The only proper response to this month’s attack on Israel was a condemnation of terrorism and antisemitism. But that was too much to ask of students and faculty at what used to be our finest academic institutions.
That the West’s elite colleges and universities have become morally and intellectually corrupt is old news to Hillsdale folk. A lack of trust in our country’s esteemed universities is what drove many of us to this college.
But some Americans have tried to carry on as if these institutions were not rotting but were instead still solid, still trustworthy. For years, they brushed off the rising focus on equity over merit, the sometimes violent student opposition to conservative speakers, and the administrative attempts to shut down non-progressive speech on campus.
They even ignored it when a federal judge — a week after he spoke at Hillsdale — was shouted down by students at Stanford University law school and scolded by its associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. After all, these were just kids, they said.
If there is any good that can come from a terrorist attack, it is the moral clarity that separates the decent from the depraved. Our once-great universities showed how many of their students and faculty fall into the latter category.
Take the response from our fellow students on campuses across America. While many appropriately condemned the attacks, an alarming number of students and faculty did the opposite. More than two dozen student groups at Harvard University said in a letter that Israel was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” More than 50 student groups at the University of California Berkeley stated their “unwavering support for the resistance in Gaza.”
At George Washington University, a crowd associated with the group Students for Justice in Palestine projected slogans onto its library, proclaiming “Glory to our martyrs” and “Free Palestine from the river to the sea” — a call to extinguish the Jewish state. Students at more than 100 colleges and universities across the country planned walkouts supporting Palestine last week.
The FBI arrested a Cornell University student Tuesday who allegedly threatened to kill any Jewish student he saw on campus and “shoot up 104 West,” a university dining hall that mostly serves kosher meals.
Hamas killed more than 1,300 Israelis on Oct. 7. More Jews were killed that day than any other since the Holocaust, and students at America’s once-respected universities blamed the Jews.
All the while, Ivy League administrations struggled to publish statements condemning terrorism and antisemitism. Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, issued her first, mild statement a few days after the attack but did not mention the student group letter. In her second statement, she merely said the student groups did not speak for the university as a whole. Even after a third comment — and many more interviews — the president has yet to condemn the statement that blames the victim.
The best that can be said of administrators is that they did not praise the terrorists on their first try. The bar is low these days.
The teachers aren’t much better. A Cornell University professor called the Hamas attack “exhilarating” and “energizing” earlier this month — he is now, conveniently, taking a leave of absence. A Columbia University professor described the massacre as “a major achievement of the resistance.” An art professor in Chicago said after the attack that Israelis were “pigs.” She has since apologized via Instagram. One Berkley professor offered field trip credit to any student who attended a pro-Palestine protest — pro-Israel students hoping to bump their grade need not apply.
More than 1,700 sociologists — including hundreds of professors — signed a letter last week condemning Israel’s “genocide” of Palestinians and its defense minister’s use of “racist and dehumanizing language” when he called the Hamas terrorists “human animals.” And this message was brought to you by taxpayer-funded tenure.
This timid equivocation and gross antisemitism was enough to shake the donors who fund these schools. Former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner decided he’d had enough. His foundation, which has donated more than $42 million to Harvard, announced earlier this month it would cut ties with the school.
Businessman Marc Rowan said his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, does not “seem to be able to find its voice with respect to antisemitism.” He said he would not add to the $50 million he has already donated unless the school’s president and board chair step down. Businessman and former diplomat Jon Huntsman Jr. also said he would halt donations to university.
This backlash is a victory for common sense and the integrity of higher education. Conservatives and old-fashioned, classical liberals have watched for decades as our elite universities collapse from the inside — and it seemed like nobody noticed.
But every once in a while, an evil great enough to awaken the West’s dormant moral compass forces us to pick a side. The students who chanted for a Jewish extinction and the professors who egged them on have marked for the rest of us just how far academia has fallen.
This is a wake-up call for the willfully ignorant. Pure, abhorrent evil is still alive, and our academic institutions are rotting with its apologists.
