The term “ Ivy League ” traditionally conjured a distinctive set of characteristics. One thought of excellence, brilliance, prestige, and tradition. The particular schools making up the Ivies were considered the best schools to attend, establishing a near-guaranteed path to success on campus and in a future career.
Near in reputation was another set of schools, such as the University of Chicago or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which considered themselves to reside at the mountaintop of American, even world university education. In such environs, the best minds cultivated the best thinking for the good of oneself and for the good of fellow human beings.
WASHINGTON WIZARDS AND CAPITALS ANNOUNCE PLANS TO DITCH DC AND MOVE TO VIRGINIA
The recent disastrous congressional hearing that featured three of these top schools’ presidents has elicited quite different responses as a result of these past assumptions. The heads of Harvard and Penn, joined by the president of MIT, testified last week before a House committee about antisemitism on college campuses. These three women refused to fully and forcefully condemn antisemitic speech and demonstrations taking place at schools across the country in the wake of the vicious Hamas attacks on Israel in October.
Their responses have caused a firestorm of controversy, already resulting in massive financial losses from donors and the resignation of Penn’s president, Liz Magill. Calls for the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, continue this week, with other repercussions for the schools evolving each day.
Sadly, what we heard from these hearings only confirms what those paying attention already knew. These campuses have incubated extreme progressive views for decades. The project of the New Left, going back to the 1960s, was to make colleges a place to indoctrinate along these ideological lines. These campuses have become alternative worlds, cocooned from reality, and capable of the kind of extreme words and deeds that accompany such disconnect.
This cultural Marxism running rampant in places such as Harvard and Penn has for some time seen Israel as an oppressor. They have spent more time condemning that country’s self-defense measures than calling out terrorist attacks from Hamas that intentionally targeted women and children.
The three presidents claimed to be carefully protecting free speech, discussion, and inquiry on their campuses. But all who have paid any attention to these and similar campuses over the past decade know that claim to be false. Speech is violence if it expresses disagreement with progressive tropes or is seen as not affirming certain groups. Yet, here, actual calls to wipe Israel off the map (see the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”) now must be considered in context before being judged and must receive the benefit of the doubt so as not to disturb free and open discourse.
The hypocrisy here is rank. But hypocrisy is not really the worst of it. Hypocrisy in itself merely makes the doer look unprincipled and unserious both morally and intellectually. But in having these double standards, the presidents of these elite schools communicate a pernicious view about fellow human beings. By their reasoning last week, some persons deserve more respect and deference than others in their words, actions, and even their worries about their physical safety.
These institutions take pride in claiming the side of the oppressed. Here, they fail at their own game. They fail in a way demeaning to young men and women on their campuses whom they should be respecting, teaching, and protecting. One can protect free inquiry without caving to the loudest mob. Good schools did, and still do, know the difference.
The fallout from this hearing should continue and should be hard. How else can we expect to jolt these institutions back into reality? How else might those decent people still funding such institutions see the damage they are unintentionally doing? We need a return at these schools to their roots as conservers and purveyors of intellectual and moral virtue. And if they won’t so return — and they likely won’t — we must build anew among other colleges who commit to a better, truer, older form of educating human beings and citizens.
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Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
Last week again exposed the rot at elite universities
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14.12.2023
The term “ Ivy League ” traditionally conjured a distinctive set of characteristics. One thought of excellence, brilliance, prestige, and tradition. The particular schools making up the Ivies were considered the best schools to attend, establishing a near-guaranteed path to success on campus and in a future career.
Near in reputation was another set of schools, such as the University of Chicago or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which considered themselves to reside at the mountaintop of American, even world university education. In such environs, the best minds cultivated the best thinking for the good of oneself and for the good of fellow human beings.
WASHINGTON WIZARDS AND CAPITALS ANNOUNCE PLANS TO DITCH DC AND MOVE TO VIRGINIA
The recent disastrous congressional hearing that featured three of these top schools’ presidents has elicited quite different responses as a result of these past assumptions. The heads of Harvard and Penn, joined by the president of MIT, testified last week before a House committee about antisemitism on college campuses. These........
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