American Universities Have Squandered The Public’s Esteem

American universities rode a tall wave of public esteem in the last few decades. In the Information Age, the value of learning naturally soars. By 2008, the chaos and violence of the Sixties and Seventies campuses was so forgotten that the revelation that Obama was sponsored by violent young radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn meant nothing to the voters. America likes to forgive and forget.

But intellectuals do not like to forget, and radical intellectuals like even less to forgive. They found their niches in academe, utilized free speech and inquiry as radicals do (good for me, not for thee) and set in motion currents that few knew of or paid attention to outside the ivory towers.

For those who even heard about it, Deconstructionism seemed too odd a flower to survive outside the campus hothouse. The idea that texts and ideas have only the subjective meaning imposed by readers seems so incoherent that it would crumble under the weight of its own absurdity. That the campus should shelter such a thing seemed reasonable in the way that we grant a lab the ability to keep a deadly virus for study, trusting the lab to keep us safe in the meantime. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: From Chamberlain to Biden, Lessons in Appeasement)

Perhaps it is no coincidence that the failure of the Wuhan lab to control the monster virus it created came at the same time the huge wave of intolerance surging out of the universities crested. Suddenly, intolerance seemed to be in control of every institution in America, from the schools to the media to the grim realm of power politics and the ever-expanding bureaucracies it spews forth. Incoherent Deconstructionism had gotten a gain of function, having been gene-spliced to New Left Marxism. The adherents of this new monster dismiss every argument that doesn’t please them as being nothing more than a power grab. And power, they know by direct communion with the Objective Truth they so strenuously deny — is meant only for them. And they use it with a vengeance.

The years of hell generated by this monster have led most Americans to lose their faith in the institutions that spawned it. Gallup found in 2015 that 57 percent of Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2017, that figure declined slightly to 48 percent. By last July, it was down to 36 percent — and that is before the shocking performance of the university presidents before Congress and the widespread outbreak of violent antisemitism that the universities seem unable or unwilling to confront.

American citizens have belatedly realized that something had been hatched in the darkness and has been working on the minds of our children while we were focused on other things. We had trusted the universities because we valued their great striving after truth. We did not realize that they have long made truth a lower consideration. Infected with wokeness, they worship power. Top-heavy with administrators, its professors have relieved themselves of the exacting demands of scholarship in favor of the exhilarating ride of the new True Belief. Research and experiments don’t matter because they know in advance what the outcomes will be. All they need to do is make sure you accept the Belief or get out of the way.

Now we are realizing what has happened.

For several years, I taught a unit on the Holocaust in a small Jewish day school in Dayton, Ohio. I thought it important not just to expose the horror but to teach students where hope lies as well. To that end, I once brought in a woman who had been newly married when her native Holland was conquered by the Nazis. She and her husband sheltered a series of Jewish families in their home, saving them from the fate of 90 percent of Dutch Jews. She was no intellectual and put on no airs. But the students’ jaws dropped when they heard her matter-of-factly detail the risk they ran for years. “How could you be so brave?” one student asked her at the end.

She seemed genuinely puzzled. “Brave? Anyone would have done what I had done.”

An ordinary person, she was in her own mind.

But the people who thought themselves extraordinary usually did less well. How few acted as she did! How many of the better educated and more self-regarding were skilled at the rationalizations that kept themselves safe and that eased Hitler’s path.

I also showed the students a film about Le Chambon, a small village of farmers in France’s remote Massif Central. Only one or two people in the town had a college education. But these religious, simple people saved about 5,000 Jews from the Nazis. The director of this film had been born on a farm there to a Jewish couple sheltered by one of the farm families. He, too, asked the farmer who had sheltered his family how he had the courage to do what he did. The farmer shrugged his shoulders and said, anyone else would have done the same thing.

But they didn’t.

For those who live in the abstractions universities are good at generating, the world of action in which the young Dutch wife and the French farmer lived is just another interpretation, just another hypothesis. Morality is just a power play, since one mode of explanation is just as arbitrary as another, and all that matters is making your abstraction jibe with what everyone else in your identity group is saying, because your group alone knows the truth.

Contemptuous of those so crude as to believe in a real world and a moral law, many university denizens become a living parody to all but themselves.

“Queers for Palestine” reads the sign of a college student who would be thrown off a Gaza rooftop or hanged and left dangling from a crane in Iran. “Stop the Genocide” reads the signs in support of a group who only failed to commit genocide on October 7 because they were stopped by military force (and who have vowed to keep on trying to do so, an aim furthered by the utterly unironic sign-carriers). (READ MORE: No, Red Cows Won’t Spark War in Israel)

A poet basking in her own banality feigns an epiphany on discovering that the etymology of “gauze” may lead back to Gaza. For the poet, this is a Beautiful Thought , stunning in its abstraction from the shattering horror of mass rape and deliberate, intentional butchery of family after family. For the poet, this etymology somehow lets her in to the great secret of the woke — today’s home of rape-for-the-cause has really only been interested in healing the world, as beneficent as a patch of gauze. Meanwhile, those who are stopping the murder and rape the only way it will be stopped are the bad guys.

It is no wonder that Americans are losing trust in the training ground of what we may gently call educated fools.

If only they were so harmless. Ask Samar Tartuk, stabbed in the eye with the pole of a Palestinian flag at a Yale “demonstration. Ask the Jewish students at Cooper Union, locked into the school library by a mob. Ask the Jewish students about the active intimidation and threats to which they are subject at Columbia, where New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, for years a generous donor, has announced he will withhold all funding until the university shows it can protect its Jewish students.

This is not so new for universities. German universities were a breeding ground for the antisemitism that eventually formed itself into the Third Reich, starting with the student Hep! Hep! Riots of 1820, and after a century, supplying many of their graduates to the ranks of the SS.

Early in the 20th century top American universities, such as Princeton and Harvard, had strict quotas on the number of Jews they would accept. It was chic among this crowd in the Thirties to approve of many aspects of Hitler’s regime, as documented Prof. Stephen Norwood, who wrote of what he called the universities’ “very shameful record of complicity and indifference to atrocities committed against the Jews from 1933 onward — and actually a lot of collaboration.”

So, it may not be new, but it is even more disgraceful. Reverting to old sins disavows any repentance they may have achieved.

America is not well represented by its universities. It still abhors the doctrines of hatred for which her sons shed their blood to defeat and expunge from the earth. That dedication to good, beyond equivocation and rationalization, is the source of our real greatness. And it is that real greatness that America intends to assert, and it will remove its support from those who have betrayed its trust.

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