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Commentary By Heather Mac Donald

DEI Drives Campus Antisemitism

Gerrymandering Jews into an ‘oppressed’ class won’t save universities from a malevolent ideology.

Tuesday’s House hearing on campus antisemitism ratcheted up the pressure on American universities: counter the anti-Israel vitriol that exploded in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack or risk losing philanthropic and government support. The leading approach is sure to fail: doubling down on the ideologies and practices that led to the pro-Hamas fever in the first place.

Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager leading a Harvard donor revolt, told CNBC on Nov. 6 that he hadn’t previously read Harvard’s DEI statement. Though he had assumed DEI was “for all marginalized groups,” once he read the statement, he realized that “the DEI program at Harvard is limited to specific groups and exploits others.” Instead, Mr. Ackman suggested, DEI should cover all minorities, including Jews and Asians.

Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal. Her latest book is When Race Trumps Merit.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images