The Patriot Post® · In Brief: DEI Drives Campus Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism on college campuses is a huge and growing problem, as we saw earlier this week with the congressional testimonies of three elite university presidents. In at least one really important way, those universities are to blame, says researcher Heather Mac Donald.
Tuesday’s House hearing on campus antisemitism ratcheted up the pressure on American universities: counter the anti-Israel vitriol that exploded in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack or risk losing philanthropic and government support. The leading approach is sure to fail: doubling down on the ideologies and practices that led to the pro-Hamas fever in the first place.
Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager leading a Harvard donor revolt, told CNBC on Nov. 6 that he hadn’t previously read Harvard’s DEI statement. Though he had assumed DEI was “for all marginalized groups,” once he read the statement, he realized that “the DEI program at Harvard is limited to specific groups and exploits others.” Instead, Mr. Ackman suggested, DEI should cover all minorities, including Jews and Asians.
Mac Donald noted that several universities, including the University of Pennsylvania, the president of which testified to Congress, have launched varying forms of anti-Semitism task forces. Of course, Mac Donald says, “Penn is also rolling out a presidential commission on Islamophobia.” No matter the university, she adds, “DEI bureaucrats are well-represented on all these commissions and task forces.” And that’s the rub.
But a university has no capacity to eliminate “hate,” nor should that be its mission. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges built their DEI bureaucracies in the first place and allowed bureaucrats and their faculty sympathizers to put certain facts and ideas off-limits. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges started requiring faculty — even in the hard sciences — to justify their research in the name of “inclusion” and “belonging.” Protected identity categories have constantly expanded while the haters shrank to an ever smaller subset of white males.
The real issue on campuses isn’t antisemitism but the anti-Western ethos that has colonized large swaths of the curriculum. Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization’s very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class — that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence.
“Gerrymandering Jews into an ‘oppressed’ class for DEI purposes wouldn’t do anything to prevent this classroom propaganda,” Mac Donald says, because “college leaders are at pains not to address” that propaganda, or the actual people responsible for it.
Instead, she says, they’re trying to find “The Intersectionality of Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Racism,” which in the minds of these leftists means “White supremacists, former Trump administration officials, evangelical Christians and white opponents of mass immigration from Muslim countries.”
None of these supposed oppressors play a significant role in pro-Hamas campus protests. The actual protesters — Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Queers for Palestine, socialist groups and proponents of the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanctions movement — went unmentioned.
She concludes:
Solving the problems of higher ed requires rejecting this victim ideology wholesale. … Donors and alumni should demand changes in governance and curricula to counterbalance the anti-Western ideology that undergirds the anti-Israel coalition. Every identity-based bureaucratic sinecure should be eliminated. Trustees and presidents should be chosen based on their determination to support humanistic learning and academic excellence, not “inclusion.”
Wall Street Journal subscribers can read the whole thing here.