When the university is hopeless and stupid, what is left?

I just read an article, American, well documented and sadly very pertinent to the situation of our brothers in America today; it was about the american elite unniversity and their patrons in the 1930’s; a genuinely elite group before FDR’s New Deal and WWII and the GIBill of Rights and all the public education we take for granted was instituted, the 1930’s when only the rich could afford education…. our photos and TV documentaries of the 1930’s consistently stick to pictures of the poor South, The Dust Bowl and The Grapes of Wrath etc.,.

The article is about how Columbia University today with its pro-Arab anti-American agitations is a replica of the 1930’s, e.g., it’s an account of our Ivy League (plus Howard) universities in the 30’s who brought German Reich authorities, dignitaries as guests and faculty to speak and influence campus life and politics…. the exchange of students, summer programs and courses initiated by German departments in the US….. the bias on campuses against Jewish scholars and protesters in not allowing them to protest Hitler etc., etc., ..That is, Germany was investing monies and propaganda into forming loyalties among American Germans and in influencing politics favoring Hitler through American universities. And the situation for Jews on campuses today is: Pro-Arab power, students and ideology is consuming the lifeblood of the University.

I’d always written the history of my life and birth in America as the story of a first-generation american jew and his struggles to find a place under the sun: to escape the laboring class into the professions, the suburbs- into a different and educated class of gentile, where the Town Hall principles of democracy can work. And I did my part. Newark Rutgers was $400 a year and so I went to Montclair though in the years since I’ve recognized it was self-confidence dodging me; and with the assumtion this was the Jewish story of all of us- proud I was, so proud of New York City and the civilization that we had wrought; for we were a good people; from a class of people that for centuries had been under subjugation and deprivations of insecurity, physicalfears and beatings and progroms…a class of people where to attain mere subsistence had been a miracle and yet here in NYC our skills and solidarity had been rewarded….and attaining safety, the will to share and gratitude for the laws and decencies of the population made us the social activists, the Liberals, the Liberal academics that brought Senator Kravitz of New York with support to introduce the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I marched with everyone else. Nothing can erase the significance and factuality of the Jew in the drive for equality.

I was born in 1934 in the Margaret Hague Hospital, of Jersey City, it was free and my parents were very young and very poor; my father was a hat maker and mother a hat trimmer and the two in 1940 opened a store on 125th and 8th avenue. it’s impossible to transfer the feeling for its a collective a world of sights and sounds and a penny for ices….I am left with saying, it was awful, the Depression…..and of course Harlem was very poor but I played in front of the store and was very happy. For I had something unknown to any other 6 year old……next door the second-hand women’s clothing store….the old ladies who called me sweetie and honey and were as they said, ‘from the south’ put the whole place at my disposal, they let me try on every hat, parade in every shoe and I dreamt and imagined greatness and beauty. And I told my father I would be a teacher at which he laughed and said, ‘Oh Goldie, you’re no realist’. In Israel they say friar’

The point I’ve been so long in coming to: it was about 1939 when first I heard ‘University’,my cousin Gerry was so smart….there had been an exam.. the government was sending him away to university.(It was NYC that had undergraduate free local colleges) A remarkable thing for us and much remembered. But imagine Gerry’s grandaughter is today in Columbia, perhaps even faculty, What would she say about Mamdani? and should Trump withold monies from Harvard, Columbia? Should the university be an indepemdemt institution free to take sides in politics? free to vote democratically about divestments to Israel? Or would the grandaughter say the History of Columbia and NYC also counts; people built it and suffered for it and these things can’t be disposed of by the vote or the power politics of the moment. There is an obligation to the history of the past.

When Jerry started no one questioned that the University was a value in itself and above all politics. Can we survive as a civilization if it is not?
And have we degenerated to such barbarity that campus protest, the pleasure of being young, is now a menace?