This time feels different

In my last email to you I talked about the testimony of the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to a US Congressional committee investigating anti-Semitism in higher education. When asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would breach their universites’ code of conduct the presidents all gave the same answer. They said ‘it depends on the context’.

I sent out my email 48 hours after the hearing and like many who watched it I was still in shock. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer described it as ‘one of the most despicable moments in the history of US academia.’ Bourla’s grandparents, aunt and uncle died at Auschwitz.

Since that my email you’d probably be aware they’ve been developments. The president of the University of Pennsylvania has resigned, and the US House of Representatives passed a resolution that ‘strongly condemning’ the presidents’ testimony. And it went further. The resolution noted ‘Whereas President Magill [the University of Pennsylvania president] has resigned…the other Presidents should follow suit.’  It passed 303 votes to 126. Every Republican but one supported it as did 84 Democrats.

As you can imagine it’s been a big story in the United States and around the world. Not so much though for The Sydney Morning Herald. It’s made one mention of it through a reprinted Associated Press story. Which contrasts with the Herald’s seeming obsession with Donald Trump. In the last fortnight it’s printed no less than a dozen stories about or involving Trump, including this one that began – ‘Donald Trump is selling cut up pieces of the suit he wore when he was arrested.  The price?  US$5000, or nearly $7000.  The former president has released a series of digital trading cards priced at US$99 ($150) each and anyone who buys all 47 will receive a physical card containing a piece of the ‘priceless’ navy suit and be invited to a gala dinner at Mar-a-Lago.’

Such is what passes for news in Australia’s legacy media.

It’s not surprisingly the progressive media has all but ignored the story. They don’t have anything to say about it. In The Guardian, one of its columnists, Moustafa Bayoumi, a professor of English at the City University of New York had a go at defending the presidents.  He suggested the question ‘does calling for the genocide of Jews on your campus constitute harassment, yes or no?’ – was ‘a  trap’ and ‘the question can’t be answered with just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and ‘context makes the difference’. While Bayoumi lamented the war in Gaza he made no mention of how the war actuallty started. For people like Bayoumi it seems ‘context’ is only relevant when it suits them.

In the United States, as in Australia, universities hold enormous cultural and political power. The higher education sector holds economic sway as well. Greg Lukianoff and and Rikki Shlott point out in their new and timely book, ‘The Canceling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens US All’ in 2021 the market size of the US higher education industry was nearly US $1 trillion.  It’s one of the largest sectors in the US economy (three times larger than the food and drinks sector) and larger than the economies of many countries.  In 2021 Australia’s GDP was US $1.5 trillion. In this country  before Covid income from overseas students was our third-largest export sector.

What’s happening in America is very relevant for Australia.  Where America’s institutions go, we follow. The trends of American universities are replicated here. The Institute of Public Affairs’ ‘Free Speech on Campus Audit 2023’ analysed the nearly 300 policies from Australia’s 42 universities that regulated freedom of speech on campus – 38 universities had policies hostile to freedom of speech.  In 2019 the IPA surveyed 500 students enrolled in Australian universities.  41% said they felt unable to express an opinion in class, 31% had been made to feel uncomfortable by a university lecturer for expressing their opinion, and 59% felt they were prevented from expressing their opinion by other students.  A recent survey by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students found nearly two-thirds of the more than 500 Jewish students at Australian universities in the poll had experienced anti-Semitism, 20% had avoided going to campus because of it, and 37% had seen Israel compared to Nazi Germany.

The first and most obvious point about what the professors said is that they’re hypocrites. They all said they were committed to freedom of speech – but the evidence proves they’re not.

To take just one example. The president of MIT said this in her testimony – ‘in addition to my duties to keep the campus safe and to maintain the functioning of this national asset, I must at the same time ensure that we protect speech and viewpoint diversity for everyone.  This is in keeping with the institute’s principles on free expression.’  That is laughable.  As dozens of people responded within minutes, MIT was responsible for one of the most notorious examples of ‘cancel culture’ in recent years.

Dorian Abbot was an associate professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago.  In October 2021 he was scheduled to deliver a public lecture at MIT on ‘Climate and the potential for life on other planets’. A few weeks before the lecture  MIT cancelled his invitation – not because they had a problem with Abbot talking about life on Mars but because some months earlier he’d written an article in Newsweek saying that academic promotion should be based on merit not race. Abbot wrote affirmative action policies ‘violate the ethical and legal principles of equal treatment’ and ‘entail treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.’ A ‘twitter storm’ followed and the university told Abbott he could talk to a few MIT staff and students instead. As Abbot said ‘74% of Americans oppose race being a factor in university admission – There’s almost nothing in America that 74% of people can agree on.  Advocating one of those things was my outrageous offence.’  In the end Abbot gave his lecture over Zoom hosted by Princeton University.

Then there’s the professors’ double-standards. As Bari Weiss wrote:

A quick thought experiment: imagine if large numbers of students and professors has marched through the campus of Penn over the past two months saying all black people should go back to Africa and whoever remains should be subjected to genocide.  Should the president of Penn defend those people merely as exercising their rights to free speech?

I think that it would be monstrous to do so.

Finally, there’s the discussion about how universities could have ended up in such a place. And why has the public (and politicians and donors) only now started to notice?

Someone who long ago identified what’s occurred is the historian Niall Ferguson.  In a devastating piece ‘The treason of the Intellectuals‘ he said we’ve been here before.

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published ‘La trahison des clercs’ – ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals’ – which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism.  By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France.  But already Benda could see the pernicious role than many European academics were playing in politics.

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in ‘the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds.’  And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence – with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction – leftward instead of rightward – but has ended up in much the same place.  The question is whether we – unlike the Germans – can do something about it.

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals.  I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicisation of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory’, and apologists for Islamist extremism.

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating.  Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity and inclusion on campus?  In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning?  Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of ‘radical’ students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life.

In the UK Telegraph, Allister Heath summed up Ferguson’s argument – ‘Universities’ net impact on society is increasingly negative.  The woke mind virus has turned once great centres of learning into indoctrination camps, vehicles to ‘manufacture consent’ for nihilistic ideas and a new obscurantism.’

Last week in two in-depth, fascinating articles in the City Journal from the Manhattan Institute, ‘The Academy at the Crossroads’, Heather Mac Donald delved into what’s happened to higher education in America.  To paraphrase her argument – universities have waged a war on the West while the public has looked away, while donors have continued to donate because they like their name on things.

A Penn professor told me: The ‘handful of outraged trustee [and donors] should have understood everything dumb, dysfunctional, politicised and discriminatory at Penn thirty years ago.  They lavished love, approval, and mountains of money on the administration.  Nowhere have trustees honoured their primary fiduciary obligation to pass on a free, fair, and rigorous university to posterity.’

This professor, Jewish himself, concludes: ‘If I had to bet, the liberal Jews will be lured back into the fold, since they object only to anti-Semitism and they love the prestige of having buildings named after them.’

Mac Donald is not as pessimistic as the unnamed professor.  While acknowledging efforts over the years to reform universities have all failed miserably:

But this time feels different.  The sheer scope of attention that has been focused on the university, the array of powerful individuals who are mobilised, the daily revelations about conflicts of interest and shameless double standards provide momentum that, if maintained, could result in actual change…

[With] enough persistence on the part of the rebels, the next generation of college students may have real opportunities, beyond today’s handful of contrarian colleges, to immerse themselves in beauty, sublimity, and the wonder of knowledge.

PS – Of all the pieces I’ve read on this over the last fortnight – this is my favourite.  It’s by C. Bradley Thompson, a professor of politics at Clemson University in the US. He’s one of the foremost scholars on the intellectual history of the American Revolution and he writes as ‘The Redneck Intellectual’.  His piece ‘Au Revoir, Harvard – Or, Two Stories in One‘ is wonderful. It’s about Harvard as it once was, and as it is now. It’s really the story of all of our universities.