American academics suffered through their most depressing week since Donald Trump’s election — maybe even since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On Wednesday, 67-year-old Anthony Polito murdered three people and wounded a fourth at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The job applicant passed over by UNLV affirmed the school’s decision by so violently objecting to it. The counterintuitive lesson drawn by many of his fellow professors was that the rest of society needed to become a gun-free zone just like UNLV. Hmmm.
On Tuesday, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges punted on a proposed rule to weigh the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts of a college or university as a condition of accreditation. This end-around on state laws in Texas and Florida limiting DEI ran into a defensive end faithfully fulfilling containment duties, i.e., a South unwilling to subsidize leftism disguised as an essential component of education as all other regions do.
The worst news at least for the public image of higher education came on Tuesday when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT affirmed the oft-affirmed title of a book I wrote two decades ago called Intellectual Morons. Rep. Elise Stefanik asked what the university administrators seemed to regard as a trick question in whether calls for the extermination of Jews rose to a punishable offense on their campuses. Penn’s Liz Magill labeled it “a context-dependent decision.” Harvard’s Claudine Gay said it “depends on the context.” MIT’s Sally Kornbluth offered a “depending on the context” in her answer, too.
The three weird sisters not only failed the test, they copied their answers. How might their universities discipline three students sitting next to one another who gave the same profoundly wrong and bizarrely amorphous non-answer answer? One imagines a penalty worse than for any “from the river to the sea”–type chant. And this hypothetical gets to the heart of the very real issue: the adults in Congress and beyond want to force students to pay for the offenses of their teachers.
There seems a linkage between these three seemingly disparate events. Prevailing ideas on campus — such as gun-free zones or meted out punishment for calling a man a man but not for loudly wishing Jews dead — make less sense the further one gets from a campus. And DEI, a philistine’s way of hijacking education for mindless, ideological purposes, paved the way for the deer-in-the-headlights responses to a softball question from Rep. Stefanik. Why did the schools not punish one group for chanting words that a second group found displeasing or legitimately threatening seems the wrong question. What foolishness do these colleges teach that emboldens so many to call to erase an entire nation as they obliviously imagine this proposed genocide as social justice?
“The real issue on campuses isn’t antisemitism but the anti-Western ethos that has colonized large swaths of the curriculum,” Heather MacDonald explains in the Wall Street Journal. “Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization’s very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class — that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence.”
Expel as many students for sanguinary speech as one cares to. This addresses symptom and not disease. Nineteen-year-olds, even ones at Harvard, Penn, and MIT, amount to human xeroxes.
Somebody at MIT taught those 19-year-olds it’s okay to blockade Jewish students from attending class. Somebody at Penn inspired a vandal to scribble “The Jews R Nazis” on a door. Somebody at Harvard taught those 19-year-olds to reflexively blame the victims of the Oct. 7 rapes, beheadings, and kidnappings.
Rep. Joe Wilson asked the percentage of conservatives on the faculty at each school, a statistic the professional bean-counters of race, sex, and myriad other categories divulged they do not collect. Wilson concluded that “no diversity” of thought bequeathed this “antisemitism,” adding that “it’s due to illiberalism.”
Indeed, only in a politically homogenous intellectual swamp would one feel comfortable blaming the murder of a tiny, harmless Jewish hippie chick on her and her fellow holiday ravers.
Rather than punish students who cycle through every few years, why not consciously hire a faculty that represents a broad range of thought rather than the bigoted, narrow crowd that excludes ideas heterodox on campus but common beyond the walls of Harvard Yard?
Alas, to do this first requires firing Presidents Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth. Short of this, the adults undoubtedly continue to blame and perhaps punish the teenagers. Donors and governments defunding these schools appears the more realistic way to improve this ghastly situation unmasked but not born this fall.
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