Bastions of Higher Learning or of Hate?

The disturbing testimony by college presidents from Penn, Harvard, and MIT received a lot of attention last week because of their refusal to acknowledge the horrors of Jewish genocide or genocidal rhetoric. Though Penn President Liz Magill resigned, Harvard President Claudine Gay will remain. Unfortunately, this incident is just the tip of the iceberg. It can be tied directly to the Israel/Hamas war, but it also goes well beyond that and reflects a growing hatred and divisiveness and ignorance of history not just at universities but in our society at large.

This is coming at the same time that a new poll from the Economist/YouGov found that a fifth of Americans ages 18 to 29 believe the Holocaust was a myth.

It is clear that the Gaza war is stoking the embers of antisemitism on college campuses and around the country into a raging fire, as students replace discourse, debate, and truth-seeking with hate. This current degradation is not occurring in a vacuum; antisemitism has been growing roots in higher learning — both here and around the world — for decades, even centuries.

My wife grew up in the Soviet Union, where antisemitism was a daily reality, and she became one of only two Jewish students in her medical school class — as a result of straight-As but also because she worked in a post office for a year to prove she was a member of the proletariat. Non-Jews faced no such criteria. After emigrating to the U.S. in the 1980s and establishing herself as a physician, she returned to visit her medical school in 2016, but was not allowed in.

Here in the U.S., antisemitism has been more below the surface, awaiting an event such as the Gaza war to allow it to bubble up.

Jewish admission to institutions of higher learning was restricted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, while antisemitism flourished there.

The Anti-Defamation League has been following antisemitic acts on college campuses since 1984 (when there were only four reported incidents), including vandalism, harassment, speeches, and Holocaust-denial ads. The ADL believes that antisemitism at colleges reflects overall trends in society, increasing as the wave of inclusive positivism in the post-World War II era slowly receded. According to the ADL, “As students form their sense of self at college and seek a niche in the world, some are especially vulnerable to hatemongers who either stir their developing political passions or couch bigotry in academic terms designed to appeal to their intellectual curiosity. Controversial speech is often welcomed at universities more than in other venues.”

More recently, ADL tallied 665 campus anti-Israel incidents during the 2022-2023 academic year, including 24 instances of harassment and over 300 protests. The number for the 2023 to 2024 year is clearly going to be many times that, given campus reactions to the Gaza war.

Unfortunately, the ADL has done too little to staunch the flow of antisemitism in colleges and elsewhere, the very trend they are tracking, and has instead focused on diversity, which seemingly has become a code word for minority rights other than for Jews.

It is beyond hypocritical that at these supposed bastions of tolerance and equality, the very principles that university leaders insist be applied to all minorities are not applied to Jews.

University leadership cannot choose equal rights for one group while another group is attacked and mocked and threatened.

Link to article: https://themessenger.com/opinion/college-presidents-campus-antisemitism-higher-education-penn-harvard-mit