Bret Stephens is correct to call for a reckoning with America’s elite academic institutions. Clearly, the explosion of anti-Semitism at these places has made Jewish students feel largely unwelcome. Jewish parents have taken notice. Many of them are encouraging their children to apply elsewhere.
Mostly this involves the Ivy League, but similar institutions, like Stanford, are on the list.
And yet, it is not just about Jewish students. The advent of systemic bigotry should tell all students, not to mention donors, that the value of the degrees being given out by these schools is in freefall. All parents, regardless of their ideological predilections, would do well not to feed the beast of America’s elite educational institutions.
Before examining the Stephens analysis, we should point out one aspect of the problem that he does not notice. We can ask ourselves who is financing this anti-Semitism. If it seems now to be endemic to private colleges and universities, that means it is not being funded by the public. It is being funded by Middle Eastern countries and entities, all of whom expect a return on their investment.
Remember the old saw: Follow the money. If the government of Qatar has financed a Middle East Studies Center and some Palestinian professorships, it is engaged in the production of anti-Israel propaganda.
Of course, a double standard is at work. The student demonstrators are all-in for defending every imaginable victim group, except for Jews. By their calculus Jews are oppressors, not victims, even when they are victimized.
Stephens explains:
Students who police words like “blacklist” or “whitewash” and see “microaggressions” in everyday life ignore the entreaties of their Jewish peers to avoid chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Students who claim they’re horribly pained by scenes of Palestinian suffering were largely silent on Oct. 7 — when they weren’t openly cheering the attacks. And students who team up with outside groups that are in overt sympathy with Islamist terrorists aren’t innocents. They’re collaborators.
As for the question of where the students learned to be anti-Semitic, the answer is obvious. They have been fed a radical leftist narrative, one that offers them a place within the vanguard of the coming revolution.
We all understand that this has been tried and that it failed during the last century, but people who want to extort advantages they have not earned find it irresistible:
They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.
As for the larger context, let us not ignore the simple fact that the Biden administration has been criticizing and attacking the prime minister of Israel. It has lately been withholding munitions from the Jewish state and it has told Israel not to counterattack the Hezbollah forces attacking it from the North.
This makes it respectable to hate Israel, to see it as a genocidal state.
And groups like the International Criminal Court, led by George Clooney’s dopey wife, have declared that the leaders of Israel and of Hamas are morally equivalent-- both worthy of indictment.
If there is a moral equivalence, you are free to choose sides.
And then there are the college administrators. Many of them, apparently not owing their jobs to their merits, have bought into the oppression narrative.
They live with a constant threat. They are afraid that someone some day will discover that they do not deserve the jobs that they have. Their fear being called out and discovered to be frauds, so they are far more interested in attacking people, like the Israelis, who have earned and built what they have.
They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.
That’s the significance of the leaked images of four Columbia University deans exchanging dismissive and sophomoric text messages during a panel discussion in May on Jewish life on campus, including the suggestion that a panelist was “taking full advantage of this moment” for the sake of the “fundraising potential.”
And then there is the problem with fashionable theories, the kinds that are propagated on campus these days:
But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?
The Palestinian cause has little to do with building a functioning and even prosperous society. It is about expropriating what others have built. Losers are drawn to this cause because it gives them a reason to demean the accomplishments of others; said accomplishments make them feel ashamed. And we cannot have that.
As for what is to be done, Stephens suggests that the rot is now endemic to the system. He believes that it will take years to clean it out.
Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it.
Better to look elsewhere for educational opportunity. Go South, young person.
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