Do not be shocked by the outpouring of Jew-hatred on college campuses. Student and faculty reactions to Hamas’ terrorist attacks are barbaric and horrific, but they are completely consistent with the direction of higher education over the last 40 years.
For the past two generations, college presidents and deans have capitulated moral authority to radical activist professors who turn college classrooms into indoctrination camps where anti-Semitic sentiments inform anti-Israel assignments, readings, presentations, and projects.
The results are on full display this week. Students across the country parade their hatred of Jews as they celebrate the murder, decapitation, burning, rape, and capture of Jewish bodies.
California State University-Long Beach students have celebrated Hamas glider attacks. Hunter College students have demanded that universities support Hamas.
The New York University Law Student Bar Association has refused to condemn the atrocities — which is a similar sentiment to the 30+ Harvard University student groups that blame Israel for the massacre and the Stanford University students who have draped pro-Hamas signs on campus.
The elected student president of the NYU Law School Bar Association just sent out a message refusing to condemn Hamas's mass slaughter and effectively cheerleading it. pic.twitter.com/mtn3ZUP4Li
— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) October 10, 2023
I graduated from NYU in 2011 and I’m not surprised by the heinous statement that Ryna Workman drafted on behalf of the school’s Law Bar Association. I was in political science classes where students and teaching assistants perpetuated lies about Israel. One professor told me it wasn’t worth bringing up the Israel perspective in class.
The situation has only gotten worse in the last 12 years.
Universities are overflowing with pro-terrorist students because the radical faculty that inept administrators hired and promoted have normalized anti-Semitism on campuses as a polite expression of highbrow intellectualism. Leftists’ anti-Israel research papers, lectures, and conferences are a mask for them to indulge in Jew-hatred in polite society.
Radical instructors and student governments have normalized rabid anti-Semitism to such an extent, it is now entrenched in the very fabric of American higher education. A network of anti-Israel student groups organized a “Day of Resistance” last week to “rally support for the deadly Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.”
University presidents and deans are not just negligent in their responsibility to Jewish students, they are hypocritical. The same university offices that enabled student activists to claim that silence and words are violence are now doing nothing against student groups who are cheering Hamas terrorist acts. Take Swarthmore College President Val Smith for example. In her statement on Swarthmore students celebrating the Hamas terrorists as “martyrs,” Smith wrote that those sentiments exemplify “free exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives” at a diverse educational institution.
Universities have spent millions of dollars in the last decades championing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming that systematically ignores anti-Semitism and promotes the same resistance ideologies that student groups now invoke to celebrate Hamas.
Students and professors have been canceled, ostracized, and fired for misgendering or causing microaggressions, but the academic Left expects Jews to live among the “diverse ideas” of Hamas supporters. That right there is the tyranny of double standards that campus liberals and leftists impose on Jewish students.
University administrations downplayed allegations of anti-Semitic work environments and dismissed Jewish students who expressed fear for their safety. It doesn’t matter for far-Left faculty and campus administrators that nearly 50% of Jewish students have direct experience with anti-Semitism. Never has Jewish safety been taken seriously by diversity officers or professors who have a vendetta against Israel.
Higher education needs to eliminate the ideological and moral rot that has led to this situation. University leadership needs to hold the students championing Jewish genocide accountable or admit that they are unwilling to do so.
Time’s up for the liberals running American colleges and universities. These administrators must admit that they have hired, promoted, and welcomed a critical mass of anti-Semites and allowed Jew-hatred to spread on campuses through activist syllabi, student organization programming, and events.
Higher education needs to fix this problem now because these pro-terrorist students will be America’s next generation of lawmakers, teachers, and employers. Our institutions would impose systemic discrimination against an entire ethnic minority. Our country’s leaders would be the same ones celebrating our enemies’ victories.
Zachary Marschall is editor in chief of the Leadership Institute’s Campus Reform and an adjunct, assistant professor at the University of Kentucky.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.