KU donors should oppose terror speech

One has to wonder if big-time financial donors to the KU Endowment Association like the Hall Family Foundation in Kansas City or Capitol Federal in Topeka ever get the willies when some tattooed, purple-haired 7th-year grad student, inching ever closer to that interpretive dance degree, makes a public statement attacking their customers’ values.

In other words, to tilt at the slogan of KU’s gargantuan sugar daddy – the Hall Family Foundation of Hallmark Cards fame: is the KU Graduate Teaching Assistants Coalition’s recent statement supporting terrorism against Israel really “caring enough to send the very best?”

And if these big time donors don’t get peeved at these all too regular affronts to common decency and logic from the unmoored emotional juveniles burning their college funds and federally guaranteed students loans at KU and the obvious attack on the values of the customers who fund these big time donors, a logical question is: Why not? If they’re not upset by this, should we be supporting those companies?

When your values are attacked you’re obligated to speak up. And if you’re a Hallmark Cards customer or a customer at Capitol Federal or any of the other scads of donors who shovel cash to the KU Endowment Association every year, you shouldn’t be shy about scribbling a note to that effect on your next payroll deposit slip at the Capitol Federal branch bank.

There are other banks and other birthday card printers, after all.

Most of us who remember 9/11 find it abhorrent to support a combatant in a war who decapitates babies with shovels in the midst of an all-out frenzy of cowardice that specifically targets another nation’s civilians. But that’s what KU’s Graduate Teaching Assistants Coalition supports. KU’s labor union for TAs (and heaven knows the working conditions for a teaching assistant must be akin to working in a coal mine) released a “Palestine Solidarity Letter” last week declaring its support for Hamas terrorists in radical Islam’s 70-year jihad to destroy Israel and the Jews who live there. 

Of course KU’s GTAC is just trying to stay hip with the nationwide collection of university nuts at other colleges who’ve been basking in leftist enlightenment for so long, instructed by dopey professors who enrolled at the age of 18 and never left, that actual facts and logic around topics like the Middle East conflict, sex/gender and the Green Energy debacle have ceased to matter in their world. Two years ago KU’s Student Body President Niya MacAdo, who along with her “She/They” pronouns now graces the campus of University of Hawaii as a “first-gen Educational Administration graduate student …focused on creating equitable opportunities and access to historically marginalized students in K-12 and on college campuses”  according to her Linked-In page, relayed her disdain for the terrible conditions under which she as a woman of color pursues an American education by tweeting: “Happy Friday folks. Death to America,” just days before the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Ah yes, this is what happened when enlightened parents stopped spanking their kids. 

Their bubble-wrapped world of entitlement is one that refutes logic, let alone good taste. Remember the day after Trump was elected, and KU’s campus was rife with counseling efforts, cry rooms and puppy petting stations to provide consolement for distraught students and faculty?

But what good would it do to express your outrage about such juvenile insolence in an academic environment that prizes free-thought and free speech, even to degrees that push our tolerance to the limit? Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ll ever change it; but what you will do in protesting to those who hold the huge purse strings of universities is to illustrate to their management and their administrations that we actually are paying attention – and that while we prize free expression we also don’t deny – or escape – accountability.

Such push back has been apparent at other universities where students and even faculty and administration have supported the Hamas terrorists. Places like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have been slammed by announcements that mega donors are pulling out due to antisemitic proclamations. As noted by heartlandernews.com  some faculty members at Cornell, Columbia and Yale have demanded the termination of fellow professors who’ve publicly supported Hamas’ murder of innocent civilians.

There should be no argument that everyone along the chain of higher academics should stand in opposition to outright murder. If the students and faculty won’t do it and the donors won’t exert their influence, then it’s up to the customers.