Commentary
President Donald Trump issued a flurry of executive orders in his first week in office. One of them outlawed DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—quotas, or reverse racial discrimination, whichever term you like to use, in government, but it doesn’t, I think, apply to private entities, unless you enroll at any private entity, a university like mine, Stanford, who gets federal funds, will be subject to it. And that’s going to be tricky, but I hope he tries to make that executive order as well.
My point is, we’ve had some things in the news very quickly. Columbia University, right at the beginning of the new spring semester, had a class offered by a Jewish professor on the history of Israel and Judaism in the Middle East, and it was swarmed by pro-Palestinian protesters. We don’t know who they were. They had masks on, of course, and they disrupted the class because it was taught by [a]
Jewish person and there were Jewish students there, and they disrupted it. And now we’re told that Columbia University, it’s under a shadow of suspicion that they are antisemitic, to tell you the truth.
They are now looking at these people. I would advise all of these people, though, this is not
Joe Biden. If you are on a student visa and you disrupted or broke into a classroom and you, what, committed a felony, or the university suspends you, then I think it’s very likely that the State Department will look at your student visa.
This came up because at New York University last year, during the finals, no less—the same type of protest swarmed the library and disrupted everything and New York University has suspended those pro-Palestinian, I shouldn’t say pro-Palestinian, pro-
Hamas protesters for one year. So, what are they going to do if some of them are on foreign student visas?
My point is this, all of these elite students at these elite universities talk a great game, but when—they’ve never faced any consequences. If Donald Trump and if these universities are afraid of Donald Trump and they clamp down, I think you’re going to see deterrence start to work to discourage other protests, because one thing we know about all these young students, they are careerist and they are used to being pampered, whether they’re Americans or foreigners. And if some of them have to go back to their beloved Palestine or Syria or
Egypt, they’re going to be very unhappy. And if some of these children of the elite are suspended or charged with felonies, and that’s on their record, they’re going to be very unhappy.
I’d like to finish very quickly with another thing that came up related to education. There’s a wonderful interview with Marc Andreessen, the Wall Street entrepreneur financier, but especially a techie. And he was the one that created Netscape. He’s a multibillionaire, along with his partner, Ben Horowitz.
He gave a long interview to a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, but here’s what I’m interested in—at one point, he was asked, what made you change? Why did you endorse Donald Trump? And he said, among other things, they tried to control our industry. In other words, he said, we could deal with the taxes. We could deal even with the regulation, but they wanted to pick winners or losers and deny us to create, to express ourselves.
But here’s the point. He said, and we looked at the students that we were hiring from these elite universities, the DEI people, the radical, and we realized, from what they were saying about us, their employers, they wanted to destroy us.
This should, this should be taken very seriously by Stanford University, by UC Berkeley, by USC, by UCLA, by Caltech, all these universities that feed into Silicon Valley. These people are getting very tired of your graduates going in there and they’re not prepared very well. The entrance exams have been watered down.
There are four years without a SAT requirement, four years without a comparative adjudication of GPA, the quality of the graduates that Silicon Valley people like Andreessen hire is going like this and the activism and the obnoxiousness is going like this. And if I was to distill that entire interview, it would be something like, we in Silicon Valley don’t really respect the Stanford brand or the UCLA brand or the Berkeley brand very much anymore because these people are not very good at what they used to be excellent at, and they don’t like the people who hire them, and the people who hire them are us. So, we’re going to see some big changes, and it’s long overdue.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
