The Unkindest Cut of All

 

Sally Kornbluth, President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the aftermath of a Congressional hearing exploring the policies of presidents at prestigious universities where ugly antisemitic protests have occurred since October 7 without much disciplinary response, I found this portion of a N.Y. Post article headlined “Harvard, MIT presidents face increased calls to ‘do the right thing’”:

 

FTA: <<The executive committee of the MIT Corporation, meanwhile, said Kornbluth had their “full and unreserved support” in a statement Thursday.

Liyam Chitayat, an Israeli PhD student at MIT, gave an impassioned speech calling out Kornbluth for her comments and the executive board for its response.

“Since the executive board responded to this pathetic congressional hearing of our President Sally Kornbluth by stating that they support Sally for her ‘excellent moral compass,’ I have to ask all of you about this continuous obsession with context,” Chitayat said in the speech, a video of which was posted online Saturday night. 

“I want someone to tell me, when is the right context to come and urinate on the window of the prayer room at MIT Hillel in front of the Jewish praying students inside there?” said Chitayat, while highlighting some of the antisemitic attacks Jewish students at MIT have recently endured. 

“Tell me when is the right context to respond to reports of students facing blatant antisemitism by telling them, ‘Well, you can try talking to the police, you can go to therapy or you can go back to where you came from?’” she continued. “I want to know when a dozen students are allowed to storm in and harass individual staff members that work, or are Jewish and are Israeli.”

“Somehow, there’s a context in which you can tell Jewish students not to come to the entrance of MIT and go to the back door to their classes,” Chitayat, a doctoral student studying computational and systems biology at MIT, added.

“There is context where it makes sense that 70% of Jewish students at MIT do not show any sign that they’re Jewish because they’re scared. There is a context where a chaplain advisor is allowed to stop an event four times to say that Israelis are European racists, white colonizers, right before asking who in this room eats kosher.”

Chitayat went on to say that she sees the faces of some of the Israelis taken hostage by Hamas in those of her own family, and when she looks in the mirror, “I see the face of Naama Levy, who was seen being dragged through the streets of Gaza with blood gushing through her thighs.”

She then turned her attention to Kornbluth and Gay, addressing them both by name as she asked: “When you look in the mirror what do you see?”>>

I admit I was astonished. It’s not surprising that six of the eight Ivy League Universities have female Presidents. But it never occurred to me that MIT, the Vatican of Engineering in these United States had also drunk itself into a stupor on the woke Koolaid that’s even more dangerous than Fentanyl to the intelligentsia of the nation. MIT doesn’t have a law school, medical school, or journalism school, institutions that are enrolling women at an unprecedented rate to paper over lack of achievement in other areas, notably the hard sciences and the technological disciplines. For context, here’s a glance at some of many statistics I have compiled recently to illustrate the differences between the sexes in professions and trades.

Two additional kinds of data to provide context: 1) The primacy of engineering as an American profession, responsible for the design and manufacture of everything we need to live our modern material lives (see this old post of mine from 2019, What We Owe All Those Evil White Men) 2) the full extent of the lack of female participation in the building and maintenance of the infrastructure specified in engineering blueprints, including their low participation rates as electricians (2.5%), plumbers (3.5%), automobile mechanics (2%), construction workers (14%), house painters (16%), bridge painters (13%), telephone linemen (5%), water and sewer workers (6%), manufacturing workers (29%), highway maintenance workers (10%), commercial pilots (5%), truck drivers (5%), train operators (3%), seafaring ship crews (2%), oil roughnecks (5%), dock workers (7%), fishermen (10%), loggers (16%), tree surgeons (8%), game wardens (26%), police officers (13%), firefighters (4%), military troops (17%), and even chefs/head cooks (23%). 

This is the physical world and its operation presided over by MIT and other institutions dedicated primarily to making the brick and mortar and steel and wood and plastic and electronic and other concrete environments we inhabit. Historically, the Ivy League has been the realm of books and ideas and abstract knowledge and creation. They have no libraries to study in and no campuses to think in without the ones who do the math and build the paths and walls that protect them.

So who is the woman MIT found to be the best possible leader of its faculty and student body? Here are the basics from Wiki:

Interesting. Having made the decision that their President had to be a woman regardless, the Trustees chose carefully, cherry-picking credentials around but not within the CHYOS set of Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Stanford. Her undergrad degree was from one of the ‘Little Three” elite colleges (Williams, Amherst and Wesleyan) who look down on Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and her necessary link to the poisonous atheism taproot of the 20th Century was not Oxford but Cambridge, where she took her bachelor of science degree. Clever. Of course, her first study concentration out of the gate was in political science, one of the five junkiest majors offered by elite liberal arts colleges, the others being sociology, psychology, ethnic/gender studies, and contemporary culture. All of these are more BS than science. Odd that MIT would choose a BA in the favorite major of law school aspirants, preparation for using words to arrive at pre-ordained positions in a plausible, logical-sounding way. 

All of this is a given, unnecessary of further analysis. But I do have one question. Isn’t Kornbluth a Jewish name? Here’s the first link Google gave me a few minutes ago…

Kind of reinforces the question Liyam Chitayat asked to her face in front of the executive committee of the MIT Corporation, doesn’t it?  If she can’t recognize the deadly dagger point of the anvil on which she’s broken her own career, that would be the unkindest cut of all, wouldn’t it?

I’ve already raised the issue of the schism in the hateful alliances that make up the Democrat Party. (See my post on The San Andreas Fault Line in the Democrat Party.) Situations like the fix the rotten higher education establishment has gotten itself into are merely the bitter icing on an evil cake. I don’t care what Harvard and MIT do, or what the Democrat Caucus in Congress does. They’re already sellouts of everything they’ve claimed to believe for at least a hundred years.

All that’s left now is finding viable alternatives to the diseased institutions that have betrayed us and themselves.