The end of the Cold War in the early 1990s did not bring humanity to the “end of history,” but it did significantly change its direction. As if being deprived of the enemy that mobilized its energies, keeping it in a battle-ready spirit and confident of its course, the West relaxed, turned inward, and, ultimately, lost its direction. No longer focused on the common outside threat, the West let its attention wander from one lesser problem to another, disuniting communities, and making various publics in each of them increasingly dissatisfied. Many of these problems existed previously but were eclipsed by the exigencies of the Cold War. But others were new, either created from scratch or brought about by recent developments. They have been feeding on each other for the last thirty years, tearing our world apart, undermining it, and destroying it from within.
American research universities—our national contribution to world science and higher education, imitated almost all over the globe—while not the only factor contributing to this moribund development, were undoubtedly the main institution to do so. I noticed that something was awry with the university a few years after coming to the United States in 1982 on a post-doc.
A year after I started teaching at Harvard in 1986, another female sociologist arrived at that illustrious institution. There was a lot of celebration on account of her joining our faculty, but the primary reason for the celebration astonished me: It was not the quality of this sociologist’s work, but the fact that the new faculty member was a woman, female. Coming from Israel, which recently buried its long-term, extremely consequential female prime minister, and where unmarried childless women served in the armed forces, being a woman was a trivial circumstance for me. It certainly was no justification for offering someone a position in the most famous university of the free world, and it was simply peculiar to celebrate such an unjustified appointment.
Granted, I was not able to appreciate then, in my early thirties, how par-for-the-course appointing a woman as a professor at a distinguished university on the basis of gender would appear to me in the light of the academic madness with which I would be confronted in my advanced middle age. But at that time, I found using genitals as a credential for a university professorship shocking and revolting. Because it was illogical, it was unjust, since justice reflects the logical consistency of our order. And because it was unjust, it was immoral. Utterly flummoxed, I began doubting that the American research university was the home of science and scholarship, which it was believed to be.
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