Guest Post by Victor Davis Hanson
After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses. Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic.
But immediately after October 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.
Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.
Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?
After the George Floyd riots in 2020, reparatory admissions — the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population — increased.
Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20 and 40 percent, despite whites making up 68-70% of the general population.
The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy. Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools.
One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20-30% of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10-15%.
Jewish students are also currently stereotyped as “white” and “privileged” — and thus considered as fair game on campus.
At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities.
Huge numbers of students have entered universities, who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.
Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs.
Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading — or all three combined.
The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement.
And, presto, an epidemic of antisemitism naturally followed.
In such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them.
“Gender, Black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental, and green”-studies courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors.” The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and antisemitic behavior without consequences.
Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut-courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively, and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.
At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines, and absences.
All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic, or the traditional sciences.
Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2-trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.
Exceptions and exemptions are the bible of terrified and careerist administrators.
Faced with an epidemic of antisemitism, university administrators now claim they can do little to curb the hatred. But privately they know should the targets of similar hatred be instead Blacks, gays, Latinos, or women, then they would expel the haters in a nanosecond.
What is the ultimate result of once elite campuses giving 70-80% of their students As, becoming hotbeds of dangerous antisemitism, and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students?
The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.
They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.
But the erosion is already occurring — and accelerating.
At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.
These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.
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First they came for the homosexuals and I did nothing to stop them.
Then they came for the blacks and again, I did nothing to stop them.
Then they came for the Jews, and alas, I did nothing again.
Then they came for the illegal alien brown people and I did nothing.
Then, all of a sudden for no reason whatsoever, everything was fucking great again.
I gave your comment the side eye until the last sentence. Haha.
How were the Universities lost? By putting women in charge of them. Just like every other institution in the West.
Actually……very slowly and then all of a sudden.
Beat me to it.
Like on Nov 3. All of a sudden.
The universities were lost because—We tolerated communism and ignored its true nature. When they come to power they reveal their true nature. Snakes will act like snakes. Communists act like communists.
You tolerate communists to your own detriment.
All worthy things are lost via insouciant inattention.
What happened to him?
Easy,guaranteed student loans and a need for diversity of idiots who cannot even read being allowed into colleges.
You work your way thru(me parents did and had a good college social life)as is affordable and actually teaches one to think and have good future skills your college will be full,end the nonsense I mention and many either change course with alacrity or go out of business,simple as.
My little buddy here has a higher IQ then most college students these days(and he is a fucking otter with a cone!).
I attended a state university in Ohio — 1970-74 — and the faculty there had only 2 issues that focused all of its attention: preaching marxist doctrine everywhere they could; and, trying to have all of the faculty sign a pro-israel statement to submit to the United Nations to show that faculty’s unanimous support for israel … the 1st or 2d home of most of that university’s faculty.
The US education system was taken over by JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie in the early 20th century. At that point they implemented the Prussian educational system designed to teach the populous to obey and do mind numbing tasks redundantly. The purpose of this was to train a nation of factory workers who would take orders and not ask questions. When factories were all offshored, the Globalists shifted the focus to social engineering and pushing the Globalist agenda. The Globalists look at this as a war, and the way to win a war is to capture the hearts and minds.
If you hate America, you hate Jews.
If you hate Jews, you hate America.
It’s the same thing as:
Holocaust-Holocaust-Holocaust!
Antisemite-Antisemite-Antisemite!
It’s the same old story to excuse everything the Jew does. It’s the Jew get out of jail free card… like the race card.
Anyhow, this, and others like it, are making the rounds incessantly. Depending on which Jew or Jew worshiper, it is they are either surrendered, or were captured.
No one will say the obvious: if you are a fighting age man found in the IDF AO you are automatically tagged as… Hamas.
Israeli soldiers vandalize a gift shop in Gaza after destroying the area and killing or expelling residents.
GOD HELP the #JewishState if this is not #FakeNews— how I pray it is, but ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDEST. You are what you do ~ilana Alleged Israeli Intelligence Ministry Policy Paper: Option C: The evacuation of the civilians from Gaza to Sinai desert
Put your emotionalism aside for all that the Jew is feeding you. Go back to day one and entertain the obvious.
For quite a while now schooling in all its levels/grades, has been nothing more than a political cauldron stirring the budding marxists. There is no need to lean anything as alas, the Satanic controllers envision our future such that study, meritocracy, personal fulfillment and liberty will be permanently erased.
If it needs doing, a machine will do so. Your job is to obey, and not to step out of line in deed or thought.
on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.
Stopped right there.
The first casualty of war is the truth.
Nice how you callback the current promoted lie with an old promoted lie.
Propaganda.
Dismissed.
Indeed.
VDH=Neocon=Communist. Accepting neocons as conservatives is one of the ways that “we” lost the universities and everything else.
Slowly at first. Then suddenly.
“The Revolution won’t happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.”
— Max Horkheimer