How Do You Spell ‘College Antisemitism’? D.E.I.
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/19/how-do-you-spell-college-antisemitism-d-e-i/
In a rare show of bipartisanship, 84 Democrats joined 219 Republicans on a resolution condemning antisemitism on college campuses and calling for the presidents of Harvard and MIT to resign after they refused to condemn student calls for genocide of Jews at a House hearing. The University of Pennsylvania’s president, who was also at that hearing, has already stepped down.
But even if all three them were gone, so what?
The problem is far wider and much deeper than antisemitism at three elite schools. And if you want to stamp out intellectual and moral rot driving it, start by firing the army of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers at colleges across the country.
Two years ago, Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, did groundbreaking work on the DEI bloat at 65 universities that are members of the five “power” athletic conferences: the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big 10, the Big 12, the PAC 12, and the Southeastern Conference.
What he found was that these schools averaged 45 DEI staffers, which was 1.4 times larger than the number of history professors. More recently, he looked at three public colleges in Virginia and found they had 6.5 DEI staffers for every 100 faculty members, which is higher than any single public university outside Virginia.
Later, Greene studied their posts on Twitter (now called X), and found that the ranks of DEI staff were full of antisemites. He found that 96% of their tweets about Israel were critical of the Jewish state, while 62% of the tweets about communist China were favorable.
“Frequently accusing Israel of engaging in genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes while rarely leveling similar criticisms toward China indicates an irrational hatred that is particularly directed toward Jews and not merely a concern for human rights,” he wrote.
Wait, you say. The “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staff is supposed to be making campuses more welcoming and tolerant.
Wrong. As Greene notes: “DEI bureaucracies are better understood as an academic version of a political commissariat that articulates and enforces an ideological orthodoxy on campus.” And in this case, the orthodoxy dictates hatred of Jews for “oppressing” Palestinians.
Shortly after those three presidents told lawmakers that “it depends on the context” whether calling for the genocide of the Jewish people violated their codes of conduct, David Wolpe, a rabbi who is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School, posted on X that “We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see.”
He went on to say that this problem “is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person. This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.”
For those who don’t know, Rabbi Wolpe had been tapped to join an advisory board cobbled together by Harvard President Claudine Gay in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 butchery of Jews.
But after Gay’s “painfully inadequate testimony,” Wolpe quit the board when he realized that “I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.”
Rabbi Wolpe is right to feel discouraged. Firing a president, or setting up some Potemkin “advisory board” won’t solve what ails today’s elite schools.
But who is going to bring about the “vast unlearning” that Wolpe rightly calls for?
Here’s an idea. Start by eliminating every DEI job on every campus.
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