Ten years from now, American universities may once again be bastions of vigorous and provocative intellectual pursuit, true tolerance, and robust but respectful (and evenly applied, bipartisan) free speech.
You know — everything they have ceased to be for the last 20 years or so, or at least certainly since Donald Trump became president.
That is probably wishful thinking. But if it does happen, we can look back on the congressional hearings last week as the turning point.
That’s not because the entire country got a chance to actually peek behind the veil of how “leading” institutions such as MIT, Harvard and Penn are being run. It’s not because conservative parents and students finally got everyone else to pay attention to what they have been complaining about for years. And it’s certainly not because of some profound epiphany after deep introspection on the part of the great intellects holed up in their ivory towers.
No, if it happens, it would be for one reason: the activist progressive liberals who dominate higher education finally upset the donors who have been unwittingly empowering their twisted pedagogical experiments on the youth of this nation.
If you stop to think about it, the left had successfully gamed the system for a long time. They had managed to marginalize — and demonize — all the “right” people. And the “right” people are the people who don’t write seven- and eight- and nine-figure checks to university endowments.
No one had managed that duplicity better than my own alma mater, which avoided a congressional grilling last week. Georgetown University's administration could have, in fact, written a textbook on how to turn a respected institution of higher learning into something more closely resembling a marginal trade school for Marxist community organizing.
A few years back, the secularists at this formerly Catholic school nearly ran off campus a club espousing the traditional definition of marriage. The claim was that extolling the merits of marriage between one man and one woman was “hate speech.” The administration dithered in its response — Georgetown is ostensibly a Catholic school, and the charge against the club was very much an assertion that fundamental Church teaching was hate — meekly offering instead to support everyone’s right to “free speech.”
A few years later, however, the administration put the lie to that defense when it ran off a leading professor who dared to question the merits of pre-selecting and pre-announcing the race and sex of a Supreme Court nominee without respect to merit.
But that was fine, you see, because folks who believe in traditional marriage and a colorblind meritocracy on the court stopped giving money to Georgetown long ago. Indeed, the people who write the big checks sat idly by while speech that should have been “free” was twisted to become “hate.”
Georgetown clearly isn’t alone. A recent poll showed that at least one in five Americans between 18 and 29 believe that the Holocaust was a myth. You don’t get that result without broad activist attempts to thwart free debate.
But the raw antisemitism that has been exposed on college campuses since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7 might change that.
When someone calls the alumni office at Penn and lets them know that a check for $100,000,000 isn’t coming, things change. And indeed, things are going to change at Penn, and at Harvard and MIT. They may change at Georgetown and Duke and your local community college as well.
There’s also a chance that more changes than just attitudes toward Jews. Our young people might start to learn what they should have been taught from the start: that deeply-held religious beliefs on marriage, or racial quotas, or any of the dozens of other topics that divide our country right now, are things that many, many people may disagree over — and that we can disagree about such things agreeably.
But they will also be taught that a genocidal slogan such as “From the River to the Sea” is actual hatred.
It is truly, truly sad that an exposure of such widespread and raw hatred for Jews was needed to draw attention to what is happening on the campuses of American universities.
Personally, as a conservative, a Republican, and a southerner, I would be the first to admit what many similarly situated won’t: that racism is very real in this country, and that we need to do more at every level of society to root it out. But it wasn’t until the last few weeks that I honestly, in my worst nightmares, would ever have imagined that antisemitism was as prevalent as it has turned out to be.
Better to have it exposed, in all its brutal ugliness and corrected than to let it keep festering in silence. That is what last week’s hearings, and the actions of some brave, wealthy, liberal-leaning patrons of education may have just accomplished.
Never let anyone tell you that congressional hearings are just political theater. Sometimes they are, but not always.
And never let anyone tell you that people only give money to their colleges to stroke their own egos by seeing their names on the sides of buildings. Sometimes they do, but not always.
Sometimes, these things can be catalysts for tremendous good. Let us hope that last week was such an occasion.
Thank you, Elise Stefanik. Thank you, Marc Rowan. And thank you to everyone else who has used this alarming opportunity to try to get this country headed back in the right direction.
Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina, is a contributor to NewsNation. He served as director of the Office of Management and Budget, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and acting White House chief of staff under President Donald Trump.
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