The loss of viewpoint diversity in higher education has played a major role
Antisemitism on campus is intimately tied to the loss of viewpoint diversity which has occurred in the US, Britain and other parts of the Anglosphere since the mid-1960s.
Congressional hearings on antisemitism at elite US universities revealed that the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania were unwilling to answer in the affirmative to the question: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment?” As it happens, I agree with the Washington Post’s Jason Willick, who remarked that these leaders were correct, under First Amendment jurisprudence, to reject the idea that talk of genocide should automatically lead to punishment. The problem, of course, is that these colleges are extremely hypocritical, clamping down on any speech which might offend totemic minorities (BIPOC, LGBTQ) while clinging to a First Amendment justification for tolerating antisemitism.
Financier and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman has admitted he was unaware of the scale of the radical takeover at top universities until antisemitic incidents made headlines. In an open letter, he drew attention to Harvard’s persistent bottom-ranking performance on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s free speech rankings — a stark contrast to their free speech rationale for permitting students to disrupt and intimidate Jewish students on campus. He traces this to a generalised hostility to whiteness and sympathy for nonwhite — especially black and indigenous — voices. Issues such as Israel-Palestine have come to be processed through this absolutist racial lens in which Jews are assigned the role of white oppressor and Palestinians that of colonised people of colour.
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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.
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