Our Universities: What Is to be Done?

This article first appeared in New English Review.

Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, during testimony

 It is heartening that the recent testimony before the House Education Committee by the three pathetic presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania is getting national attention. The odds are that all three will be forced to resign. That, however, will not fix the problem by itself. The question must be asked, "Who will replace them?". Secondly, there are so many other universities across the land where Jewish students do not feel safe-and for good reason. Just this morning, it has been announced that 6 other institutions of higher learning are under the microscope including Santa Monica College, a two-year-school in Santa Monica, California where I attended and played on the baseball team for two years back in the 1960s.

I have very little faith that the new presidents at the above three universities will be much better. It is a culture we are battling, one that goes back to the 1960s and which has solidly taken root. Most people who are conservative or pro-Israel have no inclination to be involved with academia once they have their 4-year diploma in hand. Academia has pretty much been left to the far left, at least in the humanities and social sciences.

I myself got into academia almost by accident as I was completing my career with DEA in the 1990s. My final five years were spent as an instructor in DEA's Office of Training, which, at the time, was co-located at the FBI Academy in Quantico. (At the time, there was serious consideration to merging DEA into the FBI, which thankfully, did not happen. DEA now has its own facility down the road from the FBI Academy.)

While I was at Quantico, DEA and the FBI had a program in which we could take night classes at the academy toward a master's degree in education at the University of Virginia. The costs were covered by both agencies since it was argued that the program would enhance our teaching abilities. In two years, I was able to obtain a master's degree. When I retired in 1995, I was offered a part-time position teaching English as a Second Language at Northern Virginia Community College, which was a natural for me since I had spent 11 years of my life overseas and had an intense love of languages. In 1998, when we moved to California, I got a similar position at the University of California at Irvine Extension. I taught a total of 18 years there from 1998-2016.

That is a long-winded way of saying that I have a fair amount of experience on college campuses.

So given the above and the fact that I have been involved in the campus anti-Semitism issue for some 15 years, I have some thoughts on what should be done to make our campuses once again safe for Jewish students.

First of all, we must recognize who the perpetrators are at least when it comes to college campuses. To the extent that anti-Semitism exists across all parts of society, I concede that some of it comes from white nationalist/right-wing sources. We must also condemn it, but these people have no sway on college campuses. It is my fervent opinion that most anti-Semitism in the US today comes from the left, which does hold sway on campuses. It must be pointed out here that the far left in America has entered into a marriage of convenience with radical Islamists and pro-Palestinian activists-witness organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). In addition, it should be no surprise that the rise of the WOKE ideology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Intersectionality fits right in with the pro-Palestinian victim narrative. While CRT consigns Jews to the classification of "white oppressors", Intersectionality is structured so that a broken sewer pipe in Philadelphia can be blamed on Zionism and "settler-colonialism". Such is the reasoning that predominates on university campuses as practiced by the "community of scholars" today. It has gotten so insane that academic feminists and LGBTQ activists are ignoring how their own would be treated in Gaza under Hamas rule and joining the chorus against Israel.

The above two organizations, particularly the former, are responsible for a large part of the trouble on campuses. The SJP, which was co-founded by UC Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, himself a Palestinian, is made up of people of different faiths, mostly Muslim. SJP has taken the lead in promoting boycott resolutions by student governments, as well as using tactics of intimidation and disruption of Jewish students and their pro-Israel events. Let's take UC Irvine as an example. Prior to 2010, it was the Muslim Student Union (MSU) that was most active in making pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel noise. Each May, they held a week of events devoted to demonizing Israel.  Prior to 2010, there was no SJP chapter on campus. That changed in 2010 when MSU members disrupted the speech of the Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren at UC Irvine, an incident in which I was present. Consequently, the MSU was suspended on campus. Soon thereafter, SJP formed a chapter and since then, they have taken the lead and allowed MSU to keep a lower profile in order to protect its campus recognition.  Both groups share members except that MSU is exclusively Muslim in membership while SJP is open to all who share the philosophy. There are even some misfit Jewish members in SJP.

By its actions over the years, SJP has demonstrated that it should be banned from all campuses nationwide. A handful of universities have taken steps to suspend their chapters, The bans should be permanent. Going back to the topic of university president, it will take people vastly different from those we saw this week on Capitol Hill. Those three women are emblematic of the cowardice that most university administrators have shown when it comes to confronting anti-Semitic hate-especially when the perps are Muslims. Not only Muslims, but when administrators cower in fear of their own students and leftist faculty, it is further evidence that the inmates are running the asylum.

In addition to taking action against SJP-as well as Muslim Student Association chapters who cause hate on campus-all students must be put on notice that anti-Semitic speech and actions will not be tolerated and will result in expulsion. 

In a larger sense, academia needs to change its culture, a culture that welcomes far-left professors who use their classrooms as a soapbox to advance radical causes, trash America, Israel, and the West in general, and basically indoctrinate students rather than educate them. Aside from the issue of Israel, it is the far-left that rules in academia, and as I pointed out above, the far-left is solidly in the Palestinian camp.

The influence of the extreme left in academia must somehow be reversed. That will take a lot of time and effort. I am not talking about summarily firing leftist professors. Still, the universities must be put on notice that serious intellectual reform is necessary-a return to education as opposed to indoctrination. I must be cautious here because I know how the Nazis, as one of their first priorities, purged universities of professors and administrators they deemed hostile to Nazism-particularly Jewish faculty who all lost their jobs in the first year of Hitler's rule (1933). Purges and litmus tests can cut both ways.

Universities must also reexamine their emphasis on useless ethnic studies, gender, and LGBTQ studies. Individual courses are one thing, having entire departments devoted to this victimology is quite another. The now institutionalized DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) offices are also a part of the problem. They are not well-meaning. They do not bring students from diverse backgrounds together, rather what they do is divide students into tribes, "People of Color" pitted against whites-and Jews, who are basically considered part of the "white oppressor class"-witness Israel. When it comes to campus anti-Semitism, they have shown themselves to be unwilling or unable to come to the defense of Jewish students.

There is also a financial aspect to this issue. Universities are awash in money, billions of dollars depending on the size of the university. In fact, much of the job description of a university president is to bring in donations and raise money. Questionable countries like China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are pumping in millions of dollars to American universities, in the cases of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, largely to establish Middle East Studies departments. These departments tend to be pan-Arab, pan-Islamic, anti-Israel, anti-US, and anti-West. They are a significant part of the current problem of campus anti-Semitism. Law schools like those at Harvard, UC Berkeley, and UC Irvine are nothing more than training schools for activist lawyers. Campus newspapers are so politically correct that they are a joke. And that is being charitable. In covering the current Israeli-Hamas war and its impact on their campuses, they struggle not to offend the pro-Hamas side.

In addition, public universities receive money from their state governments as well as federal funding. To his credit, President Trump put the universities on notice that if they could not or would not protect their Jewish students, they risked losing federal funding. Of course, President Biden has not followed through with that. In addition, donors who give millions of dollars to their favored schools need to stop when anti-Semitism runs rampant on campus-especially Jewish donors. Already we have seen one donor publically announce that he is withholding $100,000,000 from the University of Pennsylvania in light of recent events. That is precisely what more of is needed. Also, we are now seeing lawsuits filed against universities on behalf of Jewish students who have been subjected to bullying and harassment. There need to be more such lawsuits filed.

Furthermore, parents, especially Jewish parents must consider whether they wish to send their children and pay tuition to places like Harvard, the University of California, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, etc when so much anti-Semitism is being tolerated on campus. The list is really long, and I'm not sure which schools could be considered truly a welcome environment for Jewish students. 

The bottom line is that if you want our universities to truly begin the process of reform, it comes down to the money. Take away the money, reduce student enrollment, and then they will pay attention.

I believe in free speech, but as a teacher, I never brought my opinions about the world into the classroom. Unfortunately, I was an exception and not part of the rule. There is a line separating free speech from indoctrination. Yes, our students should be exposed to differing viewpoints, but currently, that does not include conservative, pro-American, pro-Western, or pro-Israel viewpoints. It is intolerable that there is actual censorship in academia. Why is it that pro-Israel, pro-America, or conservative speakers are routinely disrupted when they appear on campus? Why is there no punishment?

Ultimately, universities should drop this idea that their role is to teach our kids what they should think about the world and get back to educating them. Were I to advise a high school student on the question of college, I would encourage them to major in something that they can use in the real world. There is no problem studying engineering, languages, or hard sciences, for example. As for the humanities or social sciences, forget it. For decades now, the private sector has been telling universities that they are not turning out graduates who are prepared to enter the workplace and contribute. That has never been more true than now. Post October 7, when we see thousands of students marching in solidarity with Hamas and calling for intifada in the wake of these horrific atrocities, we know that something is terribly wrong on our campuses.

Personally, I would not be heartbroken to see universities like Harvard collapse under the weight of their own insanity and hate. They would not be missed. I am hopeful that the three incompetent ladies who testified about their universities this week will quickly find themselves out of a job. But we should not be deluded that their resignation or firing represents the ultimate solution. There is far too much work to be done.