At Columbia… that’s all, folx!

Undoubtedly the best moment in the testimony of Minouche Shafik, the President Columbia University, before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week was elicited by Representative Jim Banks. Why, he wanted to know, was the word “folks” spelled “folx” throughout an official guidebook for the School of Social Work?

Shafik coyly suggested that perhaps the authors did not know how to spell, which might well be the case. But you cannot watch her squirming response without feeling the hot, sticky, and slightly nauseating air of disingenuousness wash over the proceeding. 

“Folx,” as Shafik must be aware, is just the latest instance of weaponized orthography disseminated by the academic left. Think “Latinx” and you are on the right track. “Folx” is the certified preferred term for the LGBTQWERTY+ “community,” something Shafik, the leader of an Ivy League outpost of “wokeness,” must surely know. 

In truth, Shafik’s remarks were not as gruesome as the testimony provided to the House last fall by Claudine “Autolycus” Gay, sometime president of Harvard University, Liz Magill, sometime president of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Sally Kornbluth, somehow still the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Back then, in the aftermath of the October 7 slaughter of 1,200 Israelis by the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the latest round of visceral antisemitism on college campuses was just getting started. Representative Elise Stefanik wanted to know whether publicly calling for the murder of Jews violated the conduct of conduct at those august institutions. 

Here’s a bit of news you can use: if you are going to deploy three official mouthpieces to defend the indefensible, do not have them all briefed by the same legal team. Doing so almost guarantees they will come off as moronic, stunted ditto heads, which is exactly what happened when this affirmative-action troika began chattering about “context.”

It was repellent, yes, but also, if you stepped back to consider the purely rhetorical effect of the verbal emissions, grimly comic. The gratifying codicil, as all the world knows, is that Gay and Magill were soon required to put to “former president” on their résumés. Experts are still wondering how Sally Kornbluth escaped the enforced professional preterite. 

A second thing that made Shafik’s performance noteworthy was the coincidence — if it was a coincidence — of a largish “pro-Palestinian,” i.e., antisemitic demonstration at Columbia even as Shafik was puzzling over the not-too-subtle subtleties of the latest efflorescence of “woke” linguistic inanity. The demonstration by the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” was unruly enough that Shafik called in the New York Police Department to break up the festivity of more than 100 protesters. Several were arrested, including Isra Hirsi, daughter of “Squad” member Ilhan Omar, an intern for New York attorney general Letitia James and the daughter of a senior UPS executive who, according to the New York Post, killed an elderly couple with her truck as a teenager and “got off with a slap on the wrist.” 

The whole unseemly spectacle raises at least two large questions. One, why are American colleges and universities such hotbeds of virulent antisemitism? A corollary to that question is why the antisemitism is more pronounced and reflexive the more elite is the institution? Right on cue, Yale was on board announcing its “solidarity” with the Columbia protests, as were other tony institutions.

The performance is partly pathetic, it is true — all those privileged, skirling females of both sexes shouting their “demands” into megaphones. What makes the comedy disagreeable, however, is the dark undercurrent of gutter totalitarian sentiment and hatred that fuels the adolescent tantrums. It is important to keep firmly in mind the connection between these campus-bound expressions of antisemitism and the savage, sanguinary attacks of October 7. At Columbia, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, one wretched professor described them as “awesome,” in response to which the university has done… nothing.

I might frame the second question as an observation. Harvard, UPenn, MIT, Columbia, Dartmouth, Williams: there is an epidemic of distaff leadership in the elite precincts of higher education. It’s almost as if the mentality of the Human Resources establishment had rolled into the leadership of American higher education. This fact raises a host of questions. I won’t try to answer or even fully articulate them now, but I urge you to bear them in mind and ponder their significance.