And Now, Princeton

Now that Harvard has come clean about the festering anti-Semitism on its campus, the nation’s eyes move to other Ivy League universities.

Harvard has just published a report it commissioned about campus anti-Semitism. It is not a pretty picture. Lawrence Summers explained it on CNN:

This is a searing report. It says what many of us have known for a long time, particularly that there are real issues of antisemitism on the Harvard campus. The report proposes, in quite constructive ways, a variety of steps that should have been taken some time ago but much more needs to be done by leadership if the campus culture is to profoundly change. 

As for Princeton, Christopher Rufo interviewed an anonymous professor for the City Journal. The professor explains that Princeton jumped head-first into wokeness:

Anti-Semitism is really a symptom of a deeper malaise at Princeton, which is that the university decided to go woke and—as President Eisgruber wrote in the last few months of the first Trump administration—declare that we were “systemically racist.” But if we have been systemically racist, it’s been against whites, Jews, Asians, and Indians, in favor of other demographics. We’ve always been told that we have to give special treatment to women and certain demographic minorities.

Those faculty members who speak out in favor of Hamas and against Israel are now being rewarded:

All the people who’ve been signing these anti-Israel petitions and going to the encampments are being considered for the top administrative positions. For instance, there’s a woman named Ruha Benjamin who has just been given the MacArthur Award. She led a group of students to take over a building here and then exited the building a minute before the police showed up. 

As it happens, Benjamin is a professor of African-American studies. Do the letters DEI come to mind?

But, Rufo asks, isn’t Eisgruber himself Jewish? Apparently, he is not as Jewish as it would appear.

Professor: No, hold on. He discovered he was Jewish as an adult. It was a very late discovery. It was something from Ellis Island that his son looked up. I don’t think he grew up Jewish at all. To me, again, the bottom line is this: he’s bought into the ideology that certain people are victims and certain people are oppressors. I think he’s bought into it completely.

Jewish or not Jewish, Eisgruber is thoroughly woke. He has ordered the removal of photographs of white males from university walls, even Jewish males:

A scientific department had displayed photographs of all the previous department chairs for the last 70 years—all white men, many of them Jewish. One day, all the pictures disappeared. The administration had removed them from the wall because someone found it objectionable that all these white men should be staring down at them. And yet, a number of those men were key in bringing black students to Princeton in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But none of that history matters: it’s just a bunch of whites faces, so they removed all the photographs, and no one objected—no one.

The anonymous professor offers a plan for attacking anti-Semitism at Princeton:

I want this university severely punished for its unlawful behavior. I want discovery; I want all the emails to come out that will make it very evident that this university was engaged in illegal discrimination. I want President Eisgruber subpoenaed before Congress to have to account for not only anti-Semitism, but for DEI and for the “systemic racism” arguments that he’s made. I want him to be publicly put on the stand. That’s what ultimately will deeply embarrass this university.

It sounds like a good plan.