No One Should be Surprised by the Sudden Appearance of Anti-Semitism on Campus
“The response from university administrators has often been slow, weak, or entirely absent.”
The simple fact is that anti-Semitism was baked into the social justice cake long ago.
Jon Haidt writes at After Babel:
Why Antisemitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus
In the days after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, university campuses immediately distinguished themselves as places set apart from the rest of American society—zones where different moral rules applied. Even before Israel began its military response, the loudest voices on campus were not university leaders condemning the attacks and vowing solidarity with their Jewish and Israeli students. Instead, the world saw faculty members and student organizations celebrating the attacks.
Political commentator and Atlantic author David Frum summed up the moral uniqueness of the academy in this tweet, four days after the attack:
You don't find a lot of murderous antisemites in senior business jobs. You don't find many in the military or national security agencies. Maybe somebody in academia should ponder why their one sector of public life is so very susceptible to a plague so rare everywhere else.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) October 11, 2023
Since then, there have been hundreds of antisemitic incidents on campuses including vandalism of Jewish sites, physical intimidation, physical assault, and death threats against Jewish students, often from other students. The response from university administrators has often been slow, weak, or entirely absent.
Why is the culture of elite higher education so fertile for antisemitism, and why are our defenses against it so weak? Don’t we have the world’s most advanced academic concepts and bureaucratic innovations for identifying hatred of all kinds, even expressions of hatred so small, veiled, and unconscious that we call them “micro-aggressions” and “implicit biases”?
Yes, we do, but it turns out that they don’t apply when Jews are the targets,1 and this was the shocking hypocrisy on display in that Congressional hearing room on December 5. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked the President of the University of Pennsylvania “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” President Magill was unable to say yes. When the question was asked in various ways to all three presidents, none could say yes. All said variations of “it depends on the context.”
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Comments
They are free to stand with their cardboard sign across the street on the sidewalk and take their selfies for their FB page with their opinions. Allowing them to “protest” on campus property suggests they have some kind of approval from the college for their opinions. That’s wrong to the other students, and damaging to the school.
I don’t think it is as sudden as people think.
For years NYU piously maintained that it was simply due to “respect” that it allowed its Abu Dhabi campus to openly discriminate against Jews.
And Oberlin had a professor who made horribly racist statements against Jews, with the clear support of both students and administration. And they had repeated incidents like raw bacon being thrown on Jews during the High Holidays. The prof was only fired due to public pressure, but they then gave her a massive settlement, and the official university position was that they won’t make any statements about anti-Jewish incidents on campus and will keep them quiet from the media.
The response of administrators has been weak because administrators, on average, are farther left than faculty or students. They will only oppose the Mob if they are forced to, either by their trustees or by their legislatures.
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2018/11/08/college-administrators-are-more-liberal-other-groups-including-faculty-members