On May 16, 2024, I appeared on Top Story with Jonathan Tobin, a podcast of the Jewish News Syndicate.
I have been on the podcast multiple times in the past and also did a joint webinar with Jonathan.
Jonathan, who is JNS Editor-in-Chief, also is an amazing and prolific columnist.
The podcast segment was given the title of William Jacobson: Defund universities that promote hatred of Jews, but that’s an oversimplification as all headlines are. We covered a lot more territory, as described in the JNS write up:
The surge of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses following the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is the culmination of a decades-long process by which higher education has been handed over to leftist ideologues who hate the West, America and Israel.That’s the analysis of Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson, also head of the Legal Insurrection Foundation that advocates for free speech and Western values.Jacobson told JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin that at the heart of the problem is the lack of ideological diversity at American colleges, where conservative and pro-Israel professors are rapidly becoming extinct in an atmosphere where the woke left is intolerant of opposing ideas.He says the left understood that “if you can take over education, you can shape a generation. And we gave our kids to them. We turned our kids over to the radical left who had taken over education.”According to Jacobson, hard-left anti-Zionists and professional agitators, such as members of the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine, are organizing the protests that have created hostile campus environments for Jews. But the problem goes deeper than that. The atmosphere is such that support for “Palestine” has become a matter of political fashion, and so the facts of the conflict don’t seem to matter.While the institutional capture of almost all of higher education seems irreversible, Jacobson says there is a way to effect change: Strip these schools of their federal funding. Federal intervention is necessary not so much to save the academic institutions but to protect Jewish students—and American society—from them.
The program was almost an hour, so it’s not practical for me to do the clean up needed to post the entire transcript. Here are select excerpts. As always, this is auto-transcribed, and there may be transcription errors, and is lightly edited for clarity.
WAJ Teaser Show Intro (00:00:00):Academia is so far gone, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, that it is incapable of reforming itself internally. There is no internal opposition left. The question is not how do we reform the universities. The question is, how do we protect society from the universities?Tobin (00:00:20):Hello, I’m Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-Chief of the Jewish News syndicate jns.org. And you are listening to Top Story, a weekly podcast where I analyze the most important stories happening in Jewish news around the world….Tobin (00:05:51):Can American higher education be saved from the antisemitic surge? Can Jewish students be protected without violating the free speech? Rights of others is defunding these schools and their or their replacement by alternatives, viable options. And how can liberal Jews who are outraged about the impact of woke ideology on their children lives go on supporting or tolerating these ideologies with respect to other issues? To discuss all this, we’re pleased to have back with us today a man who has done as much as anyone to raise awareness of the destructive forces on American college campuses and the fight to defend Western principles that are under siege there…. William Jacobson, welcome back to Top Story….I want to start by asking you the question that is on the minds of many Americans today, after the last seven months of campus protests, how did support for Hamas and for the destruction of Israel become so popular on American college campuses? And why is the cause of Palestine now not merely fashionable, but somehow dominant on the left?WAJ (00:08:00):There’s a lot wrapped into that question. I think you have to view this as a continuum that took place over 20 to 30 years on the campuses. Many different factors. I’ll just rattle off some of them and then we can talk about additional ones. So one of them is there’s been a purge of dissenting viewpoints on college campuses. There is no diversity of viewpoint, at least at the quote unquote elite level, but even not the elite level when it comes to the humanities and the social sciences. Conservatives have not been hired for 20 plus years. pro-Israel professors have not been hired for 20 plus years, maybe 30 years. And so what you get on campuses, you have a faculty which drives a lot of the issues, which is a monoculture. It’s an echo chamber, which is in many ways, anti-capitalist, in many ways anti-American views us as the source of the world’s problems, views us as irredeemably racist, baked into our system is some of the phraseology they sort of use the, um, anti-Israel component is part of that ideology that Israel is held out as the example of everything that’s gone wrong in the United States, but implanted into the Middle East.WAJ (00:09:27):So when they have an anti-colonial ideology on campuses, when they talk about white supremacy, when they talk about, you know, indigenous rights, things like that, they use Israel as their mutual object of hate.So the way I would describe it is that it’s not so much that they hate Israel, which they do. It’s not so much that they hate Jews, which many of them do. It is that Israel is a very useful organizing mechanism for the people who hate western society, western civilization, hate the United States and hate capitalism.Israel is something around which groups who have absolutely nothing in common can come together in hate. And that would be what’s frequently referred to as the Red-Green Alliance. So the Marxists and the anarchists and the Islamists, who in many ways are the exact opposite ideologically all come together to hate the Jews and hate Israel.And so that has developed over 30 years. So it didn’t start on October 7th, but it bubbled up on October 7th….WAJ (00:11:31):And Cornell’s a great example where I teach, we are required now at the start of all events to recite a land acknowledgement, acknowledging effectively that we are in stolen land from the Cayuga Indian tribe, but they’re not willing to actually do anything about it. So they’re not willing to decolonize Cornell. My view is if you really believe that, and it’s not just virtue signaling, then leave, Cornell should vacate and give it back to the Native Americans, but they won’t do that.So Israel becomes a very convenient object for them to attack because it allows them to virtue signal, it allows them to uphold their decolonization ideology without having to sacrifice anything themselves….WAJ (00:14:10):… There is not a week that goes by or barely a week that goes by that some faculty department doesn’t have an anti-Israel program. Now, they don’t say, this is an anti-Israel program, but it’s a program to demonize Israel. Yet I cannot recall a single program sponsored by an academic department at Cornell that reasonably could be called pro-Israel. To the extent there are any programs that are pro-Israel, they’re put on by other groups, by outside groups. The faculty who are active on this issue have put their foot on the scale on the campus ideology, and they drive a lot of this. They’ve been at the encampment that Cornell had. They work with the groups on campus who are anti-Israel … the faculty drives a lot of this. And that’s a problem because this was 20 to 30 years in the making, and it’s going take 20 to 30 years.The handful of faculty on Cornell’s campus who I think could reasonably be called pro-Israel, and who are willing to talk publicly about it, you can count on one hand and they’re aging out…. The administrators, I think, are relatively indifferent, but to the extent they have a viewpoint that they’re willing to express, I think it leans towards the anti-Israel camp….WAJ (00:17:07):… You have to be anti-Israel on campuses if you are going to be socially accepted. And that’s just a fact. And that’s why a lot of the reaction that the American Jewish community has had over the last decade or two, the quote unquote pro-Israel community, Jewish and non-Jewish, has not really understood that arguing the merits doesn’t work.This is a cultural problem, which has grown worse with social media. That in order to be accepted in the culture on many campuses, including the campuses where there is are problems, you have to be anti-Israel. It is a box you have to check, whether they understand it or not.My guess is many of them don’t have a deep understanding. They hear figures and death tolls cited in the media, which are often completely fabricated, and they go with it. It’s the thing to do…. While I’ve seen those videos of students not knowing which sea and which river, and I think there’s something to that, I think there is an ideological group who understands it very well and has nefarious goals and as you know, in any revolution, the revolution is led by 2% of the population. 2% of the population can really move the population. And that’s what we’re seeing happen.Tobin (00:19:12):Or smaller if you listen to Lenin, but, you know, that worked for him. One of the issues that has become a source of controversy is the question of the role of the funding of these protests. How important is outside funding as well as the presence of outside organizers from radical groups ….WAJ (00:22:57):Well, it’s all of the above. There’s a lot of things going on here. We can’t oversimplify it. There’s no question that, particularly in cities, schools that are in cities, the outside activists have played an outsized role….But at its core, it’s a cultural problem that we have a generation who gets their news from TikTok, who understands very simple themes. The other side is very good at creating very simple themes. They just keep repeating again and again, genocide, genocide, genocide. You can’t go anywhere without a sign about genocide. And that sinks in, they find a small, narrowly focused message, and they just repeat it endlessly.Whereas we’re trying to have a discussion. Let’s talk about history. Let’s talk about the last hundred years. Let’s talk about who the real indigenous people is. That’s an hour long conversation. Accusing someone of genocide takes about three seconds. And so just messaging wise, the other side is extremely good at the messaging….WAJ (00:26:34):… Institutional capture is the best way of looking at it. The left understood that if you can capture the education system, you can really shape a generation. That’s why Bill Ayers, Obama’s mentor who helped hin launch his first campaign, went into academia. It’s why the students in Harvard Law School in the early 1980s, when I was there, who were anti-Israel before it was fashionable to be anti-Israel, who developed the tactic of forming coalitions of color against Israel, which predated even critical race theory. The inventor of the term critical race theory and intersectionality was my classmate. And I saw how those student groups operated, that they understood that if you can take over education, you can shape a generation. And the most radical students from my class at Harvard Law School went into academia.Everybody else went into private law practice, and we gave our kids to them. We turned our kids over to the radical left who had taken over education. And so part of it is just straight out institutional capture. They understood, and we didn’t, how to do it….WAJ (00:30:51):And so that really, there is a reign of terror on campuses that affects faculty, which means that few dissenting voices get hired. The dissenting voices that there are, tend to get silenced or snuffed out by an elaborate system where you have anonymous bias reporting. Your career can be all but ruined by anonymous complaints about you. And so it’s really a terrible situation.The way I view it, and I’ve been trying to sound the alarm for people, is that academia is so far gone, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, that it is incapable of reforming itself internally. There is no internal opposition left. And society needs to understand that, and needs to understand that, at least in the short term, the question is not how do we reform the universities.The question is how do we protect society from the universities? And that’s something that I don’t think people have come to grips with….WAJ (00:32:27):Well, I think based on their public performance, based on what we’ve all been able to observe about it, [administrators] seem to be extremely afraid of the students. They seem to be afraid of their offices being occupied. They seem to be afraid of encampments on campus.I have to hand it to these students and their facilitators, like SJP, they understood the pressure points. And you are seeing administration after administration completely capitulate to these encampments when there’s no reason to. So I think they are afraid of the students. To some extent, they might be afraid of faculty.I don’t really think they’re afraid of donors. Sorry, donors. Sorry big donors, they take you for granted. They have no respect for you. It doesn’t matter if your name’s on a building or how much money you’ve donated, that may enable you to get a phone call with the president.But when push comes to shove, they really don’t care. They’re happy to take your money, but you’re not getting the influence you think you’re getting by donating.What I do think they fear tremendously is cutoff of government funding, federal funding particularly, but also state funding. That is the hammer over their head. Now, of course, the Biden administration is not going to wield that hammer. It’s not going bring it down on them. But if we get a Trump administration, hopefully they will. That is the big money. If Harvard or another school were to lose their federal funding, they very well might collapse.Tobin (00:34:00):Even Harvard with its billion dollar endowment?WAJ (00:34:02):Doesn’t matter, because a lot of those are restricted funds. They’ve got to pay people this week salaries or next week or how whatever the pay cycle is in Massachusetts, Harvard needs to pay people today. They can’t poach endowed restricted funds to do that. At least they can’t do it legally….WAJ (00:39:41):…. We cannot trust the universities, be they the faculty or the administrations, to do the right thing, because they won’t. And they don’t. And that’s why outside pressure, as much as I wish it didn’t have to take place, that’s why outside pressure is the only thing that can protect our society from what’s going on on the campuses.Tobin (00:41:08):Now, there are some optimists among conservatives in the Jewish community that were willing to claim that the embarrassment of the three elite university presidents at a congressional hearing in December, and the firing of two of them, was a sign that there is significant pushback against woke school administrators. And that this is a harbinger of an eventual return to sanity…. Is change even possible? I guess what you’ve been just telling me is, is the answer is No.WAJ (00:41:46):The answer is No. That unless we change the culture on the campuses, unless we get away from the obsession with race, the obsession with building coalitions based on race, the obsession with viewing our society as the great evil in the world, unless we can cure that problem on campus, who’s sitting at the top of this heap, really ultimately doesn’t matter … That’s why I just had a column, an op-ed in the New York Post where he said if Cornell is going to recover, it’s got to get rid of DEI and that the president leaving is the opportunity for the trustees to seize the day and get rid of this program she installed four years, July, the president imposed an anti-racism agenda on the campus, which has been completely destructive.It’s got to be gotten rid of completely, not tweaked around the edges. When there was blowback this fall about what was happening at Cornell, she said, well, we’ll add an antisemitism module to it. Why wasn’t it there to begin with? That’s the proof positive about how destructive the DEI has been to the Jewish community, that Cornell didn’t even have an antisemitism module and was going to add one after students were chanting for an Intifada on campus. And one student who’s now in federal custody, threatened to slit the throats and shoot Jewish students. So that’s what it took to add a module on antisemitism.And by the way, at the same time, she said they’re going to add a module on Islamophobia, which is not a serious problem on the Cornell campus, or statistically is not a serious problem in the United States.So they couldn’t even give the Jewish community at Cornell a week or two to mourn what happened on October 7th. They couldn’t even understand what a unique moment it was in Jewish history, the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust ….They couldn’t even give us two weeks to mourn as Jews, not at Cornell, not anywhere. They had to lop into it their intersectional approach to the world. And that’s how perverted and sick the campuses have become….
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