Have some respect for the new president of Dartmouth College, Sian Leah Beilock. A couple of students wore out her patience by responding to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust with a demand that Dartmouth divest from Israel, "recognize the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians and take action to stop Israeli apartheid," and further threatening "physical action." Beilock called in the Hanover Police and had the students arrested for trespassing on campus, according to a news article in the Dartmouth, the student newspaper.

President Trump referred to a New York Times reporter, Maggie Haberman, as "Maggot Haberman" in a Thursday afternoon post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Sharp criticism of the media when warranted is something I've made a career of. I've never been a "never Trumper." And I even empathize with Trump's anger at how he's been treated by partisan prosecutors and by the press. Even so, for the Republican party's leading presidential candidate to make fun of a reporter's name and liken her to a subhuman insect is outrageous. It deserves condemnation.

The comment got little press attention, which is too bad. Usually the press sticks up for its own.

If any readers can't understand what's wrong with this, maybe you never had a bully make fun of your name. We're in a moment in this country and in the world where we need leadership that brings back kindness, civility, and an emphasis on human dignity. Calling someone a "maggot" falls short of that standard.

The former governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, a national co-chair of the No Labels political movement, sent Harvard President Claudine Gay a letter today letting her know that he is withdrawing from planned fellowships at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard School of Public Health. "I cannot condone the dangerous anti-Semitism that has taken root on your campus, especially by more than 30 Harvard student organizations attempting to justify and celebrate Hamas' terrorism against innocent Israeli and American civilians," Hogan wrote.

"This horrific terrorist attack was the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust and it should be universally condemned as exactly what it is: pure evil. While these students have a right to free speech, they do not have a right to have hate speech go unchallenged by your institution. Harvard's failure to immediately and forcefully denounce the anti-Semitic vitriol from these students is in my opinion a moral stain on the University," he wrote.

"Federal Firefighters Face Steep Pay Cuts," is the print headline over a New York Times news article. If you read the article, it explains that Congress had approved a two-year temporary pay raise of either "50 percent of a worker's base salary or $20,000 a year, whichever was lower," that is now set to expire. There's a "framing" issue here: whenever any temporary spending program in Washington approaches expiration, the press and the spending advocates portray the expiration as a "cut."

It's good reason to be skeptical when any program is described as "temporary."

The Wall Street Journal talks to Neuberger Berman's Steve Eisman: "Here's what Eisman is avoiding: 'uninvestable' banks .... While banks might look cheap, he said he doesn't expect their outlook to improve much. Having to pay depositors higher interest rates, prospects of a recession, and increased regulation sap their investability, he says, even if the banking system isn't under any immediate threat."

Making banks "uninvestable" is not a great public-policy outcome, as it increases the chances that either "zombie banks" march along creating a drag on economic growth, or that they need to be closed with the costs socialized to other banks and their customers via deposit insurance premiums. As the September 8, 2023 post here on regional banks concluded, "the government actions to shut down Silicon Valley and Signature mean that anyone investing new capital in a bank or bank holding company risks getting unpredictably zeroed out. That is a deterrent to would-be investors."

Israel's ambassador at the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, is rebuking three American universities.

In a post on X addressed to Harvard, Columbia, and NYU, Erdan said, "you facilitate terrorism. No parent should feel comfortable sending their child to these terror supporting institutions. Jewish life is not cheap. You have lost your moral credibility to educate students. Shame on you."

He was amplifying a post from the official, 1.4 million follower account of Israel's foreign ministry, which said, "To the presidents of @Columbia, @nyuniversity, @Harvard and other universities who have stood SILENT as terror supporters have marched through campus and celebrated raping women, executing children and kidnapping grandmothers, you are cowards."

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni's Steve McGuire has been performing the useful service of collecting and sharing the letters from donors pulling out of Ivy League universities in response to the surging antisemitism on some of the the campuses and the leadership failures in response. One of the best ones that has come across is from Jonathon S. Jacobson of Highsage Ventures here in Boston, who wrote to Penn President Elizabeth McGill in part:

The University that I attended and shaped me is virtually unrecognizable today, and the values it stands for are not American ones. There has been a litany of issues over the past several years where the Administration has shown no leadership, moral courage or an ability to distinguish between what is clearly right and clearly wrong. ... It is said that a fish rots from the head; if those are the free speech principles future journalists are gleaning from their university studies, no wonder the mainstream media's coverage of virtually every issue is infected by extremist political bias....

President Biden is reportedly going to ask Congress for a $100 billion supplemental spending package that includes money for Israel's war, for Ukraine, for the U.S.-Mexico border, and to defend Taiwan.

Part of this is political necessity. The whole foreign aid budget has traditionally gotten through Congress on the basis of support for aid to Israel. Biden can't get enough Republicans in Congress to back money for Ukraine. There'd be political downside to any member voting against aid to Israel after the ISIS-style terrorist attack. So why not use the must-pass Israel legislation as a vehicle to carry some additional national security spending, winning over the votes necessary? The alternative—a "clean," Israel-only supplemental spending measure—would leave Ukraine in the lurch and might lose some Republican members who have been arguing against spending anything more overseas until the southern border is secure.

"Seven Tenured HBS Faculty Speak Out" is the headline over a Harvard Crimson opinion piece claimed as being from Harvard Business School faculty members that says in part, "As tenured HBS faculty, we never imagined we'd need to speak out anonymously about our own institution." It includes an "editors' note" explaining, "We made the decision to run this op-ed anonymously due to concerns of retaliation against the seven authors."

The Brown Daily Herald reports that "On Monday, Talk for Tomorrow — a new group founded by students who have opted to remain anonymous — shared an open letter." The open letter explains "We're doing this as a private signing, to maintain the safety of all signatories."

"How Harvard Lost Its Way and Became Infected With Antisemitism (Hint: It Took a Long Time)" is the headline over my latest article for the New York Sun. Please check the full piece out there for the definitive, detailed account.

is by Micah Goodman in the Times of Israel. Available as a podcast or as an edited transcript.

Key points: "we need the Middle East to fear us and we need the West to love us. But it's a zero-sum game because everything we do in order to restore the fear in the Middle East will erode the love in the West. Well, this is what we're asking the lovers of Israel. Please break that zero-sum game. Stay with us with love while we restore the fear."

"We weren't attacked by a local militia. We were attacked by the Persian Empire. We were attacked by Iran."

Below is compiled an updated list of all the college student newspaper editorials that unequivocally condemn the terrorist attack on Israel from Gaza that killed more than 1,200. A 2013 report counted 1,300 student newspapers in the U.S. I searched far and wide. Here is the list I was able to come up with of the editorials:

"Over These We Weep" – The Yeshiva University Commentator.

So far, that's it. That's the list. One college newspaper editorial.

I'd welcome additional entries to the list—if you have them, post them in the comments or email them in and I will update.

My recent Education Next article about the leadership styles of college presidents and what they might bring to the American political scene included Ben Sasse, the former senator who is now president of the University of Florida. Here is a letter from Sasse:

I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn't be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to "provide context," or try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

"America Is Confronted With a War on Four Fronts, Calling for a New Doctrine in the Years Ahead," is the headline over my latest column at the New York Sun. Please check out the full column over at the Sun.

From the September 21, 2023, Washington Post (headline "Tensions 'beginning to boil' in Gaza as fears of new conflict mount"):

Hamas put its forces on high alert recently, stopping cars near the border to check for Israeli infiltrators. The group held field exercises last week with Islamic Jihad and other armed factions, conducting drills on rocket launches, kidnapping soldiers and "storming settlements," according to local Gazan media.

A country can have the most high-tech weapons and extensive spy network imaginable, but even though a lot of what is in the press is garbage, sometimes it makes sense to read carefully and react accordingly. It all looks clearer in retrospect.