You don't have to shout "Make America Great Again" to have serious doubts about the decline of American universities - and not only America's.
The question is the one Douglas Murray asks in his new book: "Why are the most privileged students in the West siding with terrorists against a democracy struggling to survive?".
When Harvard President Claudine Gay was asked at a congressional hearing whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s rules on bullying and harassment, she said, “It depends on the context”.
Trump has said that Harvard “continues to take sickening political, ideological, terrorist-supporting positions.” And even before Trump, Harvard had seen a slump in enrollment and a flight of investors, former students turned millionaires sickened by what their alma mater has become.
So, according to the champions of the “resistance,” the federal government should continue to subsidize universities even if they practice antisemitism and propagate hatred for civilization.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls these campuses “madhouses.” A study conducted at Harvard found that 83 percent of the faculty identified as “progressive” or “very progressive” and less than 2 percent as “conservative.”
All right, they call it “pluralism.”
The White House now wants Harvard to get serious about anti-Semitism and the woke, which is its main driver, and return to a society “based on merit and not on color.” What the woke is is explained by cognitive psychologist and Harvard professor Steven Pinker, one of the most influential intellectuals in the world. “The orthodoxy of the woke left borrows the worst ideology of apartheid and Nazism,” Pinker told the weekly L’Express.
This is the ideology that the press, Obama, universities, and pundits want to defend and are now peddling as “resistance to Trump.”
Hamas-praising people lecture at Columbia, so much so that Dani Dayan, director of Yad Vashem, wonders if Columbia will go down in history as Heidelberg, the German city whose university produced many Nazi figures.
A few days ago, a billionaire Palestinian-American entrepreneur accused by the families of the October 7 victims of “aiding” Hamas, resigned from his position on the Harvard board, with the university acknowledging that the civil suit “raises serious allegations.” Bashar Masri resigned from his post at the Ivy League university just days after 200 families of victims of the deadly attack in Israel sued him in Washington federal court for allegedly helping build tunnels and rocket launchers in Gaza.
Appointed as the Biden administration’s special envoy to combat anti-Semitism, renowned liberal historian Deborah Lipstadt, not very effective in her operative position, has returned to teaching. But she turned down an offer from Columbia University. In an op-ed published in the Free Press, Lipstadt said she didn’t want to “serve as a fig leaf”.
“Harvard has set an example for other institutions of higher learning, rejecting an illegitimate and misguided attempt to stifle academic freedom,” said Barack Obama.
Harvard and academic freedom?
Harvard finished dead last in the American classic of universities on free speech. Not under Trump, but under the Democrats.
Attending Harvard costs $82,000 a year. Of that, $56,550 was the “tuition fee,” or tuition for attending classes. So, a four-year degree from Harvard will cost $226,000.
It’s bizarre, but not too bizarre, that a right-wing president is going against these temples of knowledge and privilege and that the left is defending them. It would be laughable, if it weren’t all so deadly serious.
What’s coming out of the universities is an extension of the disgust for civilization that has been instilled in young people for many years. We can now see the consequences of teaching people to distrust Western civilization and to treat everything “Western” as evil.
Harvey Mansfield, a Harvard academic and leading scholar of Machiavelli, explains this astonishing paradox in Le Figaro: “An Iranian student in my class told me: ‘In Iran you have to be careful what you say in public, but in private you can say pretty much whatever you want. At Harvard it’s the opposite.’ It’s the self-censorship of students out of fear of other students, a way of keeping their thoughts and doubts to themselves, even among their peers. This is now a fact of life in most American universities, especially the most prestigious ones.
Only those who are considered oppressed have the right to assert an identity; the others, considered oppressors, like white men, are expected to submit (…) The strange thing is that opposition to the West comes from within the West. Islamic radicalism, for all its barbarity, invites the conscience of the West to join its fight against the West.”
And now radical Islam also has the wealthy classes of this strange West on its side.
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