Category: Academia

Columbia University Custodian Defends Academic Building From Anti-Israel Mob

By

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/05/columbia-university-custodian-defends-academic-building-from-anti-israel-mob; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Mario Torres is a custodian at Columbia who tried to stop anti-Israel protesters from taking over Hamilton Hall, where he worked. A photograph of Torres pushing a “student” demonstrator up against a wall has gone viral; that “student” turned out to be a 40-year-old rich kid with no connection to Columbia. More on the custodians and the mob getting in the way of his work can be found here: “Exclusive: Columbia Custodian Trapped by ‘Angry Mob’ Speaks Out,” by Francesca Block, The Free Press, May 6, 2024:

This viral image captured the clash between anti-Israel protesters who stormed Columbia and campus workers who tried to stop them. As the mob invaded Hamilton Hall in the early hours of April 30, a facility worker was photographed pushing a demonstrator against a wall. 

Later, it emerged that the protester was a 40-year-old trust fund kid named James Carlson, who owns a townhouse in Brooklyn worth $2.3 million. The man who tried to hold him back was Mario Torres, 45, who has worked at Columbia—where the average janitor makes less than $19 an hour—for five years.

Now, in an exclusive interview with The Free Press, Mario Torres describes the experience of being on duty as protesters stormed the building in the early hours of the morning, breaking glass and barricading the entrances. “We don’t expect to go to work and get swarmed by an angry mob with rope and duct tape and masks and gloves,” he said.

“They came from both sides of the staircases. They came through the elevators and they were just rushing. It was just like they had a plan.” Mario said protesters with zip ties, duct tape, and masks “just multiplied and multiplied.”

At one point, he remembers “looking up and I noticed the cameras are covered.” It made him think: “This was definitely planned.”

There was nothing spontaneous about the takeover of Hamilton Hall. The pro-Hamas demonstrators came prepared with zip ties and duct tape to be used on any employees in the building attempting to prevent their assault, and with masks to hide their identity, and just to make sure they would not be identified, they had quickly managed to cover all the CCTV cameras in the building.

Torres was trying to “protect the building” when he ended up in an altercation with Carlson: “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face.” (Carlson was later charged with five felonies, including burglary and reckless endangerment.) “I was freaking out. At that point, I was thinking about my family. How was I gonna get out? Through the window?”…

About half of the demonstrators at Columbia who have so far been arrested have turned out not to be Columbia students at all, but outside agitators, determined to swell the ranks of the mob in Morningside Heights. Torres managed to push one of the protesters against the wall and pulled away his face-concealing hoodie. That “student” was discovered to be James Carlson, 40-years-old man who had nothing to do with Columbia, but was eager to participate in any anti-Israel pro-Hamas demonstration that might be in progress. Torres wasn’t having any of the disruption. He wanted to do his job as custodian. Having pushed back against the mob, he now worries about whether, for opposing the law-breakers and defending Hamilton Hall, he might be in trouble with the pusillanimous administrators who had been so reluctant to arrest the demonstrators holding the building hostage.

Mario Torres should be asked to appear on news programs such as the “Hero of Hamilton Hall,” a Hispanic male version of Barbara Frietchie, protecting university property from the frenzied hate-animated mob. He needn’t worry about losing his job; Columbia’s trustees and alumni, and the wider public, too, wouldn’t stand for it. In fact, he’s due for a raise, for defending his building against those who, according to plan, smashed its windows and doors, and were preparing to do even more damage once inside. Fortunately, the Columbia administration finally called in the NYPD, which cleared Hamilton Hall in a five-hour operation. The cost to the NYPD was $200,000, One hopes that the City of New York will be able to recover that amount from fines leveled on hundreds of demonstrators.

Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet

BY STEPHEN KRUISER 12:29 AM ON OCTOBER 26, 2023
SEE: https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/10/26/anti-semitic-academia-finally-getting-punched-in-the-wallet-n1737961;Republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, & research purposes.

Anti-Semitic Academia Finally Getting Punched in the Wallet
AP Photo/Michael Casey, File
Ever since the terrorist murderers in Hamas attacked Israel almost three weeks ago, we’ve been witnessing the disgusting spectacle of American college students very vocally condemning Israel, some of which the esteemed VodkaPundit recently chronicled.

For being attacked.

Yes, parents, this is what a small fortune gets you when you send your kids off to have their minds polluted by the leftist filth that controls Academia.

These kids didn’t come out of the womb being virulently anti-Semitic, they had to be conditioned. To be sure, the American public education indoctrination mill helped get them there, but it’s the lunatics in Academia’s ivory towers who are responsible for the finished product. As I said in a recent podcast, the students are only working with the facts that their professors presented to them.

A handful of college presidents and boards of regents have issued statements condemning anti-Semitism and Hamas, but that can all be filed under “Too Little, Too Late.” The damage to young minds has already been done.

Wholesale changes in American public education and academia are long past overdue, but it’s been considered sacrilege — mostly by the left — to disparage the sainted teachers or institutions of higher learning. Eyes are being opened now, however. The corrupt agenda of the teachers’ unions that run K-12 public schools was revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic and got parents involved in curriculum decisions in great numbers.

Relevant: COVID-19 Has Exposed Teachers’ Unions as the Shakedown Artists They Really Are

The behavior of the rabidly pro-Palestinian/Hamas students at many elite universities has shocked a lot of people who aren’t online and consuming news for most of their waking hours.

There is, of course, BIG money in academia. It takes a lot to keep the hegemonic brain-washing apparatus humming. Obviously, the best way to fight it is to hit them where it hurts the most — in the bank accounts.

Shortly after I decided to write this column, my friend Ed Morrissey posted one of his own at our sister site HotAir which came at the money issue from a different angle than what I’m about to get into. Ed says that we should “decolonize” academia, and here are some of his suggestions:

Rather than launch destructive campaigns that will undermine the rights of all Americans, we need to address the issue at its core. The issue isn’t the NSJP, or the current flock of moral idiots on American campuses at the moment. The problem is the firehose of federal tax dollars propping up the Higher Ed Industry, and the way it gets manipulated to transform education into the kind of indoctrination that produced this anti-Semitic Hitler Youth Movement.

In other words, we need to end the student loan programs. We need to end Pell grants, and every scholarship from the federal government, even the ones for left-handed Laplanders with Lyme Disease. We need to end the transmission of every federal dollar into the bloated, corrupt Academia as it exists now and has existed over the last several decades. Its main product has become a blizzard of non-performing administrators and crops of moral idiots, the latter of whom emerge with crippling lifetime debt and nihilist fantasies that many of them will never outgrow.

To put it another way that might appeal to our progressive partners: We need to Defund the Fleece.

This violates no rights. It doesn’t dictate speech codes to college campuses, another point on which conservatives should know better than to impose. Not a single thing will change, except that we will finally kick the financial struts out from underneath a persistent parasite that has finally come close to achieving its goal of killing its host.

That’s a long quote from Ed’s piece, but I wanted to use it to set up what I was already going to write about.

Public funding is, as Ed points out, the biggest problem, but the tonier institutions of higher learning rely on the generosity of wealthy alumni to ensure that there is always a nice sheen on those ivory towers and that they’re fortified from reality.

Well, the frothing, pro-Palestinian/Hamas student minions are making reality crash in for some schools.

The Wall Street Journal:

Top universities such as Harvard and Penn are facing backlash from alumni angry about the schools’ reactions to the attacks and their aftermath. The alumni say their schools didn’t move quickly and forcefully enough to condemn Hamas and denounce antisemitism after the Oct. 7 attacks, and that they have done a poor job since then protecting Jewish students as on-campus tensions rise.

Some say it was the final straw after years of growing disenchantment with the schools over what they see as a leftward political shift. Many big donors have announced plans to stop giving or said they are reconsidering future gifts.

The pullback could dent the finances of some universities that rely on big givers to fill their coffers. People giving $1 million or more made up less than 1% of donors but 57% of total donations across surveyed U.S. universities, according to a study by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education covering the fiscal year ended June 30, 2022.

Donations from the “big givers” can usually be penciled into the donation ledger every year and not worried about. Now, thanks to the fruits of their indoctrination labors being on display for all to see, upper-crust universities are facing situations like this:

Retail billionaire Leslie Wexner’s foundation said it would cut financial ties with Harvard and end a program it funded at the school for Israelis. Wexner and his wife have donated more than $42 million to the Cambridge, Mass., university.

Forty-two million is a lot of money even in Harvard dollars.

Some might ask if this will really bring about any positive change in the long run. That’s impossible to predict, of course. The bully needs to take a few on the chin if he’s even going to think about leaving you alone though.

Those in upper management at America’s universities are obsessed with finances and fundraising. For a long time, they’ve been well-oiled machines when it comes to bloating their institutions’ bank accounts. When big, regular donors slam their checkbooks shut it’s a cause for overwhelming concern, if not outright panic.

We continue to see backlash against people who have long gotten away with ignorant anti-Israel, anti-Semitic world views. Those in academia had reason to feel more shielded from criticism than other inherently anti-Semitic groups; they’ve been getting rich off of their hatred for decades, after all. If it can’t be ended altogether, let’s hope that dangerous grift will at least be weakened now.