On Friday, it was announced that the beloved Northwestern University agreed to pay a $75 million settlement to government for the Trump administration freezing research funds and demanding concessions in relation to supposed accusations of the university not providing enough protections against anti-Semitic actions on the campus.
 
My immediate reaction was that I was disappointed by NU settling for anything.  What little I know of the situation there, this was just Trump administration posturing over their faux-concern of Jews on college campuses, all in an effort to undermine education.  I happened to be visiting Chicago – and staying in Evanston, walking over to campus – during some of the Gaza-related protests and what I saw there (which, in fairness, was hardly definitive of the full period) was just normal protests of government policies.  It is certainly possible that some of the protesting got anti-Semitic (and possible it didn’t), but also from what I read, nothing was related to the school administration’s inaction.
 
I even wrote an article here about it and posted a photo of the Big Protest on campus.  Granted, it was a Saturday at the time, but most Big Protests don’t take the weekend off.  And have more than one big tent.

As I said, it’s a shame that Northwestern made any settlement, because any settlement risks being encouragement to the bully.
 
But –
 
The more I read about what the settle was, it seems like more a “take the money and run” deal for the Trump administration to get out of there with as little damage to itself, and hurting Northwestern.  And as much as A.G. Pam Bondi praised it as a huge win for Trump team over anti-Semitism (a subject he has never cared about, unless it was on the anti-Semite side), it was grasping at straws.
 
For starters, by settling the deal, the Trump administration immediately unfroze $790 million in research funds.  And Northwestern had to pay only $75 million, just under 10% to get back $715 million.  (Or less than 10-cents on the dollar, as they say.)  Moreover, Northwestern gets to pay this back over three years.  So, they will only be paying $25 million a year.  They’ll make more than that on interest for the $790 million alone that they’re getting back.  (A few years ago, when Morton Schapiro was the school’s president, he ended a fund-raising drive in 2021 that brought in $6.1 billion!  They can handle the $25 million a year.  That’s .004% of what they raised in that one campaign.  And for all I know, it’s tax deductible.)
 
Still, the university had to agree to certain government terms – but the terms seem paltry, indeed ones the school is likely happy to do.  Northwestern agreed to review its international admissions policies, develop training for international students to learn the "norms of the campus," and reaffirm steps to protect Jewish members of the community.
 
That’s it.  Pay $25 million a year for three years, review admission policies, develop a training program, and commit to protecting Jews.  And get back $790 million.
 
Northwestern currently has a interim president, Henry Bienen, who had been the university president for 14 years beginning in 1995 (a period that overlapped with my dad being a professor at the NU Medical School – I remember us getting a holiday card from him every year).  He defended the agreement for allowing the school to keep complete control of the areas that were non-negotiable to Northwestern – hiring, admissions and curriculum – as part of their settlement. 
 
In a statement, he said:
 
"As an imperative to the negotiation of this agreement, we had several hard red lines we refused to cross: We would not relinquish any control over whom we hire, whom we admit as students, what our faculty teach or how our faculty teach. I would not have signed this agreement without provisions ensuring that is the case. Northwestern runs Northwestern. Period."
 
I’m sorry that Northwestern felt it had to settle.  I’m overwhelmingly more furious that they were put in a Mafia-like stranglehold by the Trump administration – in its attacks on many universities – where they felt it was necessary.  Holding up $790 million in research funds that not only benefitted the school, but whose medical research benefitted world society.
 
(That’s not hyperbole.  Back in April of last year, I wrote here  about how just two weeks before Trump froze that $790 in research funding, scientist developed the world’s smallest pacemaker – that actually dissolves after it’s no longer needed!)

As I said, a settlement with a bully risks given them encouragement to bully others.
 
But – "risks" is the operative term.  If this is the settlement the Trump administration got, it is close to no encouragement to them.  This was them raising the white flag far more than Northwestern in its settlement.  Yes, Northwestern settled.  But they paid the Trump DOJ chump change, gave them zero control to hiring and curriculum (which the Trump administration has long wanted across the country), and Trump got next to nothing that it can use to try to use against other.

There is, however, one particular shame in all of this.  The new president of the university, Michael Schill, who was a good guy from what I could tell in all I'd read about him (and heard, having gone to an alumni event when he came to Los Angeles to speak), resigned.  Not because he did anything wrong, but because he felt that as long as he was there – as the head of the school when the protests occurred – he was being a hurdle the school getting a settlement.  Basically, it seemed that Trump's DOJ just wanted to force him out to show how tough on anti-Semitism they were.  Of course, not only is Trump and his administration not remotely concerned with anti-Semitism (and Trump himself has long shown himself to be blatantly anti-Semitic), but Michael Schill, who resigned for the good of the university, is Jewish.
 
I wish Northwestern didn’t settle.  But I think they made a tremendous settlement, and left Trump stumbling around in the dark.

If you didn't see Last Week Tonight with John Oliver on Sunday, his article was about (as you can see) Trump vs. Higher Education.  It was pointed, infuriating, damning, and still often very funny. 

​I won't say more about it, since readers of these pages know it's what I've written about here for years -- and going back further to my days writing for the Huffington Post 15 years ago.  (Here's an article on it from 2023 with links to two HuffPo articles that I wrote on the subject back in 2011.) 

​Actually, there is one thing I'll add  -- which is something obvious from my past writings on the subject) -- and it's that this isn't just about Trump.  It's a war on education that the Republican has been carrying on for 75 years.  But Trump and the MAGOPs have turned that effort into an art form.

Last week, there was a news story about how, now that the White House has defunded $500 million from PBS, they have a new education partner that they’re offering as a  preferred alternative for schools.  It’s a non-profit called “PragerU” that comes from the deeply far-right auspices of Dennis Prager, whose brand is supposedly "goodness," but whose reality is as a self-righteous, faux-moralizing pedagogue.  What PragerU, an off-shoot of his wider range of work, does is put out far-right videos and lessons, some of which may already be in schools across the country.

"PragerU" is a "U" like Trump "University" was a University. It makes no effort to be education or bipartisan or informative -- it's just right-wing personal morality blather by Dennis Prager.
 
Last month, the White House presented its partnership with PragerU at a launch event for its new Founders Museum exhibit, introduced by Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon.  As Vox reported --
 
“For the White House exhibit, PragerU created AI-generated videos of the Founding Fathers delivering patriotic accounts of the Revolution. In one, an AI-generated John Adams borrows a catchphrase from conservative pundit Ben Shapiro and tells the viewer, ‘Facts do not care about our feelings.’”
 
By the way, one thing facts do care about is making sure that children (and everybody) learn that John Adams did not say this.
 
Facts also care that, unlike what Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway once claimed, there is no such thing as “alternative facts.”  Facts also care about science, vaccines and climate change, which the Trump administration is trying to undermine -- and also medical research, that Trump is freezing by the billions of dollars from actual universities.
 
It's also not lost that a person like Trump, who has not shown the slightest empathy for anyone other than himself, likely loves a supposedly-educational exhibit that demeans having feelings.
 
But mostly, despite PragerU trying to put fake words in the mouth of John Adams, it’s a lack of adherence to facts that has distinguished Dennis Prager over the years, something I’ve written about periodically, indeed as far back as an article for the Huffington Post in 2010.  So, I was pleased to read a comment online last week by Timothy Messer-Kruse, Professor of Cultural Studies at Bowling Green State University, who describes himself as an “eclectic scholar of radicalism and culture.”  He wrote -- “Seth Cotlar's essay on the crap that passes for history at Prager U should be read by everyone. When MAGA says it wants to replace woke history with the truth, what they mean is burying the uncomfortable facts.”

I should note that my pleasure at reading that is because the last line in my aforementioned article on Prager, written 15 years ago, was – "Dennis Prager says the world is a cruel place. Maybe it just looks that way when you are so careless with the truth." 
 
Even if someone loves its pontificating right-wing message, that’s personal choice – but it doesn't belong in schools as a scholarship tool.
 
Vox also writes that – “Since its founding in 2009, PragerU has become a juggernaut in the conservative educational media space, with their videos reaching millions of followers across social media. The organization has helped launch the media careers of right-wing figures like Candace Owens. Their popular videos elevate narratives that have been sharply criticized as climate denialist, Islamophobic, and 'misleading' about slavery.”
 
That’s who the Trump administration is partnering with, at the expense of PBS.  Actually, at the expense of reality.
 
You can read more about this new Trump-PragerU partnership here. 

As I said, I’ve written about Dennis Prager here periodically.  And three years ago, I reposted that article I had written about Dennis Prager in 2010.  Basically, he had published a piece whitewashing the "evils" of the Christian world by saying at least they were less than the Nazis, and "most" Christian leaders now condemn them.

Here's that article.  This is who Trump is partnering with to indoctrinate children in schools.  Just one more step in the MAGOPs long-standing War on Education.  Because in the end, this isn’t about Trump, we know who he is.  It’s about the MAGOPs in Congress who enable him and are the ones who actually vote to pass his policies into law.

                                   Goodness Has Nothing to Do With It
                                                    August 20, 2022

Last week, conservative talk show host, writer and sorcerer-in-training Dennis Prager complained about a sign in a grade school that read 'The world is better because you are in it'.  For reasons known only to him, Prager decided it was a good idea to put out one of his videos and said, "What a stupid message. Plus it's not true. What has any 5th grader done to have made the world better because he or she is in it?"
 
This is all the more pathetic (an apt adjective when discussing Most Things Prager) given that one of things which pushed his career forward were two videos in the 1990s under the "For Goodness Sake" brand.

Yes, really, honest, once upon a time that was what Mr. Prager built his foundation on.  Ethics.  Goodness.  The man who today can look at a sign in a grade school that says, "The world is better because you are in it," and his first thought is "What a stupid message.  Plus it's not true. What has any 5th grader done to have made the world better because he or she is in it?"  Goodness.  Ethics.  Decency.  Dennis Prager.  As they sing on Sesame Street:  One of these things is not like the other.

Prager has made many videos over the years, including one in 2020 during the pandemic titled, "Follow the Science" is a LIE."  (The next year, after taking ivermectin sheep drench and hydroxychloroquine, he contracted COVID.)
 
It also brought to mind an article I wrote for the Huffington Post twelve years ago, on June 3, 2010.  So, I thought I would re-post it here in Mr. Prager’s honor.

A couple of things to note:

The first is that, as whimsy would have it, the "very conservative friend" I refer to at the start of the article, who sent me the column in question by Prager, was friends with the talk show host and part of the team that made the first For Goodness Sake video with him.  For goodness sake, I'll leave out mentioning which part.
 
What is also worth noting is that so many people think that today’s extreme far-right is a product of Trump.  When you read the introduction of my article before getting to Prager’s words, remind yourself that this was all written 12 years ago.  This is not about today’s GOP, but the Republican world that the party had long been building for many years that opened the door for a Trump to waltz through.
 
That said, we now return you to our regularly scheduled Prager --

                                                   *   *   *

Dennis Prager:  Making the World a Crueler Place, One Word at a Time
 
A very conservative friend has me on his mailing list.  He forwards me diatribes from his circle about how the world will end because of liberals, a term loosely defined as “anything that isn’t conservative.” 
 
These articles have two things in common.  One is that they all border on fear, and the other is their relationship to facts is similar to P.T. Barnum’s. 
 
What is unfortunate is that my friend – and his circle – accept them all on faith.  And the problem of accepting temporal matters on faith is that it doesn’t develop the power to think for oneself.
 
The other day, the latest forwarding was an article by Dennis Prager.  It was an essay that, on the surface, appeared to discuss a philosophic argument comparing religion to the evils of the secular world.  In reality, it was just bulldozing facts to make a political point.
 
This below isn't whole article by Mr. Prager.  In fairness, I only got through the first four paragraphs.  But I include those four, so that what follows would be in context.
       
   
  May 25, 2010

  The World Is a Cruel Place -- and If America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler
                                        By Dennis Prager
 
One of the many beliefs -- i.e., non-empirically based doctrines -- of the post-Christian West has been that moral progress is the human norm, especially so with the demise of religion. In a secular world, the self-described enlightened thinking goes, superstition is replaced by reason, and reason leads to the moral good.
 
Of course, it turned out that the post-Christian West produced considerably more evil than the Christian world had. No mass cruelty in the name of Christianity approximated the vastness of the cruelty unleashed by secular doctrines and regimes in the post-Christian world. The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism.

The amount of evil done by Christians -- against, for example, "heretics" and Jews -- in both the Western and Eastern branches of Christianity --  was extensive, as was the failure of most European Christians to see Nazism for the evil that it was. The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers.
 
But there were never any Christian Auschwitzes -- i.e., systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion. Nor were there Christian Gulags -- the shipping of millions of innocents to conditions so horrific that prolonged suffering leading to death was the almost-inevitable end.
 
     =================================================
 
 
This is as far as I got.   It was either keep reading or stop before my head exploded.  I opted for the latter.
 
The problem, you see, is that there are a great many things Mr. Prager far too self-comfortably and intentionally overlooks.  Like, for example, giving a pass to the Spanish Inquisition and its Auto-de-fe torture.  He does this by conveniently (and simplistically) self-defining religious mass murder on his own very-limited terms, as systematically killing "every" person of a religion.  Of course, in reality, even Nazism didn't systematically kill "every" Jew by his own definition, any more than Spanish Catholics did in the 356 years of the Inquisition.  But what the Inquisition did during those 3-1/2 centuries was pretty darn systematic and massive.  Not to mention that it was torture.
 
And though he eases his conscience by insisting, "Nor were there Christian Gulags...", he again intentionally (because if not intentional, it is ignorantly) overlooks 800 years or more of horrors that cumulatively likely were crushingly worse than any Gulag since they defined nearly a millennium of daily culture.
 
But mainly, I didn't get that far because Mr. Prager showed an unacceptable lack of history and reality when he wrote, "The argument against religion that more people have been killed in the name of religion than by any other doctrine is false propaganda on behalf of secularism and Leftism." 
 
While this statement sounds authoritative, it is of course backed up by…nothing.  Not a single word of it is backed up by – anything.  It is words strung together.
 
I actually read history.  I have no doubt that Dennis Prager does, as well.  But I can't speak to what he reads, or chooses to remember, or include.  But honestly, his above is a numbing statement.  Last year, I finally finished reading Will and Ariel Durant's brilliant and legendary 11-volume Story of Civilization.  Probably around 8,000 pages.  Up until about the year 1600, probably the bulk of wars were religious-based, and many wars beyond that, through 1800.  National governments were religious for much of history, as kings ruled their nations by divine right, and fought off opposing armies for fear of another king’s religious encroachment.  The Holy Roman Empire dominated Europe.  Muslimism, Hinduism, Buddhism dominated much of the rest of the world.  Pure secular rule only came later.  Villages of 20,000 people – 30,000 or 50,000 people – would be wiped out without a thought, becoming almost commonplace, century after century for a thousand years or more, from the beginning of history through the early 17th century.  (In the early volumes, Durant writes of such ghastly massacres with eloquent horror.  Later, as they continued through the centuries, the historian instead wearily addresses them as almost footnotes before moving on to the next.)  The continuing Crusades of Christianity against Moslems were almost unendingly devastating to the society it crossed and ravaged.  For over 200 years, there were 11 of these Crusades, all of them religiously-approved wars.
 
But more than that, as Mr. Prager tries to whitewash what was done specifically to Jews throughout history by focusing on Nazis, let me offer a passage from Volume 6 of the Durants’ history, "The Reformation."  Pages 730-731.  An important thing to keep in mind is that this was written in 1957.  After World War II.  After the Nazis.  Written by a renowned historian who made it his life work to study the history of mankind.  Durant begins the passage this way --
 
"The Black Death was a special tragedy for the Jews of Christendom.  The same plague had slain Mongols, Moslems and Jews in Asia, where no one thought of blaming the Jews; but in Western Europe a populace maddened by the ravages of pestilence accused the Jews of poisoning the wells in an attempt to wipe out all Christians."
 
Durant then continues with a lengthy tale of how such "fevered imaginations" swept across all of Europe.  "Nevertheless, some Jews were tortured into confessing that they had distributed the poison...Merciless pogroms broke out in France, Spain and Germany.  In one town in southern France the entire Jewish community was cast into flames.  All Jews in Savoy, all Jews around Lake Leman, all in Bern, Fribourg, Basel, Nuremberg, Brussels were burned."
 
(If Dennis Prager is looking for "systematic genocides of every man, woman and child of a particular race or religion," that long list of "all" is a good place to start.  But I digress...)
 
And then, after this lengthy passage describing these many dark years, Will Durant concludes by writing -- and I repeat, this was written a decade after World War II by a man who made it his life work to study the entire history of man --
 
"It would be hard to find, before our time, or in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death."
 
So, while Dennis Prager wants to whitewash history for the sake of making a political point -- shame on him.
 
Shame on him.
 
And his shame extends further.  It's when Prager writes, "The good news is that Christian evils have been acknowledged and addressed by most Christian leaders and thinkers."
 
“Good news”??  That’s the good news?
 
Yes, to Dennis Prager in his political, high-wire, contortionist act, that's the "good news."  It all makes up for the Inquisition and a thousand years of torture and persecution.  Good news indeed!  "Sorry we tortured you and killed you and wiped out entire villages for hundreds of years.  Our bad."  Good news?  That's great news!  Of course, it would have been even better news if all Christian leaders and thinkers acknowledged Christian evils, and not just "most" of them, which could mean only 51 percent...  But hey, who am I to quibble?
 
Mind you, all Dennis Prager says is that most Christian leaders and thinkers merely “acknowledge” these “Christian evils” – not that they are horrified, repulsed and mortified by them, or ever did anything to make up for them.  Just that they “acknowledge” their existence.  Okay, sorry, “most” do.  (However many “most” is.)   Given that “it would be hard to find,” as Will Durant said, “in all the records of savagery, any deeds more barbarous than the collective murder of Jews in the Black Death," I guess that in Dennis Prager’s politically conservative world the best we can get is to accept that as “good news.”  Swell.
 
I got no further than these opening paragraphs.  To be fair, maybe in the rest of his article Dennis Prager had a complete change of viewpoint.  But I didn’t have it in me to keep going and see if such a miracle had occurred.  Because I was reading empty and dishonest words.  All designed to misinterpret history to make a political point.
 
None of this is to criticize religion or praise secularism.  There is room for an honest discussion of that.  It is, instead, to note solely that what Dennis Prager wrote is not acceptable. 
 
Actually, what he wrote is pathetic.  And I'm sorry my friend and others accepted it as the truth.  Because it ignores the reality of history.  If a person wants to share the same political beliefs with Dennis Prager or with anyone amongst themselves, that's fine.  But one should still be willing to tell those you otherwise agree with that they’re wrong when they are very wrong.
 
“Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters,” said Albert Einstein, who knew something about pursuing the truth carefully, “cannot be trusted with important matters.”
 
Dennis Prager says the world is a cruel place.  Maybe it just looks that way when you are so careless with the truth.

About 10 days ago, I wrote a long article about my efforts to get Steve Carell's commencement address at this year's Northwestern University graduation ceremony posted on YouTube.  It wasn't there, but at least I was able to track it down -- buried in the full graduation video that was buried on the Northwestern website.

Well, we have a Breaking News Update:

It took WEEKS – and I like to think my repeated noodging of several Northwestern officials may have had something to do with it, but…
 
Northwestern has finally posted Steve Carell’s commencement address on YouTube!!  O huzzah!
 
Now, yes, I know it could be pure coincidence, and something they were planning to do anyway.  But – a) when I wrote all these people several times, no one ever said “We plan to post it on YouTube.  Please leave us alone.”  All I got was telling me where it was buried, and b) it took almost a month to post it, which could have been done in one day.
 
So, I’m going with my noodging assertation, and will stand by it until contradicted by school officials.  Which I think is unlikely to happen, so I’m on very safe ground.
 
If you chose not to check out the commencement address when I first sent the convoluted link, because it was too much a bother, but you wanted to see the speech -- which is a light-hearted, but a lot of fun and very funny -- the DIRECT link is...here!  Just scroll down to the bottom of the page.

​Victoire!

This omission was even more odd given the speaker, the focus of the speech, and Northwestern being one of the leading universities in theater, communication and journalism.  I’m certain, considering the national attention the speech got, that a great many people searched YouTube to find the whole speech (alums, prospective students, prospective theater students, and the general public), only to come up empty-handed.  It’s such a great opportunity to easily promote Northwestern, and in an accessible way.  All the more so at a time to offset attention from when the school has been egregiously attacked by the Trump administration, having $790 million in research funding frozen.
 
But no Carell speech.
 
Finally, I wrote to the school, asking if it was available anywhere – not just on YouTube, but even on the Northwestern website – and made all these points above.  I heard back, and it turns out that the speech is, happily, on the Northwestern site.  But – it’s buried so deeply,  which is why I was unable to find it.  It was on a page under Graduation and then under Families and Guests.  And even at that, the speech itself wasn’t posted, but the entire two-hour graduation ceremony – which is why I couldn’t find it was a search.
 
This remains inexplicable.  Almost no one will find it here…rather than editing the speech out of the full ceremony and posting it on YouTube.  After all, that’s where far-more people can find it much easier -- but also that link on the NU site is for the full commencement rather than just the Carell speech alone (which ultimately is the attention-getting “headliner” of the event), and also YouTube videos are so easy for people to repost, embed in articles, and spread positive attention about Northwestern. 
But…well, maybe at some point they’ll post the speech alone on YouTube.  At least for now, it’s available somewhere.  In the middle of the full event.
 
And it’s a very entertaining speech, charming and thoughtful, and often extremely funny.  Carell himself didn’t go to Northwestern, though as I noted yesterday, his daughter graduated in 2023 (so the actor was there in attendance when Gov. Pritzker gave his Office-themed speech), his son is a student at the school now, and Carell himself actually went to Northwestern’s summer “Cherub program” for high school students – and started his career in Chicago at the Second City theater.
 
I’ve had  two occasions to cross paths with Steve Carell.
 
The first time was in 2000 at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.  I was covering it for an article I was doing for the Writers Guild.  And he was there for his work as a “correspondent” on The Daily Show.  We ran into each other on the street outside the convention center, and he was extremely personable, giving me some advice on how to best get around the event.
 
The other time was when friends were directing and producing the movie, Get Smart.  I visited the set one day, and when sitting around with my friends waiting for a lengthy set-up, Carell came by.  And for about 20 minutes, we all had a very enjoyable conversation.  One thing I fondly remembered.  I don’t recall exactly how the topic came up, but it was on when actors complain about not getting all the perqs they wanted.  Carell acknowledged that his perspective was different from most because he came to his success much later in his career than many.  But in a quiet voice – and remember, this wasn’t for the press, there were no news cameras around – he said, “I get a nice trailer, I get meals, I’m treated well.  And anyone who complains about that…” and he paused for just a very brief moment, “…is an asshole!!”

Anyway, here's the commencem...

We interrupt this article for this Breaking News.

UPDATE:  When I initially posted this tale, this is the point where I directed you to the Northwestern website and where the speech is buried, and at what time in the speech you should jump to to see Carell's speech.  But --

It took almost a month (and I like to think perhaps all my noodging emails to three different school officials), but...Steve Carell's commencement address was finally posted on YouTube!  O huzzah!  So, you don't have to go anywhere, but just click on the video below.

And yes, here is what he says.