The American university is rotting from within
American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writer describes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.Jonathan Tobin: Trump’s pick for civil rights can doom DEI racism
Universities are likely to try resisting any changes, no matter how justified. Nationally, 78 per cent of professors voted for Kamala Harris. To many, Trump’s election represents a rebellion of ‘uneducated’. The University of California at Berkeley blames his rise on ‘racism and sexism’. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth calls on universities to abandon ‘institutional neutrality’ for activism in the Trump era, predictably comparing neutral professors to those who accommodated the Nazis. Democracy dies, apparently, whenever the progressive monopoly is threatened.
This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.
Also like their clerical ancestors, today’s academics tend to embrace a common ideology. By 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared with just 12 per cent as conservative or far right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal faculty to conservative faculty has more than doubled. As pollster Samuel Abrams and historian Amna Khalid note, all this has occurred just as the US itself became somewhat more conservative.
Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.
Ideological orthodoxy and fear of cancellation for the ‘wrong views’ is widespread on campus. A majority of students say they would report professors who say something offensive. Some 40 per cent of millennials, according to the Pew Research Center, favour suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities – well above the 27 per cent among Gen X, 24 per cent among baby boomers, and 12 per cent among the oldest cohorts. The expansion of higher education, once seen as fulfilling the promise of liberal civilisation, is now accelerating its decline.
More remarkable still, the college campus has become the epicentre of movements embracing Islamist regimes like Iran and terrorist groups like Hamas. A Cornell professor who found the 7 October pogrom ‘exhilarating’ was briefly suspended but is now back in the classroom. He’s not alone. The American Association of University Professors this year rescinded its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, which invariably target only Israel. The slaughter of innocent Israelis has occasioned celebrations on radicalised campuses, most notably Columbia, Harvard and other elite schools. Ignorance, rather than knowledge, now sparks college protests. Pro-Hamas demonstrators rarely know the geography of either the river or the sea that they’re chanting about.
Such lawsuits would raise the real possibility that any college, university, K-12 school system, corporation or arts organization that used DEI to determine hiring or admissions would lose federal funding, and be subjected to sanctions in the same way that institutions that enforced racial segregation and discrimination were punished. In the face of a DOJ determined to oppose these toxic policies, it is entirely possible that support for DEI—something that is not just current liberal intellectual fashion but a new orthodoxy that seeks to suppress and punish all those who dissent from it—will be rolled up like a cheap carpet.Kassy Akiva: Universities That Ignored Anti-Semitism Will Face Consequences Under Trump, Ernst Says
No other measure undertaken by private or governmental initiatives could do more to reverse the dominance of woke ideology. It would also go far in stemming the surge of antisemitism that was enabled by DEI policies and racial ideologues, and that has swept across the nation since the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The opposition to such an effort from not just congressional Democrats but the mainstream media and those who now rule so many of our institutions will be ferocious. Pursuing the end of DEI will take a keen legal mind, courage and willingness to fight, as has already been demonstrated by Dhillon. Her confirmation should be treated not just as a test of loyalty to Trump, but of support for the values of Western civilization and American liberty that the left has been so eager to undermine under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And Jewish groups who purport to care about the fight against antisemitism, even those that are dominated by liberals, should stand with her.
While cynics often say that politics and elections don’t affect much in our everyday lives, putting someone like Harmeet Dhillon at the helm of the Civil Rights Division could be a crucial turning point that marks the moment the tide was turned against a destructive ideology threatening to change America for the worst for the foreseeable future.
Colleges and universities that did not work to stop campus anti-Semitism will face consequences under the Trump administration and Republican-dominated Senate, Senator Joni Ernst told The Daily Wire.
“The new Senate Republican majority is going to work with the Trump administration to enforce the law in the face of campuses that have fanned the flames of hate through inaction,” the Iowa Republican told The Daily Wire. “Elite universities have made their bed, and they’ve got to lie in it, but not on the taxpayers’ dime.”
Anti-Semitic incidents have increased by over 500% since Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israeli civilians. Ernst is one of several senators who have raised the alarm about the harm anti-Semitism has had on Jewish students. She says the Biden administration has repeatedly ignored her.
“The Biden administration ignored my repeated calls for action and sat on its hands as anti-Semitic violence exploded on college campuses across the country,” said Ernst.
In contrast, President-elect Donald Trump has threatened both public and private universities with repercussions for enabling hatred and promoting a diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda.
“My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that if you do not end anti-Semitic propaganda, they will lose their accreditation and federal taxpayer support,” Donald Trump said in a September speech.
He added that Jewish Americans must have “equal protection” and that the United States government will not “subsidize the creation of terrorist sympathizers, and we’re not going to do it, certainly [not] on American soil.”
