SHOPPING FOR ACADEMIC PRINCIPLES.

I'm quite clear on what the role of a university ought to be.  "Universities best serve their students through rigorous development of reasoning skills and respect for what we have learned."  That's based on Richard "Underground Grammarian" Mitchell.  "And that’s what a university is, if it is a university, and not a jumped-up trade school, or a conditioning station for docile citizens, or a pulpit of ideology. It is a place devoted to the study and preservation and nurture of whatever human wisdom can be found that pertains to everybody who lives, or has lived, or ever will live, on Earth."

Of late, though, the spineless careerists in charge of higher education have behaved as if they most feared the professional protest communities in their midst.  Little did I recognize, when I wrote, only a month ago, that donors could close their checkbooks, how quickly that would become a preference cascade.  "The cynic in me wonders, particularly those who hold legitimate alternative views and write large checks to Harvard Med or the local university foundation?"

Oh, there have always been people, dating at least as far back as the campaign to remove tribal references and replace them with eagles, who take issue and remove their support.  Within the past month, numerous large donors at institutions you might have heard of have put the development office on notice that as long as favoritism for jihad is the institutional ethos, the shekels are going to go the way of the wampum.

It won't stop there, either.  Julia Conley of Common Dreams has found some friends of the jihad who are also closing their checkbooks.

Alumni of at least three elite U.S. universities are adding their voices to the growing resistance to the United States' unquestioning support for Israel's bombardment of Gaza—announcing Friday that they would withhold donations to their alma maters unless the schools reverse their suspension of pro-Palestinian rights groups on campus.

More than 2,000 graduates of Columbia University and Barnard College signed a scathing letter accusing the schools institutionalizing "anti-Palestinian racism" by suspending the campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace.

Gerald Rosberg, chair of the Columbia University Special Committee on Campus Safety, cited no examples when he announced last week the two groups would be suspended through the end of the fall term for using "threatening rhetoric and intimidation" at an "unauthorized event."

Campus Republicans have long understood this sort of favoritism.  Only recently, though, have we seen dueling closures of the checkbooks.

Columbia's decision last week followed pressure from many wealthy pro-Israel donors at universities including Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell to take a firm stance against pro-Palestinian voices on campus—whose calls for a cease-fire in Gaza echo the vast majority of American voters.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time for the careerists who run the universities to rediscover their proper calling. "Faculty members who have been especially focused on defending their freedom of speech need to be paying more attention to the quality of it."  If the donors are shopping for favorable mentions in the curriculum, they're not that serious about the proper role of the university, are they?

That's where the public get a say.  Use your academic status to make a silly argument, on a non-private platform or wherever, brace yourself for the incoming. "We don't refute people like this. We mock them. And we pity the students in their classes."

And perhaps we pity the donors who labored under the impression that dispassionate inquiry was the way of the universities.