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    US students rally college voters on campus: ‘We brought the polls to them’

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    College students formed a steady line outside a campus art museum to vote early on Tuesday at a pop-up polling place at the University of Minnesota.The one-day site, enabled by new state laws that allow for pop-up early voting, helps populations like student voters, who may not have access to transportation to get off campus, easily access the polls.“We brought the polls to them,” said Riley Hetland, a sophomore and undergraduate student government civic engagement director, who helped plan the event.Hetland said the group has been going to classrooms and hosting tables around campus for weeks to get people registered to vote and help them make a plan to cast ballots. So far, they have gotten 12,000 students to pledge to vote, double their goal of 6,000, a sign of the enthusiasm young people have to perform their civic duty in the presidential election, she said. More than 600 people voted during the seven hours the pop-up site was open on Tuesday, organizers said.Across the country, college campuses and campaigns have ramped up efforts to register and energize college voters, especially in critical swing states. The Democratic party is counting on high turnout on college campuses, which tend to lean Democratic..Kamala Harris’s campaign on Wednesday announced it was launching an early voting push targeting students on campuses in battleground states, including a seven-figure ad buy to primarily target students on social media.College campuses are also organizing their own get-out-thevote efforts. At the University of California Berkeley, hundreds of students came together recently for an event called Votechella, which featured music and on-site voter registration, the state university system said. The name is a nod to Coachella, the popular music festival held annually in southern California.At the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, students have reacted positively to outreach efforts on campus, where a second voting hub opened on Monday, according to CBS News.Nevaeh McVey, a student, told CBS: “I come from a place where I wasn’t really educated about how to vote or who to vote for, and I think getting the younger population to vote is extremely important in times like these. I just think [this initiative] makes it really easy and accessible for us students to do.”The push to mobilize young voters comes as some students are facing challenges in casting their ballot. Leaders of some Republican-controlled states have worked to limit student voting, writing legislation to limit the use of student identification cards as an ID at polls and shuttering on-campus polling precincts.Proponents of these measures claim that they are necessary to prevent voter fraud, while others have railed that voting is too easy for university students.The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has urged the US justice department to investigate text messages they believe targeted young people to dissuade them from voting. The organization received complaints from voters who received a text that read: “WARNING: Violating WI Statutes 12.13 & 6.18 may result in fines up to $10,000 or 3.5 years in prison. Don’t vote in a state where you’re not eligible.”College students could prove integral in tipping swing states, as they are traditionally permitted to vote either in their home state or where they attend school. Some students have registered in the state where they believe their vote might have the most impact.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ve seen dozens of elections up and down the ballot over the course of the last few years that have been decided by as close as one vote,” Clarissa Unger, co-founder and executive director of Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, told ABC News.“Every single college student’s vote can be consequential.”Throughout the day on Tuesday, the line for the pop-up site in Minnesota held dozens of people who passed by between classes, came to campus specifically for the voting site or walked over from their dorms. A 30ft inflatable eagle helped set a fun atmosphere for voting – and the free pizza didn’t hurt.There are election day polling places on campus, but the pop-up site is the only on-campus early voting opportunity. And it doesn’t require voters to live in any specific precinct – any Minneapolis voter could cast a ballot there on Tuesday. Joslyn Blass, a senior and undergraduate student government director of government and legislative affairs, said the group has pushed for early voting because there could be various obstacles – like an exam or getting sick – that can get in the way of voting solely on 5 November. “We really prioritize the early voting site, just because you never know what’s gonna happen,” she said.Madelyn Ekstrand finished her class for the day and waited about an hour to cast her ballot. The 21-year-old senior said abortion access and the climate crisis were important to her, so she was voting for Harris.“I’m happy to see people my age getting out and voting and being proactive and not waiting till the last second,” she said. More

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      Could young voters in Michigan hand the state to Kamala Harris?

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      So few students wanted to join the campus Republican party when Abigail Sefcik began studying at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU) that she was rapidly voted in as its president.“The group was only four or five people. Nobody else wanted to do it,” she said.Four years later, Sefcik has turned her back on the Republicans and is supporting Kamala Harris for president.“In 2020, I voted for Donald Trump. I was being sucked into his void and I said some really disparaging things about other people. I did some things that I would just really call shameful when I think of them,” said the political science student in her final year at university.“But after a couple of years, I decided that there wasn’t a lot that the Republicans stood for that I really cared about.”Rejecting Trump and the Republicans was one thing, but Sefcik found little to inspire her in Joe Biden’s run for re-election. Then the president dropped out the race in July and Harris rapidly became the de facto Democratic candidate.“I couldn’t identify with Joe Biden as a good leader. When we were looking at a ticket with Biden and Trump, of course I was going to vote for Biden. But I would do so unwillingly because we know what the alternative would be,” she said.“Kamala Harris provides a way out for a lot of voters. Her youth, for one thing, has inspired a lot of young people.”A recent Harvard Kennedy School poll gives Harris a two-to-one lead over Trump among voters aged 18 to 29. Harris has the support of 64% of younger voters to 32% for Trump principally because of significantly higher approval ratings on the issues of the climate crisis, abortion rights and healthcare. Harris also scores much better with younger voters on empathy, reliability and honesty.View image in fullscreenThe Kennedy School polling director, John Della Volpe, said the findings showed “a significant shift in the overall vibe and preferences of young Americans” in favour of Harris compared with Biden.“In just a few weeks, Vice-President Harris has drummed up a wave of enthusiasm among young voters. The shift we are seeing toward Harris is seismic, driven largely by young women,” he said.The challenge for the Harris campaign is to translate that enthusiasm into votes where it matters.SVSU is one such place. The university has about 7,000 students. The vast majority can vote in Michigan, a battleground state that Trump won by fewer than 11,000 votes in 2016.With polls showing the former president and Harris closely tied in Michigan, student votes potentially carry significant weight in a state that the vice-president’s campaign sees as a key part of her clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.Leah Craig is campaigning for Harris on campus and registering her fellow students to vote. She did not volunteer for Biden’s campaign even though she would have voted for him. But Harris prompted Craig to get involved.“It was reinvigorating, to say the least. When Biden was the candidate, I wasn’t really passionate about it and it just felt like I was going into another election of the-lesser-of-two-evils kind of a thing. But the Harris campaign brought a new level of attention to a lot of issues that people of my generation are really passionate about,” she said.“We now have an easier candidate to embrace, an easier candidate to advocate for, an easier candidate to appeal to young people.”Many students at SVSU talk about Harris’s relative youth. Although at 59 she is old enough to be a grandmother to the students, they see a sharp contrast in energy and spirit compared with Biden and Trump. Noah Johnson, president of the SVSU Democrats, also credits a determined social media campaign for drawing in younger voters.“A lot of it is due to a big initial social media push. I saw it definitely resonate with some people, like Charli xcx when she tweeted out the Kamala brat thing. That was effective with young people. And similarly, like the coconut tree meme,” he said.“It’s like a permission structure. It wasn’t cool or popular to be a fan of Biden. Students were like: ‘Sure, I support his policies.’ But it was very rare to find a young person that was actively a fan of him. It was more: ‘I’ll vote for him, especially because I like him more than Trump.’ But I’ve definitely seen, especially from my less politically engaged friends, they’re actively excited to go out and vote for Kamala even if they’re not doing anything else.”Still, the Harvard youth poll found a significant gender gap, with the vice-president garnering 17% more support among young female voters than those who are male, although a majority of young men say they will vote for Harris. Sefcik said she saw that at SVSU, where the small membership of the campus Republican party is mostly male while a majority of the college Democrats are women.Trump held a rally at SVSU last week but said little to directly address younger voters or their concerns, perhaps because relatively few students attended and the former president failed to fill the 4,000-seat sports hall.A student who did attend and said he supported Trump didn’t want to give his name. Asked why not, he replied: “There’s no problem at SVSU. I feel like people are respectful of each other’s views. I have friends on both sides. But it’s not like that outside. Saying you vote for Trump could cost you a job.”Many of SVSU’s students come from rural and small-town Michigan, and grew up in Republican neighbourhoods and homes. Sefcik’s disillusionment with Trump went hand in hand with questioning her upbringing in a religious and politically conservative family. But she also became more dismayed with the Republican party as she experienced it from the inside.Sefcik said that as president of the campus Republicans, she would attend fundraising events where the donors expected to hear how she was suffering at the hands of “woke” students and liberal professors.“They want to hear about how hard it is to be a conservative college student and how the system is just not benefiting you anymore. And so you sort of learn these two or three talking points to reinforce that. But in my experience, it wasn’t hard, because people who identified as Democrats were kind and most welcoming people I ever met,” she said.The SVSU Republicans declined a request for an interview.Two days after Trump’s rally, a different student crowd turned out to hear Bernie Sanders speak in support of Harris on the campus.Sanders hit all the right notes for a young audience. Abortion rights, the housing crisis, the US moving ever closer to becoming an oligarchy. He gave a discourse on the dangers of electing Trump again, warning that if he is returned to the White House the world will have “lost the struggle” against the climate crisis.But Sanders also illustrated the gap with Harris as he called for universal public healthcare – “Medicare for all” – in contrast with her much weaker proposals for drug price controls and greater regulation of medical providers.Some of Harris’s more active supporters on campus say that she falls short on some policies but they see other strengths. Although Harris has avoided putting her race and gender at the fore of her campaign, Craig said it was important to some students.“From what I’ve observed around campus, it makes people of our demographic feel more heard and seen and that’s a really big thing, too,” she said.Several students see Harris as a break with being raised in an age of apprehension. Sefcik said people her age “grew up with the fear after 9/11 and have never known a world where we were sort of safe”. She said Trump exacerbated that with his attacks on minority groups and by packing the supreme court to strip women of control over their bodies.Craig described students who recently began at university as spending their teenage years living in the “Trump era of American carnage”.“This is all they’ve ever known. The Biden years are pretty much scrambling to undo what had been done and fix things. I feel like there’s a certain level of despondency whereas, as Harris herself said, she is about bringing joy to people, making it a little more positive and upbeat as compared to the same old. It’s a new approach,” she said.Still, the challenge of making sure students actually vote remains. There are reasons for the Democrats to be optimistic on that score. Four years ago, a historic high of 66% of American college students voted in the presidential election, a huge leap from 2016, when just 52% turned out.The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education called the increase “stunning” and attributed it to a range of factors, including student activism on “racial injustice, global climate change, and voter suppression”. Revulsion with Trump also drove a lot of people to the polls.Harris’s supporters also note that nearly half of SVSU students voted in large numbers in the midterms two years ago, just months after the US supreme court threw out the constitutional right to an abortion by overturning Roe v Wade – a larger turnout than in the rest of Saginaw county.Craig is pushing a widely heard message among Democrats that Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016 by 10,704 votes is equivalent to just two ballots in each of the state’s election precincts.“We are telling them, all it takes is taking a couple of people with you. Talk to your friends, reach out on social media. You don’t have to go knocking door to door, you don’t have to be standing out here with a clipboard. You don’t have to go do anything terribly crazy. You just have to get two people to vote,” she said. More

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      Ex-senator and university president’s spending is under state scrutiny

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      Increased spending by the recently resigned University of Florida president Ben Sasse is coming under scrutiny after a student-run newspaper found that he awarded secretive consulting contracts and gave high-paying jobs to former members of his US Senate staff and Republican allies – actions that he defended on Friday.Both Governor Ron DeSantis and Florida’s chief financial officer are calling on the state university system’s governing board to investigate after the Independent Florida Alligator reported this week that as school president, Sasse gave six former staffers and two ex-Republican officials jobs with salaries that outstripped comparable positions. Most did not move to Gainesville – but work remotely from hundreds of miles away.Sasse, a former Nebraska senator, became the school’s president in February 2023.Overall, Sasse’s office spent $17.3m during his first year compared with the $5.6m spent by his predecessor Kent Fuchs in his final year. The university has an overall budget of $9bn.DeSantis’s office issued a statement saying that the governor “take[s] the stewardship of state funds very seriously and [has] already been in discussions with leadership at the university and with the [governing] board to look into the matter”.The chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, wrote on the social media platform X that the Alligator’s report “is concerning” and that the governing board “should investigate this issue to ensure tuition and tax dollars are being properly used”.Sasse resigned on 31 July, citing his wife’s recent diagnosis with epilepsy after years of other health issues. His hiring by the governing board to head Florida’s flagship university (UF) had been controversial as his only previous experience was five years as president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, which has just over 1,600 students. UF has 60,000 students and 6,600 faculty members and is one of the nation’s top research universities.In a lengthy statement posted to X on Friday, Sasse defended the hirings and consulting contracts, saying they were needed as UF launches new satellite campuses and K-12 charter schools around the state, increases its work with artificial intelligence and looks to improve in the fields of medicine, science and technology.He said all the hirings were approved in the normal budget process, that some got raises to secure their services amid “competing opportunities and offers”, and he welcomes an audit.“I am confident that the expenditures under discussion were proper and appropriate,” he said.According to documents obtained by the Alligator, Sasse hired Raymond Sass, his former Senate chief of staff, to be the university’s vice-president for innovation and partnerships, a new position. His pay is $396,000, more than double the $181,677 he made in Sasse’s Senate office. Sass still lives in the Washington DC area. He did not immediately respond on Friday to a phone message and email seeking comment.James Wegmann, Sasse’s former Senate communications director, became UF’s vice-president of communications, earning $432,000 annually. His predecessor had earned $270,000. He still lives in Washington. He did not immediately respond on Friday to an email seeking comment.Taylor Silva, Sasse’s former Senate press secretary, was given the new position of assistant vice-president of presidential communications and public affairs. The job has an annual salary of $232,000. Silva did move to Gainesville. No contact information for Silva could be located. Silva is not listed in the university directory.Three of Sasse’s other former Senate staffers also got jobs with UF.Besides his former staffers, Sasse hired two others with strong Republican party ties.He hired the former Tennessee commissioner of education Penny Schwinn as UF’s inaugural vice-president of pre-kindergarten to grade 12 and pre-bachelor’s programs at a salary of $367,500. She still lives in Tennessee. She did not immediately respond to an email on Friday seeking comment.He also hired Alice James Burns, former scheduler for South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, as director of presidential relations and major events at a salary of $205,000. She also did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.Because most of these appointees still live outside Florida, travel expenses for Sasse’s office ballooned to $633,000, more than 20 times the amount spent annually under Fuchs.Sasse also hired McKinsey & Company, where he once worked as an adviser, to a $4.7m contract. The secretive firm is one of the country’s most prominent management consulting firms. The university has declined to say what its work includes. The firm did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.He also awarded about $2.5m in other consulting contracts, the Alligator reported. More

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      America’s problem is massive inequality – not ‘woke’ educated elites | Robert Reich

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      More than a third of Harvard’s graduating seniors are heading into finance or management consulting – two professions notable for how quickly their practitioners “make a bag”, or make money, reports the New York Times.Similar percentages show up in other prestigious universities.Frankly, if anything, I’m surprised that only a third of graduating seniors at Harvard and similar places are heading into finance and consulting.In this era of raging income inequality and billionaire robber barons, the bags are gigantic. At Goldman Sachs they start at $105,000 to $164,000. At McKinsey, $100,000 to $140,000.And that’s just the first year.Think of it: make a bag and then do whatever you really want to do without ever again worrying about money. Make a bag and support whatever good causes you believe in without having to work at social change. Make a bag and you’ll never have to grovel to those with wealth and power.When I graduated Dartmouth College in 1968, almost no one I knew went into finance or consulting. In those days, inequalities were minuscule compared with now. The bags at that time could have fit into a glove compartment.One of the least-discussed but most profound consequences of America’s surging inequality is the number of talented young people now devoting themselves to making bags.Remarkably, though, most talented young people are not yet in the bag.For most of the last 43 years I’ve taught at several of America’s most prestigious universities. The biggest change I’ve seen over the years isn’t how starry-eyed students have become about finance and consulting.It’s how passionate they’ve become about making the world better.Sure, I’ve noticed the mini-stampede into finance and consulting. But graduates out to make a bag are still the minority.Most graduates are joining non-profits, entering politics or becoming community organizers, public defenders, teachers, healthcare workers, diplomats, staffers on congressional committees, union organizers and environmental activists.The conservative columnist David Brooks bemoans this trend. In a recent column he laments that at elite universities “the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero”.He cites a May 2023 survey of Harvard’s graduating class showing 65% identifying as progressive or very progressive.Why is this happening? Brooks thinks the gen Z cohort at prestigious universities is so tormented by the cognitive dissonance between their positions of privilege and their commitments to social justice that they must “prove to themselves and others” that they’re “on the side of the oppressed”.It doesn’t seem to have dawned on Brooks that, at least since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency in January 2017, the meaning of “progressive” has shifted from someone who wants a more just society to someone who simply wants to preserve democracy.To be a “progressive” at a prestigious university these days – indeed, to be a progressive anywhere in America – is no longer to be on the political left as the left used to be defined. It’s to be on the side of the constitution, the rule of law, and a modicum of decency.This is why so many more undergraduates and professors now deem themselves progressive.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionI agree with Brooks that elite universities should dismantle arrangements that let the privileged members of society pass down their educational privileges to their children, while locking out most everyone else – for example, by ending affirmative action for legacies and calling on the private sector to remove college prerequisites for decent-paying jobs.But Brooks and other conservatives are dead wrong about which elite is holding back the rest of America. It’s not the educated class. It’s the moneyed class.America’s corporate and financial elites have flooded American politics with money in order to receive government subsidies, bailouts, tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks – all of which ratchet up their wealth, entrench their power and make it harder for average working people to advance.Trump and much of his Republican party are deploying criticisms of the educated class to pose as populists on the side of the people.Consider Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of ’06 and chair of the House Republican Conference, who doesn’t miss an opportunity to attack elite universities and their presidents. Or Senator Josh Hawley, Stanford class of ’02 and Yale Law ’06, who calls the recent student demonstrations signs of “moral rot”.It’s all a thinly veiled cover for their efforts to help the wealthy make even bigger bags while keeping everyone else – especially average workers – down.At this moment, Republicans are promising the moneyed class that in return for financial backing in the upcoming election, they’ll get an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts – which disproportionately boosted the wealth of big corporations and the rich – plus additional tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.This could expand the national debt by roughly $1tn over the next decade, rendering it impossible for the government to invest in things average Americans desperately need – such as childcare, eldercare, affordable housing, and, yes, affordable higher education.Brooks thinks that if present trends continue, there will be a populist uprising – “a multiracial, multiprong, right/left alliance against the educated class”.For Brooks, the lesson is that the educated class must “seriously reform the system or be prepared to be run over”.He’s wrong. The real lesson is we must reform the system created by the moneyed class – or be prepared to run the moneyed class over.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Congress’s latest ‘antisemitism’ hearing was an ugly attack on Palestinian rights | Moira Donegan

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      If you didn’t know what was really going on at US college campuses, the congressional hearing on Thursday – in which the presidents of Northwestern and Rutger’s and the chancellor of UCLA were called to testify before a Republican-controlled House committee – would do little to inform you.The House committee on education and the workforce has held six – yes, six – public events to draw attention to the supposed crisis on campus in the months since the 7 October attack on Israel. They’ve hauled university presidents to Washington to harangue them, allegedly for not being sufficiently punitive toward pro-Palestinian students and faculty. These hearings have been used to belittle and antagonize university faculty and students and have fed racist and anti-intellectual moral panics that have led to the resignations of several of the university presidents who have been called to testify, notably including Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard.The hearings have aimed to pressure colleges and universities to crack down on a wide variety of politically disfavored speech, particularly pro-Palestinian and anti-war speech, and particularly that of students and faculty of color. In many cases, this pressure seems to have yielded the desired results: at Columbia, Minouche Shafik, the university president, twice ordered the NYPD onto campus to conduct violent mass arrests of anti-genocide student protesters; the first of these raids came the day after Shafik testified before the House committee and disparaged her own students in degrading terms.But on Thursday, at least, the university administrators seemed less nervous, a bit more subdued – even if they were not willing to defend the rights of their anti-war students or correct the Republicans’ lies about them.Michael Schill, president of Northwestern, Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers and Gene Block, chancellor of UCLA, were calm, if occasionally annoyed, as the Republicans on the committee told them they should be “ashamed” for using insufficient violence against protesters, called for the defunding of specific programs and the firing of individual faculty members, demanded that undergraduate students be expelled and compared pro-Palestinian demonstrators with Nazis and the segregationist George Wallace. At one point, a Republican congressman also digressed into a prolonged grievance over the firing of a Northwestern football coach.The Republican outrage at the college administrators is nominally due to what they say is a “scourge of antisemitism” on these campuses. That pretext is supported by the false conflation of anti-Zionism or simple concern for Palestinian life with antisemitic animus – a dangerous and insulting conflation that was made repeatedly and without contradiction throughout the hearing. In reality, the false equivalence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is belied by the reality on the ground, in the campus anti-war encampments that have sprung up across the country and in the burgeoning young Jewish anti-Zionist movement. In the real world, Jewish students are not only safe and welcome in the encampments and in the broader anti-war movement; they are frequently emerging as intellectual and organizing leaders.But this reality was not convenient for the Republicans, who hope to cynically use a fear of antisemitism to provide a shield of moral righteousness to their anti-education, anti-diversity, anti-intellectual and fundamentally racist project. The flimsy pretext of fighting antisemitism was required to provide a thin pretext for an effort that is at its core about rooting out and punishing disfavored ideologies and attempting to eliminate them from the public sphere. To say that this is an insult to the history of antisemitism would be an understatement.The attempt to paint the anti-war movement as violent and malicious veered, at times, into the absurd. In one prolonged exchange, the hearing was shown a viral video, produced by a young Zionist influencer at UCLA. In the video, the man is standing in a path on campus, facing a small group of silent pro-Palestinian protesters wearing keffiyehs. The young man declares that he wants to pass them to go into an academic building. The students are mostly silent; one seems to ask him to use a different entrance. “I want to use THAT door,” the man says, pointing, and looking back at the camera. The protesters are quiet; they do not move. No one is violent, or even particularly agitated. The Republican committee members referred to this video repeatedly and in dramatic terms throughout the hearing, claiming it represented an epidemic of Jewish students being violently refused access to campus facilities.Meanwhile, other events on UCLA’s campus went largely unremarked. For while a pro-Palestinian encampment was present on UCLA’s campus for some days, so were pro-Israel demonstrators, whose much better-funded demonstration featured large groups of Zionist protestors bussed in from off campus, along with a jumbotron that played pro-Israel propaganda at all hours. When they were there, the Zionist group jeered and taunted the anti-genocide protesters, allegedly yelling racial slurs and rape threats and even allegedly releasing rats into the encampment.On the night of 30 April, a large group from the pro-Israel camp, many of them wearing Halloween masks, violently attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment. They brought “knives, bats, wooden planks, pepper spray and bear mace”, according to one witness, and proceeded to beat the anti-genocide protesters, pushing many into the ground using barricades. The police, whom UCLA had summoned to campus to help maintain order, stood by and allowed the attack to continue for hours. They seem to have assessed, correctly, what they were there to protect, and who they weren’t.At the hearing on Thursday, the Republicans went to extensive lengths to criticize universities that have engaged in negotiations with their student protest encampments, calling these talks “capitulation” to “pro-terror” and “pro-Hamas” forces. Since the encampments sprung up at many campuses this spring, not all universities have chosen to disperse their students by having them beaten and arrested; some have engaged in dialogue – with varying degrees of good faith – and attempted to persuade the students to pack up the tents in exchange for material concessions.At Northwestern, the successful negotiations resulted in a pledge from the administration to include funding for five undergraduate students and two faculty members from Palestine to come to campus, as part of the university’s broader international programming. This promise to include Palestinian scholars in campus life seemed to particularly offend the Republicans, who demanded to know why Jewish affinity groups had not been consulted before the commitment was made.This is not typical of such university funding decisions: Why would a Russian-speakers’ club, say, be consulted before a scholarship was offered to a Ukrainian student? But the message from the outraged Republicans was clear: the inclusion of Palestinians in university life, they feel, should be subject to a Jewish person’s veto.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Dignity, joy, a raised fist: Biden renews pitch to Black voters at Morehouse commencement

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      It was, in the end, an artful compromise.Joe Biden got to speak uninterrupted and renew his pitch to Black voters. Protesters got to make their point by wearing keffiyehs or raising a fist. Even the skies were merciful, hinting at but never quite unleashing rain.And through it all, Sunday’s 140th commencement at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta, preserved not only its dignity but a sense of joy. Music played, parents wept and graduates who had weathered a global pandemic could savour their big day without being upstaged.“Thank you God for this ‘woke’ class of 2024 that is in tune with the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times,” the Rev Claybon Lea Jr said during a prayer at the start of the commencement, held on a lawn on the college’s century campus, surrounded by trees and red brick academic buildings.The urgency of the daily news agenda – will the US president be heckled over Gaza? – collided here with storied traditions dating back a century and half. Accompanied by organ music, the 2024 graduating class processed in black mortar boards with gold or black sashes. Most wore Kente stoles with the Morehouse seal.Morehouse alumni followed, many wearing maroon jackets and straw hats with maroon bands. Some went all the way back to 1954. The alumni seemed more enthusiastic about standing to applaud Biden than the fresh wave of graduates.They took their seats and looked at a stage that had been erected with a black awning with a maroon backdrop that said “Morehouse”’ in giant letters. Two big screens were showing the event, including close-ups of graduates who smiled, waved or made goofy faces.The programme began with the solemn ringing of a bell, an evocation and the Army Color Guard Corps performing the presentation of colours. The Morehouse College Glee Club performed the The Star Spangled Banner and Lift Every Voice and Sing – the swelling chorus resonant, resilient and transcending concerns of the moment.The emotion of the day was evident in David Thomas, president of Morehouse College, who choked up a few times. He paid tribute to students who got through the pandemic with perseverance: “You have demonstrated unparalleled fortitude in the face of adversity.”When Biden took the stage, wearing a maroon gown with three black stripes on the arms and maroon tie, there was polite applause, though it could hardly be described as fierce.There had been much hype around his Morehouse commencement address and whether, in light of unrest on other campuses around the country, it would be disrupted by protests over his handling of the war in Gaza. Some staff and students had called for Biden’s invitation to be rescinded over his support for Israel and their discomfort with an address during election campaign season.But not for the first time, Biden benefited from low expectations and will count the relatively modest dissent as a win. Outside the college, a lone protester brandished a handwritten “Genocide Joe” sign, watched closely by a police officer.Inside, a small number of graduates wore keffiyehs – the black-and-white head scarf which has become an emblem of solidarity with the Palestinian cause – around their shoulders on top of their black graduation robes. In his evocation, Lea cited a “Palestinian Jew named Jesus”, and said all children matter, from Israelis to Palestinians and beyond.DeAngelo Jeremiah Fletcher, the class valedictorian, wore a small Palestinian flag pin and decorated his mortarboard with another Palestinian emblem. First he spoke movingly of the dehumanisation that African Americans have long endured and said Morehouse has instilled pride “in our combined identities as Black and human”.He turned to global politics and referenced Morehouse graduate Martin Luther King, whose civil rights activism overlapped with opposition to the Vietnam war.Fletcher said: “From the comfort of our homes, we watch an unprecedented number of civilians mourn the loss of men, women and children, while calling for the release of all hostages.”Biden was staring ahead. Fletcher added: “It is my stance as a Morehouse man, nay as a human being, to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.”Biden joined the applause and shook Fletcher’s hand. When it was Biden’s turn to speak, some students turned their chairs around to turn their backs to him and one graduate appeared to briefly hold aloft a Palestinian flag.A lone graduate at the back, wearing a mortar and blue gown, remained still with his back turned to Biden and his right fist raised throughout the entire address. It was perhaps a more powerful statement than any number of disruptions or sign waving.Biden, who has lavished attention on historically Black colleges and universities, sought to assure his audience: “I support peaceful nonviolent protests. Your voices should be heard, and I promise you I hear them.”He described the war in Gaza as “heartbreaking” and acknowledged: “Innocent Palestinians are caught in the middle of this … It’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That’s why I’ve called for an immediate ceasefire. I know it angers and frustrates many of you, including my family.”Opinion polls suggest that some African American men in Georgia, a crucial swing state, are tilting away from Biden towards his election opponent Donald Trump. But it was hard to imagine the former president coming to speak here, getting the same kind of reception or speaking out against “extremist forces”, as Biden went on to do.An honorary doctorate was bestowed on Biden, who wore a mischievous expression, then smiled and laughed and pointed at someone in the audience. He joked: “I’m not going home!”And for the first time that morning, the audience began chanting. Not “Genocide Joe” but “Four more years!” More

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      Biden vows to fight ‘poison of white supremacy’ at Morehouse speech

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      Joe Biden told graduating students of Morehouse College that American democracy has failed the Black community, but vowed to continue fighting “the poison of white supremacy”, in a widely watched speech to a historically Black college during an election year.Despite a backlash from some students and alumni in the weeks leading up to Biden’s commencement address, including over the Hamas-Israel war and concerns that Biden would use the speech as a campaign event, the president’s address to the all-male school was warmly received. He used his speech to reaffirm his commitment to democracy in the wake of the January 6 insurrection, and to reiterate his call for a ceasefire in Gaza.Biden’s appearance at Morehouse comes as part of his campaign efforts in Georgia, a key swing state in the 2020 election, and as polls suggest his support from young voters and voters of color – who were integral to the coalition that helped him beat Donald Trump in 2020 – appears to be flagging slightly.Despite criticism over Biden’s visit, the mood at Morehouse seemed upbeat and when a speaker asked attendees to welcome Biden they responded with applause and cheers.“Black men are being killed in the street. What is democracy? A trail of broken promises still leaving Black communities behind,” Biden said. “What is democracy? – You have to be 10 times better than others to get a fair shot.”“What does it mean,” Biden continued, “to be a Black Man who loves his country even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure?”“My commitment to you [is] to show you democracy, democracy, democracy is still the way,” he said.Biden also warned about the powerful tide of extremism. “Insurrectionists storming the Capitol with Confederate flags are called patriots by some – not in my house,” Biden said to applause. “We all bleed the same color. In America, we’re all created equal.”Biden also reaffirmed his commitment to an end to the Gaza conflict. “I support peaceful nonviolent protests,” he said. “Your voices should be heard and I promise you: I hear you.”Biden said the war in Gaza was “heartbreaking”, discussed the horror of Hamas’s 7 October attack and of the plight of Palestinians. “Innocent Palestinians are caught in the middle of this,” he said. “It’s a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. That’s why I’ve called for an immediate ceasefire.”Despite concerns over disruptions, nobody interrupted Biden’s address, though one lone graduate stood with his back turned to Biden with his right fist raised.The valedictorian, DeAngelo Jeremiah Fletcher, also addressed the Gaza conflict in his speech.“The Israel-Gaza conflict has plagued the people of its region for generations. It is important to recognize that both sides have suffered heavy casualties in the wake of October 7,” Fletcher said. “From the comfort of our homes, we watched an unprecedented number of civilians mourn the loss of men, women and children.“It is my stance as a Morehouse man, and as a human being, to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.”Fletcher was met with applause, including from Biden.Biden also received an honorary doctorate of laws from Morehouse, which counts Dr Martin Luther King among its many renowned alumni.Morehouse invited Biden to serve as graduation speaker in September, prior to Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israeli civilians that left some 1,200 dead. In April, it announced he would also be the recipient of the honorary degree. The Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine–Georgia condemned his appearance.“More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children,” the group said in a statement. “More than 77,000 have been injured. Every hospital and university in Gaza has been destroyed. None of this would have been possible without the support and sponsorship of the Biden Administration. Any college or university that gives its commencement stage to President Biden in this moment is endorsing genocide.”Steve Benjamin, head of the White House Office of Public Engagement, met with Morehouse students and faculty for several hours ahead of Biden’s appearance, to listen to their concerns that Biden would treat his commencement address as a stump speech.After the Morehouse speech Biden is expected to travel to Detroit, where he will give an address at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner and highlight how his administration’s policies have helped Black Americans. Earlier this week Biden met with litigants in the watershed Brown v Board of education case, and sat down with the leadership of a group of historically Black fraternities and sororities called the Divine Nine. More

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      US House votes to pass antisemitism bill in response to campus protests

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      The US House of Representatives has voted to pass an antisemitism awareness bill, a controversial measure sponsored by a New York Republican amid controversy over pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in Manhattan and across the US, as Israel’s war with Hamas drags on.The bill passed 320-91 with some bipartisan support.Mike Lawler’s bill will “provide for the consideration of a definition of antisemitism set forth by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance for the enforcement of federal anti-discrimination laws concerning education programs or activities, and for other purposes”.Democrats opposed it as a messaging bill meant simply to boost Republicans on a hot-button issue and trap Democrats into taking politically awkward votes.The American Civil Liberties Union opposed the bill, telling members: “Federal law already prohibits antisemitic discrimination and harassment by federally funded entities.“[The bill] is therefore not needed to protect against antisemitic discrimination; instead, it would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism.”The Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), which “works to ensure a just, secure and peaceful future for Palestinians and Israelis”, has defined the shifting meaning of “antisemitism” in US political discourse.“Traditionally,” the FMEP says, “‘antisemitism’ has meant hostility and prejudice toward Jews because they are Jews – a scourge that has imperiled Jews throughout history, and is a source of resurgent threats to Jews today.“In recent years there has been an energetic effort to redefine the term to mean something else. This new definition – known today as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s ‘working definition of antisemitism’, is explicitly politicised, refocusing the term to encompass not only hatred of Jews, but also hostility toward and criticism of the modern state of Israel.”In the House on Tuesday morning, the Illinois Republican Mary E Miller acted as speaker pro tempore to oversee debate on the Republican antisemitism awareness bill.As a choice, it was not without irony. Miller made headlines in 2021, when as a newly elected member of Congress she was forced to apologise after saying in a speech at the Capitol: “Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ‘Whoever has the youth has the future.’ Our children are being propagandised.”Representatives for Miller did not respond to a Guardian request for comment.Introducing the bill with Lawler sitting beside her, Michelle Fischbach, a Minnesota Republican, said: “Jewish college students have faced increasing antisemitism. And since 7 October there has been an over 300% increase in incidents on campuses.”More than 1,100 people were killed on 7 October, when Hamas attacked Israel. More than 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza during the subsequent Israeli offensive.Fischbach continued: “Students are supposed to be protected from harassment. But it has been made abundantly clear that the leaders of these institutions are not going to do anything to stop it. Instead, they are allowing large-scale harassment to reign, forcing Jewish students to stay home. Since these institutions refuse to protect their students, it is time for Congress to take action.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTeresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat from New Mexico, spoke in answer to Fischbach. She quoted Thomas Massie, a rightwing Republican from Kentucky, as saying the bill was “a political trap … designed to split the Democrat [sic] party and get them stuck” on an issue over which the party is divided.Leger Fernandez also said a different bill should be considered, to “designate a senior official at the [US] Department of Education to combat antisemitism on college campuses”.In his own remarks, Lawler listed alleged outrages on college campuses and said: “We must give the Department of Education the tools to identify and prosecute any antisemitic hate crimes committed and hold college administrators accountable for refusing to address antisemitism on their campuses.”Democrats, he said, were “tripping over themselves because of electoral politics” in states with large Muslim populations which traditionally vote Democratic.Debate then descended into back-and-forth over whether the bill was necessary to defend Jewish students, as Republicans claimed, or an illegitimate attack on free speech, however abhorrent that speech might be, as some Democrats said.In closing, Leger Fernandez said: “We need to remind everybody we all condemn 7 October. We all have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation.“We have taken up these resolutions over and over again. And once again, our Republican colleague [Massie] has spoken the truth when he has said that these are sticky resolutions simply intended to divide the Democrats.“Let’s not work on division. Let’s come together in love, and in belief, and [use] our individual strength to push back against the hatred that we see, and to do it in a manner that is not partisan.” More

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      The overreaction to US campus peace protests doesn’t feel free or brave | Cas Mudde

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      Across the world people have been shocked by social media footage of heavily armed law enforcement officers arresting peacefully protesting students and professors at university campuses around the United States. The so-called “land of the free and home of the brave” looks neither free nor brave – except for the brave protesters who continue to stand up to state and university repression.Although government repression of student protests is not unique to either the US or this particular period, the current orgy of state repression is very much an illustration of the current crisis of liberal democracy as it is squeezed by both illiberalism and neoliberalism.But let’s take a step back. Ever since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, many university campuses have been on edge. As Israel’s retaliation in Gaza reached what the United Nations has called genocidal levels, student protests started to appear at some university campuses. Although there were troubling incidents of antisemitism – and Islamophobia – the protests, overall, are neither antisemitic nor violent. This notwithstanding, the far right has jumped on them to intensify its attack on universities.The far right has portrayed universities as “hotbeds of terrorist sympathizers” and “wokeness” that threaten core “American values” like freedom of speech. In far-right propaganda, universities are the dystopian future of the whole country, where women, non-whites and LGBTQ+ people oppress “real Americans”, ie white, Christian conservatives. And their propaganda has paid off. When Donald Trump launched his campaign, the public image of universities in the US was already not in great shape.In 2015, a modest majority of 57% of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Since then, it has plummeted to just 36% in 2023. Although the biggest drop was among Republicans (-37%), confidence also decreased among independents (-16%) and Democrats (-9%). This is not that surprising, given how far-right talking points are feverishly amplified by “liberal” media like the Atlantic and the New York Times.Ironically, the mismatch between perception and reality couldn’t be greater. Academia has always been a thoroughly conservative industry and universities have rarely been hotbeds of radicalism, particularly in the global north. But since the rise of the neoliberal university in the 1980s, higher education has become highly commodified and universities have been turned into “edufactories”, run by professional administrators on the basis of market principles.Although there are fundamental differences in financial and political dependence between perversely rich private universities like Harvard, with an endowment of almost $50bn, and poorer public universities like the many community colleges across the country, the neoliberal logic of contemporary higher education has made university administrators increasingly submissive to assertive private donors and public politicians (who are, predominantly, advocating for rightwing causes).What sets the current student protests and state repression apart is not just the intensity but the scope. While the rightwing attacks in the past decade have mainly targeted public colleges in Republican-dominated states such as Florida, the past week saw state repression of protesting students at such universities (like the University of Texas at Austin), but also at private universities in Republican-dominated states (like Emory University in Atlanta), and even at private universities in Democratic-governed states (like Columbia University and the University of Southern California).The starting signal for the current repression was the congressional hearing on antisemitism last December, in which Republican politicians grilled three flustered presidents of Ivy League universities on the allegedly antisemitic protests at their campuses. Afterwards, far-right activists intensified their accusations of antisemitism and plagiarism and with success: two of the three university presidents that testified – Claudine Gay of Harvard and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania – resigned nearly a month after the hearing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEncouraged by this success, another congressional hearing was organized in April, in which Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, president of Columbia University, did not even try to defend her faculty and students. In fact, she threw several faculty under the bus. The lead of her antisemitism task force said they believed that student slogans like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “long live intifada” were antisemitic. Outraged students responded by intensifying their protests, which again increased rightwing pressure to “act”, to which Shafik quickly responded by inviting the NYPD onto campus.As so often, state repression of a relatively small and localized protest gave rise to the rise of a much bigger and broader protest movement that spread across the country – from New York to California and from Michigan to Texas. Moreover, given that graduation season is only weeks away, university administrators are going into full panic and repressive mode. The University of Southern California has already canceled its main graduation ceremony, which was supposed to feature a speech by a Muslim valedictorian, out of “security concerns”.Let there be no doubt that the current attacks on US universities are a major political victory for the far right. Not only do they mobilize and unify the conservative base, they also divide that of the liberal opposition. But there are also major lessons for liberal democrats in the country. First, neoliberal universities are no match for illiberal politics. Second, no university is safe: this is not a private versus public university or red state versus blue state issue. And, third and finally, the current attacks are just a small prelude to what the return of Trump will mean for liberal democracy in general and higher education in particular.
      Cas Mudde is the Stanley Wade Shelton UGAF professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, and author of The Far Right Today More