Monday, March 24, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
"Mindless: What happened to universities?", by Cary Nelson, is the March issue of Jewish Quarterly, which dedicates each issue to a single essay.
The 120-page book is essentially both a distillation and an update of Nelson's last book, Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles. it covers much of the same ground as to the deterioration and subversion of the academy largely at the hands of the anti-Israel crowd.
This has huge ramifications on the future of the university. As Nelson describes it, the very places that are meant for free enquiry have betrayed their core values.
Nelson is a previous president of the American Association of University Professors, and he looks on with dismay how the AAUP has been hijacked by anti-Israel leaders and is now passing resolutions that go against the basics of academic freedom.
His last book was completed right before October 7, and this one centers on everything that has happened since. It is a very ugly picture. The attacks on Zionist faculty, students and ideas are relentless, and they are succeeding in ridding entire academic fields of proud Jews. Students used to study fields, now too many of the fields have become nothing more than advocacy and the only things that are studied are what is acceptable to say.
What used to be anomalous, like a professor refusing to write a letter of recommendation to a student who wants to join an academic program in Israel, is now widespread and largely unreported: Israeli universities are reporting a silent boycott, where papers are rejected unread and no one wants to partner with them. It isn't s principled BDs stance, rather it is a result of no one wanting the hassle of dealing with campus agitators.
The overwhelming feeling one gets is that while many fields in many universities have been completely subverted, a great deal more have been notable for their cowardice.
Nelson makes an excellent point about how identity has become a minefield for students who enter college and are trying to define themselves. They may have their own personal identity already defined by the time they enter a university, but there are also social identity (who they identify with,) identity ascribed to them by others, and identity as formulated in identity politics. These latter types threaten to hurt students psychologically when they are slotted in categories that they do not see themselves as belonging to. Worse, in today's charged environment, everyone is encouraged to identify as victims to gain sympathy - students do not have any identity they can be proud of, only competing to who can be the most oppressed. Who knows the long term effects that this does to teenagers?
Nelson also has horror stories, both on his own campus and outside. He knows one person who had good reviews and was on track to reach tenure. His speaking out against Hamas actions on October 7 destroyed any chance he may have had to gain tenure. Colleagues who privately supported him now urged he be fired.
Nelson has some recommendations, but they feel like too little, too late. I'm afraid that soon Jews will have to respond to antisemitism in the university the way that they responded to antisemitism in the medical and other fields over a century ago: Create their own parallel system.
I don't think we are there yet. Nelson doesn't mention it but there are several excellent schools, mostly in the Midwestern US, that have reputations of being very welcoming to Jewish students. If the smartest Jewish students abandon the universities with active Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, this may become a self-correcting problem over time as recruiters will look elsewhere for the best and the brightest.
Mindless is a sobering but important book.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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