Nothing has so vividly revealed the moral rot of our elite universities as the reaction to Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre of Jews.
A closer look at the peculiar vocabulary of the dominant campus left points to the core of the problem — and the left’s insincerity.
Normal human beings not handicapped by a contemporaneous college education may be wondering why the pro-Hamas academics coming out of the woodwork make their chief complaint that Jews are “colonizers.”
It has long been tiresome to review the lengthy history of Jews living in “Judea” (as the Romans called the Holy Land when they occupied it) centuries before Islam was a gleam in Muhammad’s eye, not to mention the 20th-century international mandate to restore a Jewish homeland after centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire and other previous “colonizers” or Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza more than 15 years ago, after which Gaza decided self-government meant empowering Hamas.
Nor does it do any good to point out the entirety of human history is one of invasion and conquest and virtually no nation or ethnic group, including especially Jews, is without a history of conquest by a hostile or opportunistic neighbor.
Indeed, William the Conqueror was a “colonizer” in the 1066 Norman Conquest.
None of the history or legal claims about the Middle East matters to the braying mob of campus antisemites because the “colonizer” charge isn’t about occupation, colonialism or a dispute about dividing up the historic land of Israel at all.
Colonialism, or its parent category “imperialism,” is the all-purpose charge Lenin developed a century ago to explain the failure of Marxist historical predictions and supply a new rationale for whipping up radical enthusiasm for revolution.
In practice it is a means of delegitimizing capitalism and sanctifying resentment of successful groups like Jews, Asians and whites generally (hence the related term ubiquitous on campus, “white supremacy”).
Despite centuries of persecution and repeated pogroms like Oct. 7, Jews persist as a supremely successful ethnic group, “overrepresented” (campus terminology, again) in the ranks of Nobel Prize winners, scientists and most elite professions including, ironically, academia, though this appears to be quickly changing.
The basic premise of our universities today is that if your ethnic group is statistically “overrepresented,” you are a de facto “oppressor.”
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Ivy League colleges openly and explicitly discriminated against Jews, putting in writing that they didn’t want “too many Jews” in their student bodies.
It is likely no coincidence the percentage of Jewish students in the student bodies of elite colleges has been declining rapidly in recent years alongside the rise in academic antisemitism.
The creed of the increasingly influential “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement has given the green light to hate Jews openly, discriminate against Asians and demonize whites.
One of the ironies of the campus critics of “colonizing” is how fully they have colonized with their identity-based dogma nearly every academic discipline in our colleges and universities.
Forget English and the fuzzy, politicized social sciences; even in the hard sciences like chemistry and physics there are persistent demands the curriculum be “decolonized,” which means in practice having fewer white male authors on a course syllabus.
The insincerity of the entire “colonizer” charge can be seen in a related campus fad: the “land acknowledgment.”
It is popular for faculty and administrators to declare at official functions like convocation and commencement that the university occupies land that belongs to — and often said to have been stolen from — an indigenous American tribe.
But if the land was acquired or held unjustly, why not give it back — or at least pay reparations from the multibillion-dollar endowments many universities have?
This is never suggested. Only the Jews in Israel are expected to give back land.
It is good some major donors to elite universities are publicly ending their financial support.
But it is unlikely to be enough to end the campus rot.
Only one solution will work: Close all the radicalized Middle East studies and “critical theory” departments that are hothouses for this noxious ideology and eliminate the faculty positions typically held by mediocre professors in the first place.
In other words, decolonize the campus!
It should be recalled some of the strongest early support for Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s came from German universities — the same time our Ivy League colleges discriminated against Jews.
Do our elite universities really want to repeat that story arc?
Steven F. Hayward is the Gaylord Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.