Resignations won’t fix America’s universities
by Jacob Howland, UnHerd:
Antisemitism runs from students to administrators.
Societies rot from the head down, as fish are said to do. In the academy, too, the head rots first. Elite universities were the first to take to heart Marx’s admonition that the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it. Revolutionary change requires silencing ancestral voices, consigning to oblivion the rich traditions of interpretation from which Western civilisation sprang.
Since Jesse Jackson led chants of “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” at Stanford in 1987, elite universities have progressively gutted core liberal studies programmes that introduced students to the vital civilisational inheritance of knowledge and wisdom rooted in Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. For the past two decades, they’ve judged applicants for admission as much by their devotion to community service and activism as by their academic potential. Activist students, in turn, began to demand that universities advance any number of causes under the umbrella of social justice.
The ideological invasion of the Ivory Tower has had predictably bad results. Much of higher education today effectively consists of giving students a handful of Post-it notes and teaching them how to apply them to the images that are projected onto their smartphones. People of colour who are evidently miserable and poor, such as the Palestinians of Gaza, are labelled “victims”, whose innocence is not only assumed but unchallengeable on campus. White, well-off, educated people, especially if they have a strong national identity, are identified as “colonisers” and “oppressors”. Should we really be shocked that students who’ve been taught this crude intellectual game, one that unfolds in the immediate present with no depth of breadth of understanding, would welcome the chance to celebrate Hamas’s demonstration that “decolonisation” is not just “an abstract academic theory” but a “tangible event”?
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