The hearing made headlines, and rightly so. But it would be a mistake to focus on the trio’s failure to sound remotely empathic when discussing the safety and wellbeing of their Jewish students. The problem with Harvard, Penn, MIT, and others isn’t merely that these previously august institutions condone, or at the very least tolerate, anti-Semitism. It goes much deeper, and you could sum it up in three letters: DEI—or diversity, equity, and inclusion, the ongoing effort to regulate a host of policies pertaining to race, sexual orientation, and other identity markers. …

It’s easy to laugh all this off as fussy ivory tower nonsense, but DEI isn’t just another campus pastime. It’s a mechanism for the forging and dissemination of an ideological construct that, before the progressive assault on words and their meaning, used to be called racism. Or, for that matter, anti-Semitism: singling out Jews or the Jewish state for calumny used to be frowned upon, but, under the aegis of DEI, it passes as a respectable, even essential pursuit. That’s because, as Stanley Goldfarb explained in City Journal recently, “at the heart of DEI is a simple binary: the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed.” And Jews confound these categories, because Judaism is both a belief system and an extended family with roots everywhere from Yemen to Yekaterinburg. None of DEI’s grotesque simplifications holds up when applied to the Jews, which is why the Jews must be singled out for scorn.

[Academia transformed itself into a revolutionary establishment in a society that needed no revolution. Instead of recognizing that futility, progressive academicians instead invented constructs that inevitably require violent responses to resolve. That’s what DEI and CRT provide, and why rooting them out of American education will be all but impossible without completely overhauling its structure. — Ed]