The corruption of American universities is now graphically on display
Fashionable cosmopolitanism and old-fashioned greed generate antisemitism
Perhaps more shocking than the weeks of student mobs openly espousing antisemitism at several Ivy League universities is what plainly appears to be their enablement by academic leaders as became evident in testimony before a committee of the House of Representatives this past week.
The Presidents of Harvard College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania responded to questions from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) about whether antisemitic hate speech was banned by their code of conduct with answers that massively equivocated. Their common claim was that actual violation would “depend on the context,” leaving open just what that meant, somewhere between advocacy and violence. Two of the three have been asked to resign by their boards.
The question, of course, is why? How, in the indisputable knowledge that a climate of fear for Jewish students on campus exists, could those leaders put such palpable evidence of bigotry in “context?” Let’s strip away the pretense and make plain that they are enabling a significant portion of their student body to avoid consequences for unlawful acts because they contribute to their bottom line too much to write off, as I will show.
It has been apparent since the mobs on multiple campuses followed with massive support after the October 7 barbarous Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens and others, that the students dominating the weeks of pro-Palestinian rallies are largely from Middle Eastern countries steeped in anti-Israel sentiment. They do not speak for any of the 80 percent of Americans which public opinion polls reveal as supporting Israel in its determination to put an end to Hamas and its terrorism for good.
In this sad era of anti-white (and anti-Asian) discrimination in admissions, we should not be surprised that foreigners openly hostile to republican government and natural rights should become so significant a force that university presidents invent reasons to overlook their bigoted and unlawful ways. But there is more, much more.
According to Google, “Between 2014 and 2020, Muslim-majority countries together donated $5.86 billion to American higher-educational institutions, representing 29 percent of all foreign donations. Qatar and Saudi Arabia were responsible for much of this largesse.”
Now that helps put in “context” what continues to disfigure leading American universities. Why should they care what excesses students from the Middle Eastengage in if oodles of money flow in from Muslim government-paid tuition, along with massive straightforward subsidies? This means there are programs and courses for all students that put those anti-democratic regimes in the best possible light. There is no other reason for the nearly $5 billion dollar subsidies.
These overseas subsidies have been prepared by decades of the American Left’s long march against the traditional liberal arts core of university education with its protections for academic freedom, to embracing cultural Marxism. I mean the deliberate stoking of class, race and gender hatred (replacing the old bourgeois/proletariat divide that failed to produce revolutions in the Western world). Jews vs. Palestinians is just another oppressor/oppressed category to add to the prescribed list. As this current trope is aimed at discrediting the “colonialist” Jews doing alleged injustice to Palestinians, the chant “From the River to the Sea” is easily embraced and repeated ad nauseum.
As a graduate student at San Jose State and Claremont Graduate school in the late 1960s, it was apparent to me that academe was indeed losing its essential moorings. Between decades of judicial rulings that blurred the distinctions between freedom of speech and calls for the overthrow of the American Constitution, and professorial embrace of value-free behavioral studies in the social sciences, something had to give, and it did. Lacking a moral compass for good citizenship and an intellectual capacity to challenge anti-American causes, the old Left defaulted to the New Left’s clear rejection of the American founding, and in due course of Western civilization.
My most vivid memory of that period is the seeming brain-dead lock on some students to affect the pose of free thinker or dissenter, apart from the merits of whatever they believed to be true before, but rejected, with no evidence of rational reconsideration in between. This tendency was apparent as long ago as the publication of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s First Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1760), which originally made the same criticism of the sudden emergence of “enlightened free thinkers,” who unreflectingly rejected faith for skepticism, a process which illustrated that arts and sciences’ restoration did not “purify morals.”
Thanks to Max Weber, influential nineteenth century social scientist, academic and political thinkers adopted “values” as non-judgmental terminology over moral judgments, rendering the latter merely personal or subjective rather than objective. After decades of blindness to evil regimes and doctrines, many people saw the horrors of Nazism and Fascism and to a lesser extent Communism, but that time has passed. The New Left’s opportunity for pushing ideologies not in the least grounded in “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” came when political thought was liberated from having to the make the case based on reasoned analysis but falling back on pure passion. No political order can be sustained without what Lincoln called “cold, hard calculating reason.”
Since the Nazi holocaust with its government-imposed murder of six million Jews, antisemitism has been condemned in the strongest possible terms. But all it took was an attack on a once-favored nation by a band of terrorists fighting “colonization” to render bigotry respectable. We are fortunate that most Americans (I’m not sure about Europeans) reject antisemitism, but it is clear that those who educate them in what we thought were our finest universities and colleges have lost their moral bearings. The dominant role that academia plays in our society that has corrupted students for decades is clearly in question.
We still need liberal education and academic freedom, but those in control of higher education need to be called to account for their offences both on and off campus. We must reject their leadership and encourage donors and legislators to do what needs to be done to restore academic purpose and rigor. No more putting up with moral drift.