If Chemerinsky read my blog, he’d have known about happenings there, and elsewhere throughout the higher education world, that apparently are news to him.
Well, to be fair, deans have more important things to do than read blogs. On the other hand, well, welcome to the party, pal. Pointing out the flourishing, toleration, and even encouragement of antisemitism in the higher education sector has largely been the function of “right wing” outlets. Mainstream and left-wing media (but I repeat myself) have had little desire to air the dirty laundry in public. And, anyway, they’re increasingly staffed with recent graduates from elite schools, steeped in Critical Race Theory, “decolonization” talk, and the like, who see this antisemitism (along with prejudice against Asians and “whiteness”) as natural and laudable, instead of as what it is, which is evil and un-American. The truth is that support for antisemitism and mass murder isn’t an aberration for the far left that dominates American campuses now. As Ilya Somin notes, it’s baked in: “It’s rooted in a long history of defending horrific mass murder and other atrocities.”
We who have been writing about this stuff warned higher education leaders for years that sooner or later there would be a reckoning, and that it would be a costly one for elite institutions in terms of lost donations, public support, and overall legitimacy. Well, that reckoning is here.
[Boy, is it ever. But the question is whether the reckoning will mean anything when the media and much of the political establishment comes out of the same toxic environment in Academia. I think it may be too late for deans to do much of anything about it, even for those inclined to try. The only solution is to decolonize Academia as I proposed last week by cutting off all federal student loan programs and scholarships. — Ed]
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