CounterCurrent: Week of 07/29/24
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.
Credentials without wisdom and diplomas with debt are what come to mind when thinking about higher education. According to a recent poll commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and conducted by the University of Chicago, only 28 percent of Americans had a “great deal” of confidence in colleges and universities. From 2015 to 2023, confidence in higher education fell from 57 percent to 36 percent. Faith in universities was already dying, and now it is nearly finished. In the recent poll, the largest drop was among “Democrats, women and younger Americans 18-34.” Campus anti-Semitism explains much of why academia has reached late-stage luster.
In the past, the phrase “Western anti-Semitism” conjured images of medieval churches, nineteenth century Russian pogroms, and German gas chambers. In the twenty-first century, the college campus is included in this list. At Columbia University, three administrators were recently put on leave for downplaying and dismissing anti-Semitism via text message. At the end of last year, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill stepped down after disastrous testimony before Congress in which she argued that anti-Semitism was “context-dependent.” At the University of Southern California (USC), the New School, Northeastern, New York University, UCLA, and elsewhere, groups of faculty have stated support for the Palestinians and student protestors who back them. Since October 7, over 2,100 were arrested at campus protests across the country. From top administrators to students, mainstream American academia is anti-Semitic to the core. But you may be asking, how did this decrease faith in the Ivory Tower?
Today’s anti-Semitic student mobs, encouraged by professors and administrative enablers, are more than agitators. Today’s graduates will someday have power inside our nation’s courts, corporations, and culture. That pipeline from college to decision-making power has triggered a justifiable alarm within various sectors of American economic and cultural life. In an opinion piece published last December, John Ellis, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, argued that higher education has metastasized into a “threat to America.” Rather than function as a beacon to help build an “advanced society,” academia has become an ideological cesspit. According to the editor of Guitar Chalk, a website for musical enthusiasts, college has become a pricey venue for propagating a “social agenda” rather than offering economic or educational benefits for students who choose to get degrees. At the University of Pennsylvania, David Magerman, a donor to the university, opted to give $5 million to Israeli universities over his alma mater due to the school’s atrocious record on anti-Semitism. Magerman stated that the “American Empire is ending.” Combined, the professor, the donor, and the online magazine editor offer a snapshot of the emerging consensus on higher education that it is simply out of touch at best, and evil at worst.
The dark secret of anti-Semitism is that ignorance alone cannot explain it away or absolve those who adhere to it. If anything, the most vivid episodes of history’s anti-Semitism have begun with a country’s elites. The Inquisitors of early-modern Spain were from the elite of the Catholic world, hand-picked by monarchs and sanctioned by the Pope. In addition to founding the Inquisition, Pope Sixtus IV (1414-1484 AD) oversaw the construction of the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Library. He also founded Uppsala University in Sweden. Half a millennium later, the Nazis emerged not out of an uneducated rabble, but out of Germany’s elites. Proto-Nazi intelligentsia carefully created a deep philosophical basis for their worldview and set about promoting it. At least 80 members of the Nazi SS were German intellectuals. Other than the ideology in question, today’s elite anti-Semites are engaged in the same exercise with their theories of oppression and intersectionality and efforts to translate theory into activism.
Adherents of intersectionality view the world through a matrix of “marginalized” groups—a binary society divided into the “oppressed” and the “oppressor.” This idea of a “matrix” of oppression is the philosophical glue behind several academic fields built around ideas of shared grievance with a consistent lack of methodological rigor. While pervasive throughout today’s colleges and universities, research driven by intersectionality is fueled by confirmation bias more than anything scientific. Rather than trying to disprove a theory, studies on intersectionality rely on piling up data favorable to the argument. Over time, this creates fields lacking any notion of objectivity; instead, it lends academic weight to ideology rather than the production and dissemination of knowledge. In other words, many ideas found on today’s campus are worthless. Now, the world is taking notice.
Campus anti-Semites seeking to explain away their hatred for Israel as the only Jewish country would quickly point out that they are animated by moral outrage over the deaths of Palestinians rather than any intellectual conviction. Days after the October 7 attacks, faculty at the University of Minnesota’s Department for Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies stated their support for Palestine, noting their own “rich history of studying transnational geopolitics and settler colonialism.” In expressing their rage for Israel’s “apartheid system,” the faculty asserted that “Palestine is a feminist issue.” At UC Berkeley two and a half weeks after the Hamas attack, faculty decried the “Palestinian people in Gaza facing genocidal Israeli state violence,” and called for more universities to “stand with, and not against, the subjugated, brutalized, displaced, and terrorized Palestinian people.”
Much of academia is more motivated by a hatred of the West, anti-Semitism, and a special antipathy toward Israel than it is about actual atrocities on principle. If academia had a moral center and outrage about suffering, campus outrage mobs would have formed over the ethnic cleansing of Armenian Artsakh by Azerbaijan, the plight of black Nigerian Christians, and young pro-democracy Iranians jailed and murdered by Iran’s theocrats. If you don’t remember campus protests over these other atrocities, it’s because there were none. In the world of intersectionality, these other groups are similar to Israel by virtue of their being too Western. That is why academia supports Hamas and cares little for these other causes.
Rumors about higher education’s deteriorating quality have been circling around for decades; however, faith in academia is finally reaching a nadir. If high financial costs, and opportunity costs in time were not enough to dissuade students and their families from college enrollment, anti-Semitism might be the last warning needed. Jew-hating mobs roaming “elite” institutions should serve as the final nail in the coffin for a dilapidated system that offers credentials without substance and anger instead of skills. Right now, the campus activists are coming for Jews. Thankfully, these activists have succeeded in alienating themselves from the rest of civil society.
Photo by makibestphoto on Adobe Stock
