Reckoning with woke’s repercussions: Northwestern and Harvard; JB Pritzker and Penny Pritzker – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Thursday is Northwestern University President Michael Schill’s turn to face the U.S. Congress. In many ways, the request for his appearance is a culmination of Northwestern’s decline, which is much the same as Harvard’s decline. Like many universities, both drifted radically left over at least the past decade particularly on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

The two schools have more in common than that: the Pritzkers, who contributed to that decline – JB Pritzker, now governor of Illinois, and Penny Pritzker, his sister.

The specific topic for Thursday’s congressional hearing will be Northwestern’s compromise with pro-Palestinian protesters who had set up an encampment on the campus and, more generally, Northwestern’s alleged failure to address antisemitism on campus. Northwestern now faces civil rights complaints and lawsuits over both those matters.

The Pritzkers, being Jewish, undoubtedly are as repulsed as anybody by today’s surge in antisemitism. The fact remains, however, that we are facing the consequences of the woke movement they helped launch, particularly at Harvard and Northwestern.

At its core, that movement teaches that the world is divided into oppressors and the oppressed, that the oppressors are indelibly stained by their ethnicity and that Western nations like America and Israel are colonial evils.

Antisemitism was a predictable consequence of those teachings, but it goes beyond antisemitism. Across America, we are witnessing a rendezvous of the consequences of the far left’s dogma. Harvard, Northwestern and the Pritzkers are illustrations.

Let’s look first at Penny and Harvard.

Harvard’s move to the radical left exploded in December with the testimony before Congress of the presidents of Harvard, University of Pennsylvania and MIT, where they were wouldn’t say whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ conduct policies. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign as a result of that and plagiarism allegations against her.

But Harvard critics, particularly angry alumni, are seeking to root out Harvard’s problems, and that has Penny is in the hotseat. Penny heads the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing board. As an active member there, Penny was Gay’s champion, and Gay’s term as president is widely seen as central to Harvard’s wholesale embrace of its DEI agenda. Penny is now heading the search for Gay’s replacement.

“The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done,” wrote billionaire and Harvard alum Bill Ackman, a leading Harvard critic.

Even a lifelong friend of Penny’s who defended her didn’t deny her role in Harvard’s DEI agenda. “I think she believes in the wokeness philosophy which appeals to many people in Chicago [and] which is the only way [Barack] Obama could have emanated from Chicago,” said Penny’s friend and author, Sugar Rautbord.

Penny was instrumental in Gay’s selection as president, and critics say little scrutiny was given to Gay’s scholarship, thereby overlooking plagiarism in her work. Gay’s scholarship was almost entirely about race, and the attachment to DEI she shared with Penny no doubt contributed to Pritzker’s support for hiring Gay and inattention to her scholarship.

Now, Penny has been named directly in a subpoena issued by the U. S. House Education and Workforce Committee. That committee, controlled by Republicans, resorted to a subpoena after what it says was repeated inaction and stonewalling by Harvard on the Committee’s investigation into antisemitism at Harvard..

“The Committee’s report proves that former President Gay and Harvard’s leadership propped up all for show,” said committee  Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-NC). “Not only did the [Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group] find that antisemitism was a major issue on campus, it offered several recommendations on how to combat the problem—none of which were ever implemented with any real vigor. This shocking revelation reveals an inner look at how dysfunctional Harvard’s administration is and the deep-seated moral rot that clouds its judgement.”

Turning to JB Pritzker and Northwestern, “Here’s a Simple Test of What You’re Made Of.” That was the headline on our column here in May 2017 when JB was a trustee at Northwestern and was first a candidate for governor.

What we don’t know then, I wrote, was “how far left he is — whether he has joined the intolerant left now dangerously ascending across the country, particularly on campuses. He has been dead silent on the controversy so far.” JB served as trustee from 2004 until becoming governor in 2019.

We know now. JB failed that test.

The controversy referred to was whether Northwestern should replace its president at the time, Morton Schapiro. Schapiro, like Gay at Harvard, led Northwestern into the depths of wokeness during his term as president from 2009 to 2022. You’re an “idiot” and a “lunatic” if you question safe spaces, trigger warnings and microaggressions, he told new students in a speech that got national attention.

During Schapiro’s tenure as president of Northwestern, the school was consistently regarded as near the bottom on tolerance for diversity of opinion. Law professor Jonathan Turley, a graduate of Northwestern’s law school, wrote in 2016 that “Schapiro has succeeded in not just abandoning principles of free speech but directly assaulting core values of academic freedom. The chilling effect of his words will be most felt by untenured faculty who may think twice about advocating views that Schapiro has not defined as lunacy and idiocy.”

In 2018, Schapiro presided over the derailment of Karl Eikenberry’s appointment to become the first executive director of a new Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwestern. Eikenberry, who had already begun his move from Stanford and bought a home near Northwestern, was superbly qualified as a three-star Army general and former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

But the military background didn’t sit well with leftists on Northwestern’s faculty who led the opposition to whom Schapiro caved. It’s not clear whether Eikenberry was told to withdraw or did so voluntarily, and Schapiro was on the record supporting Eikenberry. What is clear is that Schapiro allowed the leftists to win. The shameful affair is described in detail in this Chicago Tribune column.

You won’t be surprised by the direction that new global studies institute took without Eikenberry. It’s mostly woke. Its global initiatives are listed here. They include Climate Crisis and Media Arts, Disproportion Impacts of Climate Crisis, Epistemic Reparations, Language Curricula and Gender Equality and Race, Caste and Colorism.

Through it all, JB was silent. As a trustee and major donor to Northwestern ($200 million to its law school alone), he could have made a difference. The buck stops with trustees. They select, replace and direct university presidents. He could have spoken up publicly. But there’s not a shred of evidence that JB questioned anything about Schapiro or Northwestern’s direction, publicly or privately.

“The active members of Northwestern’s board of trustees have either shamefully been asleep at the wheel or, equally disturbing, in the driver’s seat, allowing the situation at the university to deteriorate to a point that it takes a subpoena from the United States Congress to hold them accountable.”

That’s from an op-ed in Crain’s this week about Northwestern’s current problems, written by the national co-chairs of the Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, and it applies perfectly to JB’s tenure as a trustee at the school.

Returning to alum Jonathan Turley, he wrote in 2017 that “if this trend continues under Schapiro, Northwestern will not only fail to be viewed as a leading academic institution but any type of academic institution.”

That prediction is being validated.

Harvard and Northwestern are reaping the whirlwind of the radically left culture they created. JB and Penny Pritzker are common denominators.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.