RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jon Huntsman Jr. halted his contributions to the University of Pennsylvania on Oct. 15 to protest its leaders’ silence in the face of “hate,” which higher ed was “built to obviate.” An open letter to Penn President Liz Magill initiated by alumnus Marc Rowan called for mandatory antisemitism awareness training across the university. The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law has demanded that Penn add modules on antisemitism to the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion trainings.

College leaders are happy to oblige. As Ms. Magill told lawmakers Tuesday, Penn has created an Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism and a University Task Force on Antisemitism. Since antisemitism is “interconnected” to “other forms of hate,” Ms. Magill explained in a Nov. 1 message, Penn is also rolling out a presidential commission on Islamophobia. The university must do better to “reject hate in all its forms,” she said on Nov. 1.

Northwestern University President Michael Schill is establishing a committee to prevent antisemitism and “other forms of hate.” The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is creating a Standing Together Against Hate council. The University of Maryland, a self-described “proud multicultural community,” launched a task force to eliminate “antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate.” DEI bureaucrats are well-represented on all these commissions and task forces.

But a university has no capacity to eliminate “hate,” nor should that be its mission. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges built their DEI bureaucracies in the first place and allowed bureaucrats and their faculty sympathizers to put certain facts and ideas off-limits. In the name of rejecting hate, colleges started requiring faculty—even in the hard sciences—to justify their research in the name of “inclusion” and “belonging.” Protected identity categories have constantly expanded while the haters shrank to an ever smaller subset of white males.

The real issue on campuses isn’t antisemitism but the anti-Western ethos that has colonized large swaths of the curriculum. Elite schools once disdained Jews because they were seen as outsiders to Western civilization. Now they are reviled as that civilization’s very embodiment. Students explain that their hatreds come from what they learn in class—that the West is built on white supremacism and oppression. Israel is cast as the Western settler-colonialist oppressor par excellence.

The Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine explained that “our classes regularly discuss the inevitability of resistance as part of the struggle for decolonization. We study under renowned scholars who denounce the fact that the media requires oppressed peoples to be ‘perfect victims’ ”—that is, not to commit acts of terrorism—“in order to deserve sympathy.” During a sit-in, a law student at Penn announced: “It was here where I read texts about the history of colonial regimes and the importance of decolonization. . . . I just want the university to try to do part of what it tries to teach us in the classrooms.”

A Harvard student posted on social media: “how have i read frantz fanon in no less than four classes here (writing on the violent algerian decolonial movement!!!) and yet you all side with the colonizer?” Another Harvard student: “what is WRONG with EVERYONE! This is literally a decolonization struggle before our eyes. like all of those places we learn about and have historicized and sympathize with now—algeria, south africa, haiti, more.”

Gerrymandering Jews into an “oppressed” class for DEI purposes wouldn’t do anything to prevent this classroom propaganda—which college leaders are at pains not to address. Since Oct. 7, presidents and faculty have routinely spoken of the “interconnectedness” of antisemitism and Islamophobia. A Nov. 16 lecture at Cornell University by Ross Brann, a professor of Judeo-Islamic studies, was titled “The Intersectionality of Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Racism.”

Who is found at that intersection? White supremacists, former Trump administration officials, evangelical Christians and white opponents of mass immigration from Muslim countries, to judge by Mr. Brann’s PowerPoint slides. None of these supposed oppressors play a significant role in pro-Hamas campus protests. The actual protesters—Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, Queers for Palestine, socialist groups and proponents of the anti-Israel boycott, divest and sanctions movement—went unmentioned in the lecture. (Mr. Brann did briefly mention Louis Farrakhan as an antisemite.)

Mr. Ackman seems to be learning. In a Dec. 3 letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay, he described his conversations with faculty, who were willing to speak only confidentially. “The problems at Harvard are clearly not just about Jews and Israel,” Mr. Ackman wrote. Harvard also discriminates against Asians and “straight white males.” Harvard’s diversity office “is an important culprit in this discrimination on campus as it sees the world in a framework of oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressor class includes white males, Asians, Jews and other people perceived to be successful and powerful.”

Solving the problems of higher ed requires rejecting this victim ideology wholesale. “Universities need to abandon the concept that they have a central role in moral education,” Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president, told me. Donors and alumni should demand changes in governance and curricula to counterbalance the anti-Western ideology that undergirds the anti-Israel coalition. Every identity-based bureaucratic sinecure should be eliminated. Trustees and presidents should be chosen based on their determination to support humanistic learning and academic excellence, not “inclusion.”

Efforts to impose such changes will be fought tooth and nail. On their success hangs a civilization.

Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of “When Race Trumps Merit.”