CounterCurrent: Week of 03/10/25
CounterCurrent: anti-Semitism Edition is a monthly newsletter of the National Association of Scholars’ newsletter, which will document, expose, and explain the anti-Semitism on today’s college campuses.
Institutions are like old books in a used bookstore. They are everywhere, and boring on the surface until you open them up. Higher education is a boring and yet central institution to American life. Unfortunately, it is so replete with anti-Semitism as a norm in elite schools that eliminating the scourge of Jew-hate will require broad changes to one of higher education’s central features—the faculty. The Trump administration’s recent moves to deport Hamas-supporting foreign students and canceling Federal grants is a step in this direction. Still, more can be done to require universities to hire scholars devoted to classical education.
The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security are finally declaring war on the college anti-Semitism that has plagued campuses since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023. Last week, the Trump administration announced the Federal government was canceling $400 million in grants to Columbia University over the failure of administrators to stop anti-Semitism and protect Jewish students. Across the country, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into the University of California (UC) and whether or not it systematically allowed an “Antisemitic hostile work environment” to target Jewish professors and staff. The task force led by the new Attorney General, Pam Bondi, is investigating 10 universities, including not only Columbia and the UC system but also Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California. Not to be left out, a civil rights complaint of anti-Semitism was filed with the Department of Education against Cal Poly Humboldt, asserting that Jews on campus face “severe and persistent harassment.”
Back at Columbia, the university’s interim president Katrina Armstrong stated that the administration was willing to work with the government over “legitimate concerns” regarding anti-Semitism. Going after funding is a major step to changing higher education as an institution. Columbia University alone has $5 billion in dedicated government grants on file. For a new government set on cost-cutting, the Ivy League has plenty of fat to cut as a way to change university behavior. According to OpenTheBooks, the ten schools that make up the Ivy League received $33.1 billion in federal grants from 2018-2022.
While administrator-enablers of pro-Hamas students are taking notice, the new Trump administration is deporting foreign students who prevent other students from attending class. Trump stated his intent to deport “pro-Hamas” students shortly after taking office. Now, Trump is making good on that promise with the arrest and pending deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student at Columbia, for leading pro-Hamas protests at the New York campus. It was anti-Semitic protestors at Columbia that took over the campus’ Hamilton Hall, terrorized custodial staff, and barred Jewish students and faculty from reaching their classes. The crackdowns are a welcome development, but changing institutions means changing relationships, and the central relationships of any university are those between professors and students.
On the surface, it is easy to lay the blame for campus anti-Semitism at the feet of college administrators. In reality, the heart of anti-Semitism in academia is not in the admin’s back offices or on the quad. College anti-Semitism originates with professors, grows in the classroom, and is reinforced by ideologically homogenous scholars who hate Judeo-Christian civilization and anything affiliated with it. Israel is a top target for Marxist academia because the contemporary Jewish state combines the nation-state as the West’s highest form of political organization with Jews and a national identity replete with theological connotations. On the whole, professors are not only overwhelmingly leftist, but have made a profession that manufactures anti-Western sentiment and anti-Semitism in particular.
Professors have rendered higher education into a factory for hatred of Jews, Israel, and the West overall. Making an anti-Semitic college student begins with professors and their research. It begins with an assumption that professors have about the world. Israel is assumed to be illegitimate and racist, scholars then conduct research animated by that assumption. That research takes the form of books and articles that formalize those assumptions, which are then given to students in the form of lectures and course material. Most students are innocent as they are exposed to this, as they are fed a steady diet of interlocking material and lectures given by professors that are politically and socially homogenous. Over the course of a four-year degree, students can be forgiven for thinking that Israel is evil, as few dissenting voices are to be found on campus. If they are, those dissenters appear isolated and ignorant to the point of malevolence. Classrooms are strategic terrain, and the students who go through those classrooms are likely to end up leading companies and agencies later in life and shaping American institutions.
The Trump administration is off to an excellent start in trying to change higher education as an institution, but it must go deeper. Cutting off funds and deporting foreign activist students are ultimately peripheral to core of the problem. Professors espouse anti-Israel, anti-American, and anti-Semitic ideas in their work and teaching, and lay the foundation for the Columbia hate mobs that are now costing the university $400 million. If the government and civil society are serious about combating campus anti-Semitism, a new generation of professors needs to be trained to stand up for classical education, to disavow activist classrooms, and to replace the professors who currently occupy the Ivory Tower.
Until next week.
Photo by عباد ديرانية - Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147749568
