Last month, a gang of outraged Microsoft employees penned a letter to CEO Satya Nadella demanding the tech giant to end its deal to provide cloud services to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – or to any clients with ties to ICE. The professional radical class – academia – circulated their own letter backing Microsoft’s rogue employees and now are calling for boycotts of their own.
Left-wing faculty, alumni and students now are calling for the Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels to end a partnership with ICE that the school has had since 2009. The formal agreement with the School of Education’s Division of Public Safety Leadership, according to the website, has a stated purpose of improving ICE’s training and educational programs and working to “support the ICE mission, strategic goals” and “contribute to measurable outcomes and results.”
Hardly controversial. But the value is not relevant to the activists, who have an ultimate goal of ending ICE and immigration enforcement.
The petition slanderously asserts that ICE is “responsible” for managing detention centers that “have been described by scholars of the Holocaust as meeting the conditions considered definitive of concentration camps.” Therefore, “we do not see how in good conscience Johns Hopkins University can collaborate with this organization.”
Boycott fever is not confined to Johns Hopkins as was evident during protests at Boston’s Northeastern University. Tired chants and anti-ICE signs were plentiful as students and faculty marched across campus demanding the university cancel any research contracts with the agency.
According to federal spending data, the university has received $2.7 million from ICE over the past two years and the potential of over $7.7 million over an almost five-year period.
The funds from ICE were awarded to Glenn Pierce, director of Northeastern’s Institute of Security and Public Policy, to support his work analyzing “exports of technologies that have civilian uses” and how to prevent acquisition by terrorists.
The leftists may not mind shutting down academic research, but Northeastern spokeswoman Renata Nyul does.
“Efforts to restrict which federal agencies a faculty member can approach for research funding are antithetical to academic freedom,” she stated, according to WBUR radio.
Not only do these knee-jerk boycotts stifle academic freedom, they are initiated with no consideration for the consequences – such as ending research into combating terrorism.
2 Comments
As an American with a family member who lost an eye while fighting the Nazis, I am offended by all of the people trying to slander as “Nazis” Americans who support border security and the enforcement of our immigration laws. They are also showing their profound lack of historical knowledge.
President Eisenhower enforced our immigration laws and Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander in charge of liberating Europe from Nazism. None of the fools calling Americans “Nazis” for supporting the enforcement of our immigration laws would be worthy of shining Eisenhower’s shoes if he were alive today.
The Democrats are claiming the move to abolish ICE is just some fringe movement, because they realize the implications of the party being tagged with that label are not good. But it is hardly a fringe movement. DNC chairman Tom Perez called House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “the future of the party” and she campaigns on abolishing ICE. Elizabeth Warren, certainly a major figure in the party, said ICE needs to be “replaced with something that reflects our morality and that works”. By something that “works” she means something that does NOT work, that does not do deportations and that does not defend our borders. In other words a welcoming committee at the border that says step right this way and don’t worry we won’t arrest you.
The House vote yesterday, on a GOP resolution saying ICE should not be abolished and it’s agents should have our support, had Democrats fuming about “doing something more important”. Nothing more important than having secure borders. Only a handful of Democrats voted yes, with the big majority voting “present”. What they really don’t like is to have to actually state a position, when what they prefer is the usual talking out of both sides of their mouths. Something like “we have the right to enforce our borders, but”. It’s always those little qualifiers that really mean open borders. Like “we need immigration reform” translates to tripling legal immigration and amnesty for every illegal here.
Amazing how the Democrats and media have decided that Russian hacking of DNC e-mails is an “act of war”. Uh, then what? Start a war over the fact that the DNC was stupid enough to be using passwords that a 12 year old knows not to use? But then, the DNC e-mails did show collusion. Collusion between the DNC establishment and the Hillary campaign against Bernie. And Trump is right to question why the DNC was asked by the FBI to turn over their server, but refused to do so and that was ok with the FBI. We just have to take their word. Just another little something where one side seems to get the benefit of the doubt and the other is under a microscope.