The hypocrisy and moral imbecility of the three Ivy League presidents before Congress last week points to two deeper problems of university leadership today: First, college administrations are terrified of the campus left — both the faculty and grievance-mongering student groups.
Second, college administrators don’t take the campus left seriously.
How to square these seemingly contradictory propositions?
Consider the number of academic leaders doing their best Claude Rains act, professing to be shocked — shocked! — to discover there is virulent antisemitism on their campuses.
Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (who is Jewish) wrote in late October, “Nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism I see on college campuses right now.”
Many other senior academic figures, including former Harvard president Larry Summers, have said much the same.
Surely such accomplished academics could not be oblivious to the rapid spread of ideological strains of “decolonialism” studies that demonized Israel and the way the noxious “intersectional” identity-politics factotums who run the “diversity, equity and inclusion” racket on campus assigned Jews to the ranks of “white supremacist” oppressors, thus mainstreaming antisemitism behind the flimsy cloak of “anti-Zionism.”
You’d have to be Rip Van Winkle to have overlooked this trend.
It’s not as if there weren’t warnings.
The eminent Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky observed back in 1990 that antisemitism was on the rise, seeing early the exact intellectual mechanism that would be used to turn Jews, previously regarded as a set-upon ethnic minority, into a delegitimized oppressor class.
“Jews,” Wildavsky noted, “were identified with Israel, which was defeating Arabs, who resorted to guerrilla warfare, however inefficacious, which somehow gave them membership in the Third World, so that Israel ipso facto became an imperialist oppressor, and domestic Jews ceased being a minority. Acta est fabula.” (“The play is over; applaud.”)
Yet neither Summers nor any other university leader lifted a finger to slow this spreading malignancy. Why not?
Perhaps another recent campus fad provides a clue: the “land acknowledgment.”
It is commonplace to hear student leaders and senior college administrators begin public events declaring the campus is located on (or “occupies”) land that belonged historically to indigenous people.
These declarations are often ambiguous, though some insinuate the land was “stolen” or acquired unjustly.
Some schools, such as the University of Washington, even sought to require all faculty to include a land acknowledgment in every course syllabus.
But if the land on which the university rests was acquired unjustly, then why not give it back — or least pay back rent to the descendants of the indigenous tribes?
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Surely Harvard can spare some reparations from its $50 billion endowment.
Yet these demands are never made.
Apparently only Israel is expected to give back “occupied” land.
The reason paying for land a university “occupies” unjustly is never demanded is no one takes land acknowledgments seriously.
It is, to borrow the popular postmodernist term, “performative” virtue-signaling.
These declarations are wholly insincere, but they mollify the oppression-obsessed’s endless appetite.
This is just one example of the wider phenomenon of campus monocultures that’s seen an explosion of ideologically debased faculty and curricula.
Administrators have given in to the path of least resistance for a generation, approving the creation of tendentious “studies” departments, along with busybody DEI bureaucracies, filled with mediocre and politicized faculty.
They thought it was costless to give in, while regular faculty in mainstream departments regard these fever swamps with benign neglect.
This is true even among many liberal professors, who will admit in whispers they know most of the radicalized faculty, such as Ibram X. Kendi, are third-rate thinkers.
Worse, these third-rate thinkers can sense they aren’t respected, which further fuels their “social justice” rage.
But confronted with vocal campus demands that Israel cease to exist alongside verbal harassment and threats against Jewish students, administrators are seeing for the first time that their endless appeasement of partisan and politicized academic programs is not costless — literally so in the case of Ivy League colleges losing millions of dollars in alumni donations but more broadly to their cherished reputations as “inclusive” institutions.
They ignored the fact that for the dominant wokerati on their campuses, the fine print excludes Jews.
And after hounding students and faculty for the offenses of misgendering someone or committing other absurd “microaggressions,” university administrators are revealed as hypocrites and fools.
Firing a few presidents sends a nice signal, but nothing is going to change on campus until universities start closing mediocre politicized departments and laying off the radical faculty that generated this antisemitic malignancy.
America once helped Germany de-Nazify its universities after World War II, so it’s not like we don’t know how to do it.
Steven F. Hayward is the Gaylord visiting professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/12/10/opinion/firing-ivy-league-presidents-should-only-be-the-beginning/