I know a little bit about the kinds of speech that are generally welcomed on campus.
I’ve been banned from a few campuses, including DePaul University; I’ve spoken at more than a few campuses at which violence broke out over my speeches, including California State University at Los Angeles, Penn State, and University of California at Berkeley.
I also know that were I a student at any of these universities – and if I said, as a student, what I routinely say as a speaker – I’d undoubtedly be dragged before the administration and hit with sanctions. I’d be responsible for “microaggressions” by saying things like “Western culture is superior” and “men are not women.” I’d be responsible for “harmful language” for stating that human beings ought to be judged not based on race, but on merit.
But apparently, at the top universities in America, all of those sensitivities disappear for one group in specific: Jews.
Yesterday, House Republicans held a hearing at which the heads of major universities were grilled regarding the rise of anti-Semitism on their campuses. We’ve been talking about that spike in anti-Semitism for weeks, from threats of violence to near-riots, from tearing down hostage posters to openly Jew-hating slurs.
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Some of the students from these universities explained the situation on campus, like. Bella Ingber of New York University:
Jewish college students are telling Congress today about the unrestrained #antisemitism sweeping their campuses. I was particularly moved by Bella Ingber, a junior at @nyuniversity. Shame on NYU and other schools for their stunning failure to protect Jewish students. pic.twitter.com/obWCeQxqL0
— Trisha Posner (@trishaposner) December 5, 2023
Eyal Yakoby at the University of Pennsylvania described the calls for genocide of Jews and celebration of the Hamas massacre on October 7 as well as physical threats.
Eyal’s testimony is profound and shows how serious the problem of antisemitism on our colleges campuses is.
America’s elite colleges had an easy test the past two months: forcefully condemn antisemitism and speak out against vile hatred.
Many of them have failed miserably. https://t.co/9MG0dEX3IY
— Congressman Rudy Yakym (@RepRudyYakym) December 5, 2023
Now, imagine that black students had arrived in Congress to describe similar experiences: calls for genocide, celebration of terror attacks against black Americans, physical threats. Does anyone think the respective university presidents would have sat, grinning at the lawmakers quizzing them on their lack of action?
But that’s precisely what happened yesterday. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York questioned the presidents University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and MIT about genocidal language chanted on campus. Listen to their responses.
🚨🚨🚨Presidents of @Harvard @MIT and @Penn REFUSE to say whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” is bullying and harassment according to their codes of conduct. Even going so far to say it needs to turn to “action” first. As in committing genocide.
THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE AND… pic.twitter.com/hUY3SgoOOi
— Rep. Elise Stefanik (@RepStefanik) December 5, 2023
Listen to that obfuscation. Listen to the spin.
It is difficult to imagine that these icons of sensitivity and diversity, equity and inclusion would be nearly so sanguine about slurs against any other racial or ethnic minority in America.
Simply put, they wouldn’t.
One can make the case for free speech on campus – I can and I do – but one cannot pretend that universities protect students against harassment and then soft-pedal Holocaust-level rhetoric.
These university presidents don’t like free speech at all. But they’re perfectly fine not only mouthing language they certainly don’t believe about free speech, but smiling while they do it.
So, why are they so sanguine?
There are two reasons.
First, the Left – and university presidents are almost the Platonic ideal of intellectual Leftists – believes that Jews are not part of the intersectional coalition of the oppressed. By Leftist logic, Jews are part of the superstructure of power, since all success is merely a reflection of hierarchies of power, and Jews are disproportionately successful. Anti-Semitism is merely the ugliest guise for the oppressor/oppressed binary, but it isn’t the only one – just ask the newest white Americans, Asian Americans on university campuses, who have been deemed white because they score too high on their SATs, and thus are candidates for discrimination.
Then there’s the second reason: the Left hates Israel. The Left hates Israel because, like American Jews, Israel is too successful in the region in which it is located. Israel, according to the Left, is a colonialist outpost of the West, and the West is evil because it too is successful – which means that it is exploitative and oppressive.
Hence the deep and passionate attempt by the Left to pretend that anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are unrelated. The Left doesn’t want to be perceived as openly anti-Semitic, but they understand that anti-Zionism can provide a heartening opportunity to oppose Jewish and Western flourishing.
Hence the Left’s rabid attachment to the idea that calls for Israel’s destruction are somehow not anti-Semitic, but actually a reflection of a more universalistic humanitarian creed.
Sure, that creed would actually materialize in the death of millions of Jews and the dominance of radical Muslim terrorism. But that doesn’t matter. After all, Israel is the real problem, because the West is the real problem – and we know that’s true because the West and Israel are successful. According to the Left, radical Muslim regimes that impoverish their citizens aren’t worth one bit of attention. Israel, by contrast, ought to be destroyed.
That’s why yesterday, in a subtle bit of maneuvering, Harvard President Claudine Gay acknowledged Israel’s right to exist – but not as a Jewish state. Which is like saying that Ireland has a right to exist, but not as an Irish country.
So, what ought to be done?
Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square and a major donor to Harvard, wrote that the college presidents “must all resign in disgrace. If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has anti-Semitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context. To think that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest.”
He’s right, of course.
But that isn’t nearly sufficient.
The universities are corrupt through and through. Their endorsement of DEI has been a curse to reason and decency. Their politics are vile and those politics also make the universities corrupt factories of moral depravity.
Which means that first, every major donor to these universities should think about cutting funding. Of course, some of us were on this bandwagon years ago. I wrote a book titled Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth when I was 19; the book came out when I was 20, in 2004. In it, I wrote that conservatives ought to “pull money from universities,” but that such a tactic wouldn’t be nearly sufficient – that other sources, including radical Islamic regimes, would fill the gap.
And that means that universities ought to be hit with another tactic: businesspeople must stop falling for the credentialing scam that universities represent. They ought to be hiring bright kids out of high school directly and giving them internships, or hiring from solid state schools.
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Finally, parents need to seriously think about not sending their kids to these universities. They are indoctrination mills for truly immoral garbage.
Want a case in point? How about young liberal Jews?
A whole generation of young Jewish kids have been sent to university by their parents, who believed in the upwardly mobile American dream. There, these kids were turned against their parents and their roots. The New York Times reports that many young Jews – meaning, of course, people who were born Jewish but have nothing to do with actual Jewish practice or identity, as even the Times recognizes – are abandoning Israel in the name of Leftist ideology.
Here’s the Times:
Marc Kornblatt prepared uneasily last month for his daughter, Louisa, to arrive for 10 days with the family. Her homecomings once brought the comfort of movie nights and card games, but this year was different….He and his wife, Judith, had moved away from Madison, Wis., to live in Tel Aviv, where they felt a real sense of belonging as Jews. Around the same time, their daughter, attending graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, came to oppose the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
That daughter, unsurprisingly, “sometimes uses the pronouns they/them.” According to the Times,
At Berkeley, she read Audre Lorde, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and other Black feminist thinkers, who prompted her to consider ‘questions around power, privilege and whiteness.’ Ms. Kornblatt came to feel that her emotional ties to Jewish statehood undermined her vision for ‘collective liberation.’ Over the last year, she became increasingly involved in pro-Palestine activism, including through Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist activist group, and the If Not Now movement. ‘I don’t think the state of Israel should ever have been established,’ she said. ‘It’s based on this idea of Jewish supremacy. And I’m not on board with that.’
Actually, the concept of Israel is based on Jewish existence. But that’s really what Leftism opposes, for all the reasons listed.
Universities are a disaster area. Parents should pull their kids unless those kids are prepared for the raging hell-storm of foolishness and immorality they are about to be taught.