Straight to the point

Societies rot from the head down, as fish are said to do. In the academy, too, the head rots first. Elite universities were the first to take to heart Marx’s admonition that the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it. Revolutionary change requires silencing ancestral voices, consigning to oblivion the rich traditions of interpretation from which Western civilisation sprang.

Since Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford in 1987, elite universities have progressively gutted core liberal studies programmes that introduced students to the vital civilisational inheritance of knowledge and wisdom rooted in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. For the past two decades, they’ve judged applicants for admission as much by their devotion to community service and activism as by their academic potential. Activist students, in turn, began to demand that universities advance any number of causes under the umbrella of social justice.

The ideological invasion of the Ivory Tower has had predictably bad results. Much of higher education today effectively consists of giving students a handful of Post-it notes and teaching them how to apply them to the images that are projected onto their smartphones. People of colour who are evidently miserable and poor, such as the Palestinians of Gaza, are labelled “victims”, whose innocence is not only assumed but unchallengeable on campus. White, well-off, educated people, especially if they have a strong national identity, are identified as “colonisers” and “oppressors”. Should we really be shocked that students who’ve been taught this crude intellectual game, one that unfolds in the immediate present with no depth of breadth of understanding, would welcome the chance to celebrate Hamas’s demonstration that “decolonisation” is not just “an abstract academic theory” but a “tangible event”?

Bret Stephens has written that Americans are on the road to a second Kristallnacht. This is not a figure of speech. Since the Hamas pogrom of October 7, Jews have been attacked on the streets of American cities, and Jewish-owned stores are vandalised every day. To their shame, universities have been on the cutting edge of this intellectually-fuelled explosion of antisemitism, as they were in Nazi Germany.

Americans have taken notice. The US Department of Education recently opened investigations of possible discrimination based on ancestry or ethnicity at more than a half-dozen institutions. Summoned by Congress to explain why they have allowed antisemitism to fester on their campuses, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all refused to say that calling for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment. Would these university leaders say the same about calls for the genocide of Palestinians, gays, or African Americans? The question answers itself. Even the Biden administration, which has aggressively pushed social justice imperatives, felt compelled to condemn their evasions.

The president and chairman of the board of trustees of Penn resigned in the aftermath of the congressional hearing, and many are calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign as well. These blood-sacrifices make for good theatre, but don’t address the problem. Lopping off the head of a rotten fish does little good: the foul thing still stinks to high heaven. The deeper problem is that the intellectual formation of large numbers of faculty and administrators at American universities supports acts of violence so appalling that to call them barbaric would be an insult to barbarians.

The genocidal logic of Post-it note ideology was recently made clear at Hillcrest High School in Queens. Students discovered that a teacher had attended a rally in support of Israel. As one told the New York Post: “A bunch of kids decided to make a group chat, expose her, talk about it, and then talk about starting a riot.” (“Exposure” has been a primary weapon of nihilists and revolutionaries for almost two centuries.) “School administrators and the NYPD… got wind of their plans just in time to rush the teacher into an office and lock the door,” the paper reported. Students waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Free Palestine!” rampaged for hours, vandalising bathrooms and other property.

Here’s the kicker: the students called the teacher they tried to hunt down a “cracker ass bitch”. The kids may be ignorant, but they are not stupid. They’ve somehow learned that social justice licences the expression of hateful attitudes, including racism and misogyny as well as antisemitism. Did the mob pursue their quarry because she is a female teacher, or a Jew, or because she is a “cracker”? It doesn’t matter: an oppressor is an oppressor. A document on intersectionality distributed by the sociology department at my old university explained that oppressors include those who are “white”, “European”, “credentialed”, “upper and upper-middle class”, “anglophones”, and “pale”. Most Jews in the United States tick all these boxes. How could they not be oppressors, if they fit the profile?

The civilisational threat posed by this ideological activism in American higher education recalls the invaluable intellectual support German academics gave Nazism during the Third Reich. Theologians worked to fashion a new myth of Jesus as a forerunner of Nazism, presenting him as a spirited Christian warrior who strove heroically to destroy Judaism. They purged all Jewish content from a revised publication of the New Testament, depicted Nazi ideology as the fulfilment of the original Christianity of Jesus, and elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ. Today, few academics would see Christ as an Aryan. Yet many embrace identity politics and the religion of humanity with a distinctly religious fervour.

The German theologians were not alone. The philosopher Martin Heidegger played a leading role in clothing the Nazi Party with academic respectability. In “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, a speech he gave when he assumed the Rectorship of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger aggressively positioned the academy at the forefront of Hitlerism. His speech anticipated many of the attitudes now popular on American campuses. He decried what he called Germany’s “moribund semblance of a culture”, and he called for the expulsion of academic freedom from the university. He also characterised the revolutionary work of students and professors as a “battle” — music to the ears of academic social justice warriors.

Most important, Heidegger applauded the mobilisation of students under the Führerprinzip, the suspension of written law on the basis that the word of Adolph Hitler is the law for Germans. History repeats itself, except that the Führer — the “driver” — is now social justice. After 2020, critical race theory became mandatory in law schools, and many universities are now arguably ignoring the law for ideological reasons. Hamas is a federally designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), and federal law makes it a crime to provide “material support or resources” to an FTO. Yet students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has over 200 active chapters on American campuses, has emphatically claimed to be “a PART of this [Hamas] movement”.

Many state laws also forbid support for terrorism. If SJP receives any financial or logistical support from a university — a share of student activity fees, photocopying, or anything else — that university is arguably involved in criminal activity based on federal law. These are ample grounds for excluding them from campus. Yet only three private schools, Brandeis, Columbia, and George Washington, have so far suspended SJP, and Florida, the only state that has tried to do so, recently backed down in the face of a lawsuit.

The Nazis engaged in what was called Gleichschaltung, political equalisation or coordination. A Schaltung is a circuit. Gleichschaltung in an organisation makes it possible to run a charge through it as efficiently as possible. It turns an institution into a conduit of ideological power. This, too, harmonises with the functional reality of much of American higher education.

The rot in higher education is far too deep to be fixed by resignations, lawsuits, and congressional hearings. Nothing less than a systematic and widespread effort at something like de-Nazification will do. Short of such drastic measures, I fear, the American university will continue to be an activist institution that advances a totalising ideology. And it will drag society down with it.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/