Testimony Before the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Director of Constitutional Studies Ilya Shapiro testified in a hearing on “Discrimination Against Jews on College and University Campuses Since Oct. 7, 2023.”

Thank you for inviting me to discuss these important issues. I think we all recognize that higher education is in crisis, one thrust into the national discourse after October 7, 2023. It’s amazing that the heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley Law, wrote soon after Hamas’s attack on Israel that, as a 70-year-old Jewish man, “never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.” Some of us were less surprised, given the anti-Israel, anti-American, and generally anti-Western ideology that’s taken root in higher education.

As Bill Ackman put it in a revelatory essay posted the same day Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues. It’s a leading indicator of underlying pathologies, which here means everything from cancel culture to indoctrination, intellectual corruption to moral decay. We’ve seen a subversion of the core mission of universities to seek truth and knowledge, and of classical liberal values like free speech, due process, and equality under the law. It’s been a shift from education to activism.

The root cause of all of this is a noxious postmodern ideology that contends that truth is subjective and must be viewed through lenses of race, gender, and other identity categories, according to some privilege hierarchy. Your rights and freedoms depend on whether you’re part of a class deemed oppressor or oppressed. Jews are coded as oppressors and, once that move is made, the same campuses that can detect microaggressions invisible to the naked eye suddenly become blind to students being harassed, blocked, spat on, or told that their people had it coming.

Click here to read the full testimony.

______________________

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.