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The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

Syracuse University announced the other day that it will phase out 93 of its approximately 460 academic programs. The administration framed the decision as strategic alignment, calling it a portfolio review driven by student demand and institutional focus. Provost Lois Agnew insisted the move was “not a cost-cutting exercise.” Taken at face value, some of these cuts are routine catalog maintenance. Fifty-five of the ninety-three programs had zero students enrolled. Twenty-eight were advanced certificate supplements to graduate degrees. The provost herself noted that Syracuse offered more than double the roughly 200 programs typical of peer institutions, and a university trimming a bloated catalog to concentrate faculty resources is doing ordinary academic management. Reasonable people can call that housekeeping.

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Clench Your Fist, it’s Time to Play: “Knockout the Jew!”

Have you heard of the “Knockout” game lately happening in Brooklyn and Hoboken and Syracuse and St. Louis?

If you’re Jewish, or old and feeble — or female! — prepare yourself for a face-meeting-sidewalk event you’ll never forget, if you live to tell about it, as young strangers on the street punch you in the face without warning.

This horrible street game is called “Knockout” because the whole idea behind the crime is to see if you can be knocked unconscious, and left “lights out” on the pavement, with a single punch to the face.

The “knockout game” that outraged the Syracuse area earlier this year when two teenagers playing it attacked and killed Michael Daniels on West Brighton Avenue is getting renewed attention as reports spread about Jews being targeted in Brooklyn and the death of a homeless man in Hoboken, N.J.

The New York Police Department’s Hate Crimes Unit is investigating reports that a group of men is playing “Knock Out the Jew” in Brooklyn. A 64-year-old man told CBS New York in a report posted Tuesday that he and his 12-year-old son were attacked. Video in the report also shows a 19-year-old Jewish man being sucker punched.

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