During April and May 1945, American troops liberated a number of Nazi concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Dachau and Mauthausen. What those soldiers witnessed there, recounted in letters home and broadcast in newsreel film, gave the American public a traumatic insight into the depths of human depravity and the ultimate consequences of promoting a cult of anti-Semitism.
For decades afterwards, although casual disparagement of Jewish people remained a minor feature among some communities in the United States, the shock provoked by the revelation of Nazi beastliness engendered a more sympathetic outlook among the American public towards Jews. It was notable that if there was one area of American life, outside Hollywood, that fostered respect for Jewish culture it was academia. In US universities there was a significant Jewish presence and a culture of civilised assimilation. To American academics, anti-Semitism was a crude and barbaric aberration associated with the lowest elements of society.
The general public, unfamiliar with internal developments within what Americans term “the academy”, assumed that this high-minded tolerance continued to prevail on campuses even eight decades after the liberation of the concentration camps. On 5 December 2023 that reassuring assumption was rudely shattered. The presidents of America’s premier university, Harvard, and two other Ivy League institutions – the University of Pennsylvania (U Penn) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – appeared before a congressional committee where they were questioned about the rise of anti-Semitism on campus.
Asked by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” would constitute harassment and breach her university’s code of conduct, Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania (U Penn), responded that that was a “context dependent decision”, but “if the speech turns into conduct, it can be”.
Claudine Gay, the Harvard president, resorted to the same weasel words: “It depends on the context.” Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, answered that the statement (a call for the “genocide of Jews”) would constitute harassment “if targeted at individuals, not making public statements” and it would be investigated as harassment if it was “pervasive and severe”.
For the avoidance of doubt, let us recap exactly what was said, in the solemn context of a congressional hearing, watched by millions of appalled Americans on television and online. The head of the most prestigious university in America and the presidents of two other Ivy League institutions were asked the simple question whether a call for the “genocide of Jews” would infringe their respective codes of conduct and not one of the three was able to answer “yes”.
Again for the avoidance of doubt, it should clearly be understood that the term in question was “genocide”: not name-calling, not bullying, not “micro-aggression”, but the notional extermination of the Jewish race, already half accomplished just eighty years ago by Adolf Hitler. Yet for Liz Magill, president of U Penn, whether to sanction someone calling for a renewal of that atrocity is a “context-dependent decision”, but if the call for genocide turns into genocidal conduct, “it can be (harassment)”. Note the conditionality of that “can be”, even in the context of action, not words.
When Harvard’s Claudine Gay took refuge in the same disingenuous formula, “It depends on the context,” Congresswoman Stefanik told her succinctly: “It does not depend on the context. The answer is yes, and this is why you should resign. These are unacceptable answers across the board.”
But the response from MIT president Sally Kornbluth, who is herself Jewish, which lent her tendentious argument an additional dimension of distastefulness, that the call for genocide would amount to harassment if targeted at individuals, seemed to suggest that harassing a few Jews would be reprehensible, but calling for the extermination of the entire race would not breach MIT’s code of conduct.
Reviewing this tolerant attitude by three leading American academics towards the promotion of genocide, one needs to recall that they preside over the same campuses where the accidental “misgendering” of someone can be career-ending, where “micro-aggressions” are perceived in the most innocent actions and an Orwellian speech code controls all utterances – except, it seems, calls for a return to the agenda of the Third Reich.
Both Gay and Magill have since resigned and Kornbluth’s coat is hanging on a very shaky nail. But Claudine Gay’s resignation letter and subsequent op-ed in the New York Times displayed no remorse, while denouncing the alleged “racist animus” of those demanding her removal. So instinctive is the assumption of victimhood by Gay and her apologists that they miss the cardinal point: Gay lost her position for failing to condemn a very real racist threat on her campus, for effectively condoning racism against Jews in a deposition at the heart of Congress, before the House Education and Workforce Committee, in full view of the American public.
The question that quickly emerged after that disgraceful scene was: how did she become Harvard president in the first place? She was selected out of 600 candidates to head the leading university in the United States, yet her academic qualifications were minimal. A candidate for the presidency of an Ivy League university would normally have an impressive record of research and publication. Gay had written no books: her entire corpus of published work amounted to just 17 articles in journals, between 1998 and 2018.
Half of them are now subject to charges of plagiarism which appear to be well founded. How did an academic lightweight, with a negligible and now questionable publishing output, become president of Harvard? The answer is distasteful, but unavoidable: because woke grandstanding demanded the appointment of Harvard’s first black woman president. In that context, was it a coincidence that the three university presidents appearing before Congress were all women? In American academe, identity politics have supplanted academic standards and Gay’s appointment represented the capture by the leftist culture warriors of the ultimate commanding height.
Gay’s appointment was acclaimed in terms so extravagant that the public could have been forgiven for thinking that Harvard had acquired the services of Albert Einstein’s more intelligent sister. Today, a lot of faces on that campus display strong traces of egg. But it is important to understand that this sorry episode is not just a passing scandal involving three leading universities in the United States: it has significance both nationally and internationally, since it testifies to the subversion of the entire higher education system of America, in many respects the brain of the world.
Already, two decades ago, one critic claimed that every American campus had become “a small, ivy-clad North Korea”. This week, CNN’s Fareed Zakariah savaged American universities for having “gone from being centres of excellence to institutions pushing political agendas”. He claimed that DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) had become a dogmatic ideology and that “the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit”.
Zakariah claimed that last year’s Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action and race-based admissions policies would be evaded by universities removing test results and other objective criteria from their selection process, to give them a free hand in social engineering. The result, as he pointed out, would be to disadvantage bright scholars from poor backgrounds – the universal consequence of socialist initiatives in education, anywhere.
The surveys he cited show that the American public, especially young people, aware of the oppressive woke tyranny on campuses, have become disillusioned with higher education. In 2013, the proportion of young adults who thought a college degree was very important was 74 per cent; by 2019 that figure had fallen to 41 per cent. In 2016 there were still 70 per cent of high school graduates moving on to college; by 2023 that figure had declined to 62 per cent. By 2018, 61 per cent of Americans thought the higher education system in the US was going in the wrong direction, with only 38 per cent saying it was going in the right direction.
Grade inflation is out of control: at Yale, the median grade is now an ‘A’. Zakariah claimed that not only must any candidate for an academic post tick the right boxes, but so must his subject: it is all about race, gender politics and DEI. In Zakariah’s words: “A white man studying the American presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America today.”
Tenure itself, many might think, is a questionable institution. Claudine Gay, for example, having discredited her distinguished university and been exposed as a plagiarist, has now retreated to a tenured professorship at Harvard on an annual salary of almost $900,000.
But do all these campus capers in America have any relevance to us in Britain? They most certainly do; they affect the entire world. The Ivy League universities have always powered America’s intellectual ascendancy. That does not simply mean scholars coming up with new insights into the works of Shakespeare: it implies the whole gamut of medical, technological and scientific innovation that has powered space exploration, computer science, defence technology and myriad other advances in knowledge.
While there are significant contributions also being made by Britain and many other countries, the resources of America’s massively endowed universities have led to the United States becoming the world’s brain. If that brain is damaged, the domino effect throughout the world would cause a slowdown in innovation and wealth creation. The perception is that American campus lunacy is concentrated among the humanities disciplines – which is bad enough in cultural terms – but if Ivy League institutions deliberately evade Supreme Court rulings to dumb themselves down, that abandonment of meritocratic principles in admissions will equally affect disciplines such as science, medicine, mathematics, with catastrophic consequences.
No superpower endures forever and America, already afflicted with a burden of $34 trillion in national debt, is being challenged by China and other rising economies. The disaffection of American youth from higher education revealed in the surveys cited above shows a trend away from education and skills that is diametrically opposite to the direction of all other nations, whether developed or developing. It is to be hoped that the action taken against Claudine Gay and her associates is just the first step towards reclaiming academic integrity and ending the infantilisation of the American mind.
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