RUTHFULLY YOURS

Many have responded to this moral collapse by demanding scalps. As of this writing, two of the three presidents who testified have resigned. Firings and resignations of leaders (and expulsions of students who vandalize property or occupy buildings) are necessary proximate goals, but cannot be the ultimate goal of the backlash. Rather, we must address the deeper problem of institutional capture by an ideology hostile to its host nation. What do we do when our finest schools have been overrun by students eager to cheer genocidal antisemitism, faculty and administrators who broadly agree, and a culture that could produce credentialed people so smugly disdainful of the West?

Precisely diagnosing the disease is the first step towards offering effective prescriptions. The renovation of the American academy must be tailored to its problems, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

One threshold observation is that a focus on the American university is warranted, because what happens on campus shapes our nation’s character and ethical instincts in sustained ways. For years, conventional wisdom held the opposite: young people always go through radical phases; they eventually grow out of it or leave it behind when they graduate; serious people could never take these ideas seriously enough for them to take hold. Both latter dismissals of the campus problem are wrong. They fail to account for the anti-civilizational turn campus radicalism has taken, and how liberals in the West are defenseless against its calls for “liberation” and “justice.”

This essay would hardly be the first to point out that young people immersed in the latest wave of leftist ideology wield their campus-cultivated ideas, intuitions, and jargon as weapons against well-meaning members of prior generations who hold the keys to leading corporate, media, government, and non-profit institutions. Anyone who has read James Bennet’s account of his ouster from the New York Times, the anti-Israel demands of anonymous low-level Biden administration staffers, or even progressive media coverage of the leftist non-profit landscape knows how many missionaries spread the Word about power differentials and liberation, and how they have pushed liberalism aside.

The mistaken belief that recent graduates are passionate advocates for civil rights and tolerance rather than adherents to a foreign and incompatible morality has allowed the gatekeepers to be bamboozled and bullied into handing over the keys, almost without resistance. Young ideologues now wear hollowed-out institutions—for-profit, non-profit, and government—as skinsuits. What happens on campus does not stay on campus, because universities currently function as seminaries of an aggressively proselytizing theology, the onward march of which is not easily resisted by complacent liberals and quickly becomes orthodoxy wherever it takes root.

In quantitative terms, this is a big deal—a major national problem that warrants aggressive countermeasures. Which brings us to an observation about the substance of the ideas that dominate campuses today, from presidents to pre-frosh. What makes them so viral, destructive, and difficult to resist? Understanding the nature of the disease depends on answering that question, which in turn requires a deep dive into the substance of the dominant form of campus leftism.

Since October 7, many analysts have noted that “decolonialism” (or “decolonization”), a sub-genre of antiracist progressive activism, now provides the ideological justification for students to say or do abhorrent things. To take one example: Before adherents of this movement decided that it would be politically convenient to claim that the rapes of October 7 never happened, they were fond of saying “this is what decolonization looks like.” Decolonialism gives progressives a lens through which to see complex geopolitical events as moral struggles, while upending traditional moral analysis.

Its analytical frame, borrowed from postmodernists and critical theorists, is seductively simple: the apparently powerful group is bad and its powerless opponent is good. One’s role is not to evaluate the moral worth of the conduct or aims of a given actor, but rather to engage in “solidarity” (or “allyship”) with those deemed weaker by some measure—often a superficial racialized measure, at that. And as always, the notion that a weaker party might be weaker precisely because of its conduct or aims is proscribed as bigoted.

In the context of warring ethno-religious groups in the Levant, this takes the form of believing that Israeli Jews are white outsiders who have stolen Arab land, though a moment’s critical thought would reveal that this has things all wrong. Israel is history’s greatest “decolonization” success story, featuring the return of an exiled people to sovereignty in its ancient homeland. But that conclusion requires actual historical analysis. Comparing the two sides’ skin color and relative success is much simpler, yields a reliably clear path for solidarity, and in the process appears to parallel salient American cultural conflicts. The Jewish state of Israel is liberal, rich, and free, which means it must have exploited someone, just as the West was built on the exploitation of natives and minorities. Between its tendency to simplify a complex world and the ease with which young people can join the good side, it’s easy to see why this worldview is so appealing to well-meaning young Americans.

But “decolonialism” emphasizes some unique principles. One is that land belongs to “indigenous” peoples, and anything such people do to liberate it from non-indigenous “colonizers” is justified. (Ideas, norms, and cultural touchstones enjoy the same status.) Hence the brazen campus celebrations of Hamas embodying “liberation by any means necessary” and the omnipresent claim that even Jewish children murdered or kidnapped in the kibbutzim near Gaza were colonizers who deserved their fate.

In short, on this worldview, liberating “indigenous” territory is such a high-order good that it outranks prohibitions against murder, rape, and every other atrocity that most Americans assume campus progressives must abhor. In this sense, accusations of left-wing hypocrisy miss the mark. A higher-order good like “liberating indigenous lands” can nullify lower-order evils like rape, torture, murder, and mutilation. Progressives celebrating Hamas’s atrocities are not being hypocrites, but consistent ideologues. If this ideology seems foreign and untenable, that may be because it cannot coherently coexist with the most basic elements of our civilization.

In accordance with the teachings of postcolonial authors like Frantz Fanon (whose earlier, more violent work is admired like scripture in viral anti-Israel materials), decolonial violence is worthy of celebration. Treating flesh-and-blood people as mere abstractions in a bloody fairy tale, today’s radicals—drawing on Sartre’s infamous preface to The Wretched of the Earth—imbue violence against ostensible colonizers with a redemptive quality. It eradicates not just colonizers’ bodies, literally, but the colonized’s own humiliating identity, spiritually.

Consider Professor Norman Finkelstein’s near-sociopathic reaction to the brutality of the October 7 massacres. In a (now-deleted) Substack post, he wrote: “I, for one, will never begrudge—on the contrary, it warms every fiber of my soul—the scenes of Gaza’s smiling children as their arrogant Jewish supremacist oppressors have, finally, been humbled.” Finkelstein often talks a good game about respect for international law, but the true moral force of his writing, and the source of his popularity, lies in his pathological embrace of Palestinian violence per se as spiritually redemptive (and embraced by a Jew, no less).

So, while civilized people around the world consider eliminating Israel’s sovereignty over its territory a non-starter because, in practice, it would mean the death and exile of millions of Jews, adherents to decolonialist radicalism are encouraged by that fact. In the meantime, they will continue to support, as a central part of their worldview, fanatical efforts to make Israel’s continued existence as painful as possible. While civilization depends on categorically rejecting lawless violence, decolonialism lionizes it with the claim that obedience to unjust laws allows the powerful to perpetuate their oppression of the powerless.

The activists may have trained their eyes on Israel for now, but in no way is this view limited to that conflict. To the contrary, anti-Israel activists frequently call for revolution in the West. Chants and activist materials call on the faithful to “globalize the intifada” and weave strings-on-corkboard conspiracy theories about the connections between capitalism, political liberalism, and Zionism. Witness, for example, a student at Columbia’s School of Social Work admiringly quoting Mao at a Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine event after October 7: “[Hamas] showed us that with creativity, determination, and combined strength, the masses can accomplish great feats, a fact we have seen in every heroic struggle for liberation from Vietnam to Afghanistan. As Mao says, ‘Dare to struggle, dare to win.’”

Why would liberation of indigenous territory rank so highly in these activists’ hierarchy of goals? Because returning every nation to its “rightful” original position in the world is central to their project. Contemporary progressives are animated by the conviction that history is most fundamentally characterized by one exploitation after another. This is a logical projection of their current view onto the past. Today, in the activist mind, every human interaction, no matter how mundane, is rife with oppression. The social interactions of the past—even the seemingly innocuous ones, like migration and commerce—all the more so. The only solution is a revolution returning humanity to its pre-exploration, pre-cooperative, pre-civilizational state.

This perspective helps explain not just why campus activists consistently take seemingly absurd positions (“Queers for Palestine”) but also why they behave in a manner best described as uncivilized (or anticivilized). Tearing down hostage posters, shouting obscenities, interrupting classes, vandalizing statues and storefronts—all these actions flout the norms of decency that make civilization possible. More so than even the unhinged radicals of the 20th century, the current crop of campus-trained die-hards are committed to the idea that civilization itself is a malicious fraud because it conceals and perpetuates artificial categories that necessarily result in exploitation. Freeing Palestine from Jewish control would show that the tide has turned in an unprecedented fashion towards undoing all the systems of oppression that apparently constitute Western civilization, and keep members of “marginalized” groups from true liberation.

As a proxy war in a civilizational struggle, the current unrest is not due to arguments within the regular bounds of socially beneficial give-and-take. Rather, it is at base an argument about whether there can be any rules at all, or whether justice demands that we return to some kind of state of nature. When today’s activists reject neutral rules that create disparities between groups, they condemn the very attempt to transcend our differences through a cooperative civilization. Attacking law enforcement, shutting down bridges and newspaper presses, vandalism, and chanting for the violent overthrow of the West are all pointed expressions of this condemnation, and would remain a celebrated part of the perpetual revolution machine that would emerge when the facade of civilization falls.

These revolutionaries refuse the possibility of a positive-sum alternative represented by a liberal and mutually beneficial society. Evidence that such a civilization might actually serve formerly oppressed groups well—such as Jewish national success in Israel and communal success in the West—is recast as evidence that the group is in on the game, having flipped from oppressed to oppressor in some nefarious way. The antisemitism of this worldview may be incidental. The barbarism, however, is the point. No self-respecting society should tolerate such a movement, much less pretend that the institutions cultivating it need only minor tweaks to correct course.

This monstrous ideology’s metastasis within academia is an iterative process. To call it a failure of leadership is insufficient. Precisely where it begins—the administration, the professors, the students—is hard to know. It certainly does not end with its leaders. Humanities and social-science departments are dominated by fringe ideologues. Administrators hire DEI professionals and other bureaucrats who believe the university’s highest aim is social justice. Universities seek out, both tacitly and in application prompts, student social-justice activists, lavishing scholarships upon applicants who know which shibboleths signal that they are in tune with the latest revolutionary fad.

Whether schools do all this because they sense that students, applicants, rankings-compilers, or potential employers find it appealing or because top administrators are themselves revolutionaries is not clear. But no single facet of the academy presents an obvious target for an effective countervailing policy response. Even rooting out the thousands of DEI apparatchiks would not stem the tide, because DEI principles are so deeply entrenched and institutionalized in all aspects of campus life, from hiring and admissions practices to course curricula. Rather, the academy as a whole must be treated as the arm of an anti-civilizational ratchet.

None of this analysis was inaccessible before the post-October 7 convulsions or the December 5 presidents’ debacle. It was only obscured somewhat by academics’ reliance on jargon in expressing simple but antisocial ideas. What has been revealed since then, most of all, is that the corruption of the university is not a joke. It is not a mere lack of seriousness in scholarship. It is the lack of even the possibility of seriousness in scholarship. The American academy has been turned against its host nation as never before, driven at every level by the conviction that the United States must be destroyed to achieve the higher-order good of undoing the evils of civilization, cultivated in laboratories of anti-Enlightenment morality and the contempt for the American nation its leaders displayed on Capitol Hill.

But with some understanding of the depth and character of this threat, the American people, through their elected representatives and other means, can mount a proportionate response that targets the disease itself, and conditions the academy’s future on its commitment to reversing course.

What would wholesale renovations look like? The scope of the problem and its target demand a multi-pronged campaign with contributions from policymakers and government officials, donors, employers, media, and regular American citizens. That campaign should be harsh and thorough, as universities have knowingly deranged our society for decades and gotten quite rich doing so through government subsidies, market-immune loans, and favorable tax status.

But a solution to this problem cannot be a “burn-it-all-down” pitchfork-led mob. It must still be guided by an alternative positive vision recognizing that universities, at their best, serve the public interest in advancing human understanding, wisdom, science, and gratitude for our inheritance. It is crucial to recognize that there is no other major institution currently doing this at scale in American society. This proposal is for a renovation—a major one, to be sure—not a demolition.

To the extent that the academy provides an opportunity for young people to spend their formative years becoming thoughtful people and critical but committed citizens, it has a strong claim to public largesse and the perception that its degrees mean something good. But the flipside is that states and the federal government should not treat universities as institutions that advance the public interest if they inculcate a theologically guided compulsion to derange and dismantle the West. Americans are under no obligation to subsidize thousands of active combatants in a war against themselves.

Some public policy responses to institutional capture are already underway. Multiple states have passed legislation dismantling DEI bureaucracies in state universities. Federal legislation has been introduced to tax university endowments above certain amounts. States can and should follow suit. Massive grant- and other tuition-assistance programs allow schools to charge exorbitant tuition fees. All levels of government can condition this assistance on administrations submitting to external audits to ensure that academic freedom is protected without bleeding into revolutionary and barbaric activism.

Lawsuits, both private and public, based on universities’ failure to protect Jews’ and Israeli-Americans’ civil rights may cost smaller universities non-trivial sums in settlement or damages. Information that comes out in discovery would also be useful in mounting a general-population campaign of shame and mockery that would help drain name-brand institutions of their residual prestige, making top high-schoolers think twice before applying there.

But perhaps the more interesting avenue would entail state attorneys general investigating university administrations for deliberately creating environments hostile to racial and national-origin groups deemed “oppressors.” One question these AGs might ask is why admissions departments have ushered in so many students susceptible to the temptations of an intellectually facile and barbaric ideology. What procedures are in place that resulted in an inordinate number of university students embracing an anti-civilized philosophy, and which personnel are responsible for executing it?

Even if all the current student radicals were expelled, leaving the gatekeepers who admitted them in power would simply allow universities to replicate the same patterns. The key is to investigate and identify what characteristics and behaviors admissions departments have selected for on a systemic basis, revealing how they have abandoned the pretense of rigor in order to populate their campuses with scores of true-believer barbarians and their enablers.

Of course, such drastic action must be handled with care. An easy but mistaken route during this warranted crackdown is finding professors and administrators who have said unsavory things and firing them. But not only is violating genuine free-speech rights not in the interests of those who wish to see a renovated academy, it also risks falling into the same trap of pinning systemic problems on individuals. The problem is not that influential people have said insane things. The problem is that every level of the university is currently geared towards perpetuating and mainstreaming those insanities. Tactically, critics should remain focused on reorienting the processes that led to hiring radical staff and admitting sympathetic students, rather than getting bogged down in energy-intensive campaigns targeting individuals, which are distracting and likely to draw legal and cultural backlash.

Another crucial strategy jumps right to advancing a positive vision of the university, aiming to pressure the old guard by subsidizing its competition. Some new and revitalized institutions have already begun drawing attention from donors who in the past would have given to traditionally prestigious institutions like Harvard and Penn. Donors and policymakers should feel a special solicitude towards those institutions that position themselves as explicitly pro-civilization, counterbalancing the very forces driving the traditionally prestigious schools mad.

The University of Austin, University of Florida, and Hillsdale College, to name just a few, deserve serious attention from donors and faculty who no longer wish to lend their support (and the prestige that comes with it) to experiments in anti-civilizational revolution. Organizations such as the Tikvah Fund, which has scaled up its pro-America, pro-Israel, and pro-Jewish educational programming for students of all ages, have risen to the moment by responding to the campus barbarians with a full-throated defense of Western civilization. (Full disclosure: both authors of this essay have held affiliations with Tikvah in the past.)

New and truly prestigious graduate programs in attitudinally friendly, high-paying sectors like law, engineering, and finance, would add heft to the effort. Ackman-Rowan University, sporting a beautiful $5 billion campus, would attract serious academic talent and send tomorrow’s leaders and political thinkers into the workforce with a Masters of Economics or Finance that would command immediate respect from top-tier employers.

Increasing higher-ed competition is a long-haul strategy but a crucial one. Harvard, MIT, and Penn, among many other elite schools, largely maintain their reputations by inertia. Having abandoned their short-lived 20th-century experiment in meritocracy, they no longer even pretend to select among applicants based on objective qualifications, preferring instead some proprietary blend of academic adequacy and social-justice commitment. They have returned to their pre-1960s roles as finishing schools for American elites, only now they select for elite beliefs more than elite heritage (though they do that, too). Ultimately, they do not enjoy their current status on account of current merit. They are coasting on residual prestige from a time when they could at least claim to be something more than glorified communist summer camps.

Eroding that prestige—which keeps employers coming back to campus job fairs and treating Harvard degrees as an application “plus,” and keeps talented high-schoolers dreaming of autumns in Cambridge—requires propping up competitors so they can compete for genuine teaching talent, build the amenities that will attract the best and brightest, and thus begin to drain the Ivys (and peers) of their mystique.

For years, wealth has been compounding at elite universities through the cycle of graduates obtaining high-paying jobs and repaying some of their income to their alma maters. But prestige, which is partly a function of wealth, is socially constructed. It can subsist on old gifts and accruing interest for a while, but not forever—especially if legislators work to prevent large gifts from adversaries like China and Qatar. And the best way to make pro-civilization campuses prestigious is simply to treat them—in our capacities as employers, parents, friends, consumers, and critics—as though they are.

The public shaming and mocking of university leadership should continue until the moral rot is gone. Most Americans are not donors, legislators, or potential litigants who can wield these weapons in this fight. But they can work within their local culture to bring universities down to size. To be blunt, Harvard, MIT, Penn, and most of their peers should be laughing stocks, whose names receive the same respect we give Trump University. They have lost sight of their mission, welcoming a takeover of their administrations, faculty, and student bodies by an analytically pathetic and morally perverted ideology.

We regular citizens need to treat them accordingly in our everyday lives, by encouraging bright youth to take their talents elsewhere and maintaining a healthy skepticism of the value of the degrees they confer. And until they begin dismantling their own systemic institutional radicalism, university leaders should have their feet held to the fire at every public appearance, where they should be held to account for continuing to provide succor to those who hate the West.

It bears repeating that universities need not draw this kind of scrutiny forever. A commitment to free expression and academic freedom can coexist with some minimal commitment to not use university resources to work towards the demise of the nation in which it exists. But as long as the academy is committed to forming young people who are not interested in being decent citizens—indeed, who are trained to be exactly the opposite—it should be treated as the locus of the civilizational crisis it is.