terrorists.

The University of Pennsylvania didn’t refer to Hamas as a terrorist group following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks until after a prominent donor said his family would cut off financial support to the university.

UPenn received millions in donations from Chinese donors tied to Hunter Biden.

The Penn Biden Center, established on Feb. 8, 2018, in honor of now-President Joe Biden, exists to “convene world leaders, develop and advance smart policy, and strengthen the national debate for continued American global leadership in the 21st century,” according to its website.

While UPenn received money from Chinese donors linked to the president’s son and AUB, there is no way to know whether that money funded the Penn Biden Center.

The University of Pennsylvania and AUB did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SCHMAD

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Go Woke, Go Broke Lesson Three: Do Not Hire Out-Of-Touch Ivy Leaguers To Run Bud Light

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Corporate America has not completely lost its marbles, but the bag sprang a leak about 10 years ago.

The Bud Light debacle could be another teachable moment for “woke” corporate America — if they listen. Know your customer. And if you do not know your customer, hire someone who does.

The public embarrassment of Bud Light missing the mark on an advertising campaign has cost the company billions in sales and market capitalization. Guess whose brainchild it was to plaster a flamboyant transvestite’s picture on its blue-collar beer brand? An out-of-touch, virtue signaling leftie, Mrs. Alissa Heinerscheid. And … wait for it … wait for it … a Harvard, Groton and Wharton grad. Her personal pronouns are “dumb” and “ass.”

In a video, Mrs. Heinerscheid proclaimed herself a hero by saying that if she did not do anything, there was no future for Bud Light. Really?  Bud Light, an iconic Budweiser brand, had no future? As she put it, except for her bravery Bud Light would no longer sell.

So she tried to change this great brand from Bud Light to Bud Light-in-the-Loafers.

In a leftist word salad worthy of a Kamala Harris speech, her stated goal with Bud was “inclusivity and shifting the tone.” No, your job is to sell beer, usually to middle-aged white men who have very real and very hard jobs that provide goods and services to people like you.

Thank goodness Mrs. Heinerscheid is white so Anheuser Busch could fire her. This speaks volumes about the curious, coastal liberal, elite class isolation and echo chamber thinking prevalent in people in her position in corporate America. This is the same thinking that prevails in both the Centers for Disease Control and the ruling political class in Washington, D.C.

The leaders of this generation, especially at the Ivy League, say they want to change the world, but they don’t even know how to change a tire.

Like actors, teachers and politicians, what corporations have come to realize is that the media and the policing authorities of the Democrat Party will leave you alone and let you do just about anything if you repeat their dictates. So, they went with a guy who really knows how to dictate, transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney.

You could argue that Bud Light has always been trans: it is water that identifies itself as a good beer. As a bourbon drinker, I think Bud Light is so weak that I call it the “official beer of child custody hearings.”

The tone-deaf nature of this beer campaign is repeated daily in corporate America by a class of young, left wing-indoctrinated, Ivy League dolts who could not run a hardware store. I worked on Wall Street with these type folks. They are no smarter than any state college graduate. And they are much more dangerous because the arrogance of their Ivy League indoctrination imbues  them with the false belief that they are much smarter than they really are. Doing well on the education industry-contrived SAT has become the marker for hiring rather than common sense and an up-through-the-ranks work ethic.

Hubris can remain at Harvard, but please do not try any of your “theories” about what is best for us on us. Keep those contained in your doctoral thesis for peer-reviewed papers.

The Ivy League, and thus corporate America, are in cultural decay.  They are managed by scared and “woke” people who are incentivized not by results but by tokenism, in a bureaucratic morass in which incompetence can hide.

I tell this joke when I speak at colleges. Three men are scheduled for electric chair execution on Death Row. One graduated from the University of Tennessee, the second from Alabama and the third from Harvard. The Warden and preacher are there, and all three death row prisoners are watching. The UT guy gets in the chair.  They try to execute him; sparks fly and the electric chair fails. The Warden and preacher say, “It is God’s will, he must be innocent,” and they free the man. Then the ‘Bama grad is seated, and the same thing happens. Preacher and Warden say, “It’s God’s will” and free the man. Having witnessed all this, the Harvard guy is last. The same thing happens: sparks fly and the officials say he is free to go. The Harvard grad says, “Wait a minute, if you just take that wire there and reconnect it to …”

EQ trumps IQ – every time.

AUTHOR

RON HART

A libertarian op-ed humorist and award-winning author, Ron is a commentator on radio and TV. He can be contacted at Ron@RonaldHart.com or @RonaldHart on Twitter.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.