While the situation remains fluid, American universities have clearly failed America. The American administrative elite, which reproduces itself through the universities, has likewise failed America. These are no longer bastions of liberal arts. They do not produce good citizens anymore. They instead produce fragile narcissists who will fly apart over a pronoun, call it “genocide,” and then cheer for Hamas death squads and global intifada in the very next breath.
Political reactionaries who call for businesses to stop hiring college graduates have a point, because the narrow-minded tyrants who come out of today’s colleges are apt to destroy brands and companies from within, leveraging their very youth as if it was a character quality to demand a raise just for showing up to work sometimes. More amazing, there are employers who still fall for this act. Employers who stop hiring Ivy League products right now will do better later.
Don’t tell me that I don’t know or understand these kids. Only a year ago, I was grading their papers and tests and taking their class attendance. I know and understand them all too well. Ten years ago, as a matter of fact, I was also on the ground watching campus activism revive. At first, I was exhilarated. My mind changed slowly as I noticed how much “anti-Zionism” was going on, and how it always contained antisemitism whenever I just scratched the surface. How does a protest against, say, destructive coal mining practices in Appalachia, or the war in Afghanistan, or American policy in South America, always end up having so many speakers mention the Palestinian cause and even call for the end of Israel, I wondered? The arrival of “woke” on campus still caught me off-guard, yet I did see this coming before Trump was president, and on two successive Election Nights I knew it would all become incalculably worse.
Of course, my question about the source has answers: campuses are awash in Middle Eastern hate money, and the hatred of Jews is always a horseshoe. The only difference between antisemites with tiki torches and antisemites with keffiyehs is their politics. Politics are always and forever the ultimate end of everyone advocating for the genocide of Jews, and someone is always willing to pay for that particular form of radicalism. Defunding the new campus hate speech will likely now become an essential form of taxpayer revolt in America. I can’t wait. Let’s go.
Excuses for pro-Hamas ‘activism’ on campus, and feigned outrage at accurate comparisons of Columbia to Charlottesville, will not withstand the flow of events on college campuses now. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, whereupon it is just a matter of time before people get killed — or, barring someone’s willingness to martyrize them, people set themselves on fire in the name of ending supposed genocide.
A network of anti-Israeli activists is expanding their agitation to new campuses in response to getting shut down on other campuses. This is not at all the same nonviolence animal as classical peace activism, but a kind of travelling Radio Rwanda drum circle activating its networks of allies. There will be blood, and it will be on the hands of the American administrative class, which allowed its universities to become wellsprings of hate in the name of their new gnostic gods, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These false idols must be smashed, or else the universities who contain them like kaabas must be razed, if America is to be saved from the magical thinking that has become so fashionable among American elites. The faculty getting arrested for supporting the students supporting the annihilation of Israel are evidence the foundation has already rotted. Throw down the pillars like Samson and bring it all crashing down, I say.
I have studied genocide and the Holocaust. About that supposed genocide in Gaza. The only genocide happening lately in the Middle East is the one where Hamas sent Einsatzgruppen commando units into southern Israel all hopped up on captagon with instructions to kidnap, rape, torture, mutilate, kill, and/or burn everyone they found, not necessarily in that order. People of every political stripe love to yammer as if they know how the Nazis got started mass-killing Jews when this is exactly how the Nazis got started mass-killing Jews. 7 October is literally The Violence They Did First.
Even if we ignore the recent admission by Hamas that they have been making up the numbers of civilian deaths in Gaza all along, Israel has supposedly been genociding Palestinians at the rate of a single one-ton bomb per civilian casualty. Mathematically, Gaza would then have to be counted the least-efficient, most-bullsh*t genocide in the history of mass murders, and Israelis ought to be ashamed of themselves for being utter sh*t as genocidaires, if true.
Israel is signatory to the Geneva Conventions which forbid the use of human shields. Hamas, which has never signed on to the Conventions, uses human shields as tactic, strategy, and operational art. Actual civilian deaths are likely comparable to the American battles of Mosul or Raqqa. Which, if correct, would be kind of amazing, since Israel has no experience whatsoever with military humanitarianism like the United States does.
Objectively, the fastest way to end the war in Gaza is to let Israel finish the job in Rafah and figure out some sort of Palestinian alternative to handle the security job in the Strip. Demands for ceasefires are simply demands for Hamas to continue existing as a military force in Gaza and to let the war continue, full stop. Calls for a ceasefire achieve nothing — absolutely nothing — other than the rescue of actual genocidal extremists and the continuation of their epistemic violence, now. Used in the context of Gaza, the word “ceasefire” is diplomatic language for “timeout, please, we are tired of these consequences.”
My words do not flow from hatred of the university, or a race, or a religion. I went to a university to become an historian who can write like this with confidence about any form of racial or religious violence. I had a terrific professor, a Jewish man with deep and personal knowledge of the topic, to teach me about the Holocaust and then become my advisor. A few weeks after 7 October, when I met him to discuss my thesis, I expressed my condolences for the massacres in person rather than by email.
Then this kindly old Jewish Holocaust professor noted that I was the only person on the entire campus who had said anything to him. Needless to say, I have no interest in being an active alumnus, and that is the spirit in which I say it is time to take a page from the radicals. Americans must organize to defund the American university now. It is time that higher education was laid low. Our elites need to feel extreme and urgent pain, implying even greater pain if they fail to change forthwith. A good spanking, in other words.
Of course, it is impossible to entirely defund universities just as it is impossible to entirely defund police departments. A better strategic term than this borrowed catchphrase of the left might be “targeted sanctions.”
American legislators who decry the administrative bloat of the campus, the noxious effects of groupthink and ideological litmus testing, cancel culture, erosions of civil liberties, and the propagation of hateful, extreme ideologies under the guise of anti-hate, will be the heroes in this story.
Joe Biden was already a villain by dint of his Title IX changes, entirely out of touch with most Americans. Nevertheless, this will end up being a bipartisan effort, for I am hardly the only lifelong Democrat I know who feels this way right now. In fact, more than one John Fetterman exists for every Rashida Tlaib. Thus I write the following without any illusions of avoiding an inter-party split. On the contrary, I embrace it. America requires two functioning political parties to remain America, and right now the top elements of the one party are weirdly beholden to a dangerously stupid species of bothsiderism about peace, not just in the Middle East but more generally.
First, some person will have to lead the organizing effort and be its face. Readers may think of Christopher Rufo, who has achieved success pushing back against the forces of indoctrination on the modern American campus. I am not nominating Rufo, to be clear. I am simply asking the former friends and allies in Democratic politics who have blocked me on social media in recent years, yet who still check up on this website occasionally, to imagine “Secretary of Education Christopher Rufo” as a thought experiment.
Close your eyes and contemplate it.
Secondarily, imagine hearings. Imagine new legislative mandates on cleaning up plagiarism, on evidentiary review and academic publishing, on teaching the core elements of Western Civilization.
Imagine mandatory freshman pass/fail classes on American Constitutionalism. Imagine the dishonesties of the 1619 Project used as an exercise to teach critical thinking about ideological texts rather than allowing its sacred theories about racial sins to take over the academy.
Imagine blanket national bans on male athletes cheating at women’s sports, legislative restoration of the rights of the accused on campus, and “decolonize STEM” seminars becoming as rare as parapsychology departments.
Universities have served as radicalization engines and society-demolition machines for too long. Taxpaying Americans have every right to be angry. A generation of faculty has incubated their 1970s radicalism on the campus. They became tenured faculty in hopes of effecting a 21st century cultural revolution; we see the results. Therefore the third item on this list of things to come are the zeroized budgets for arts departments which teach radical protest rather than the arts, history departments which teach ideology rather than historiography, social science departments which produce shoddy woo-woo in place of replicable research, and so on. Academics who produce “gender trouble” must become trouble.
All the dead wood of the academy must be forced to justify its existence or else be cut down for firewood without fear or favor.
Dear people who are pretending not to know me anymore: does that sound like fun to you? Because it sure does to me, now. I’ll vote for the politicians who vow to do it. Do not imagine that I am the only one. We are legion, whereas those infants on the Columbia campus represent a view from nowhere. As politics journalist Peter Hamby points out, “Freedom for Palestine means Death to America” does not resonate with American voters. In fact, it does not even resonate with a majority of young voters. The fate of Palestinians ranks 15th on the list of their concerns.
Contrary to the self-image of these protesters as a youth vanguard, “the political opinions of young Americans are more than just what we see broadcast on social media through the lens of an iPhone. They’re complicated and often unsexy, just like those of the generations preceding them,” Hamby writes. “Like it or not, the interest rate on a car payment will always be more salient to the average voter than a calamitous war abroad.”
Dear check-in Democrats: My undergraduate degree is political science. Listen to the man. Heed the numbers. Stop letting the academy teach Paulo Freire as if he is some sort of popular prophet. Stop atoning for past sins as pious civic religion in embarrassing displays of sackcloth and ashes. Recognize the extremist for what he is. Otherwise, the academy might just run out of public patience and end up like the English monasteries.
As legal journalist Helen Dale wrote in December, “There had been monasteries in England since the sixth century” when Henry VIII began to close them. Elizabeth I did for the rest. “In less than 20 years, the country’s monastic impulse was extinguished. Word to the universities: nothing lasts forever.” Universities have existed for a thousand years, just like those monasteries, but nothing lasts forever, nor is money a barrier to political action. “When it comes to US universities and their endowments, we have been here before.”
“Wealthy people were already directing moneys towards Oxford and Cambridge, grammar schools for pupils of all ages, and the Inns of Court,” Dale writes. Mike Rowe and Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman and Robert Kraft are signs of things to come. “There’s another element in common, too: shared beliefs in and promotion of rank superstition. One theological point on which Henry agreed with both Thomas Cromwell and Cromwell’s intellectual influencers (Desiderius Erasmus and Luther) was that monasteries were riddled with superstitio.”
Removing rank superstitions from the academic landscape only sounds hard. Political action is not easy or simple, but it is eminently feasible. Already, Jewish students are gravitating to Barnard and UT-Austin and any campus that takes their safety seriously. What I am describing here is to some extent a market correction. Columbia and the Ivy League lose value the way companies that turn out exploding cars and poisonous products lose value. Legal action will likely grind down administrative resistance to change, even at the most prestigious campuses, because the United States is still a land of laws, for now.
Like most Americans, I have had quite enough of campus speech codes. This is not a call to end free speech on campus, or even squelch campus protests. On the contrary, restoring debate and the right to challenge sacred cows is fundamental to any restoration project. Some of the highest-tuition universities in America are very busy devaluing their brand right now because they pandered to the superstition that challenging words and ideas cause intrinsic harm to vulnerable and marginalized people. Campus witch hunts are witch hunts. No more witch hunts. Climate science is still science, but stop teaching children to destroy artwork over their feelings about climate change. Stop mixing up the history of women with Judith Butlerian jihads. Stop teaching the kids to hate themselves, their country, their world.
Bring back academic conduct code enforcement instead. End grant funding for archaeology programs which let magicians with the correct culture destroy scientific curation. Scrutinize the nonprofit organizations and neoliberal quangos that create and sustain campus protesters. Student radicals demand disinvestment from Israel; taxpaying citizens are likewise allowed to agitate for disinvestment from anti-American, pro-Hamas radicalism, and we have 1,001 cuts to take. Freedom shall be preserved all around.
There will however be some changes. Get the kids off the Tickety-Tockety disinformation devices. Prohibit “smart phones” that keep them anxious and distracted in class. Reform should be systemic, and it should aim to liberate students from the soft tyranny of a child-led education. Nothing has injured American education more than the consumerist idea that little minds require pandering instead of shaping.
Critics of the American academy will never have a better opportunity for reform — because Hamas is losing this war.
Even with state-level assistance, a terrorist organization can only fool the world with fake numbers of civilian deaths for so long. (Readers who have yet to understand the level of fakery in Gaza should scroll down the #Pallywood hashtag.) Thousands of Gazans have assuredly died, and responsibility for this lies entirely on Hamas. They chose to bring decisive battle on themselves. They thought it would not work out this way. Hamas thought the West was too weak and divided to withstand sight of the trauma Israel would have to inflict on Gazans in order to destroy them.
At Joe Biden’s demand, the IDF recently withdrew most of their forces from the Gaza Strip. Hamas then refused another ceasefire effort and refused to surrender their remaining hostages. Now that Israelis are preparing for the Battle of Rafah, the timing of these protests on American campuses is not surprising. Hamas was never going to defeat Israel in actual battle, even with all their friends and fellow Iran proxies. Compared to their real military prospects, embarrassing the Great Satan with campus protests was always the easiest part of the plan. Slow clap.
The tunnel is closing in on Yahya Sinwar. He was out of his bunker the other day to make the fighters feel good, just like the last guy who mass-murdered Jews did in his final excursion from the bunker. Sinwar and Hamas believed that, in the worst-case scenario, after they had killed and raped and kidnapped and tortured thousands of Israelis, they could use international pressure and propaganda to stop Israel short of final destruction. Sinwar thought the time was ripe, that he understood how to destroy Israel and western imperialism and late-stage capitalism. He was wrong, and people who cheer for him right now are going to end up on the wrong end of military history in a matter of months. It will all be over but the shouting in August, when the Democratic National Convention takes place.
Americans: it is now our civic duty to ensure that our highest institutions of education do not allow students to ever erect any shrines to Sinwar, the genocidal terrorist who brought this war to Gaza and the American campus. Never again is right now. Our American elites clearly do not believe in freedom anymore. Let us incentivize a revival of belief in freedom, or else tear down these ivory towers of despotic superstition.