What Does Higher Ed Stand For?

Deborah Lipstadt writes:

My decision to withdraw my name from consideration for a teaching post at Columbia is based on three calculations.

First, I am not convinced that the university is serious about taking the necessary and difficult measures that would create an atmosphere that allows for true inquiry.

Second, I fear that my presence would be used as a sop to convince the outside world that “Yes, we in the Columbia/Barnard orbit are fighting antisemitism. We even brought in the former Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.” I will not be used to provide cover for a completely unacceptable situation.

Third, I am not sure that I would be safe or even able to teach without being harassed. I do not flinch in the face of threats. But this is not a healthy or acceptable learning environment.

This is an article that has been making the rounds over the last few days and no wonder: it is a passionate diatribe against Columbia/Barnard’s tolerance of intolerance regarding free inquiry and antisemitism.

So I’ll make a couple of points.

First, Deborah, where have you been for the past 20 years?

The demons of intolerance and authoritarianism have long since sacked the citadels of higher education, it was just directed at people Lipstadt may not have found sympathetic. Think of how Riley Gaines was treated on her campus tour regarding transgender-identifying-men in women’s sports. What about Charles Murray when he tries to speak on campuses? Then there is the situation of Amy Wax at Penn. Take a look at the FIRE rankings regarding free speech in higher education. Higher education has been a leftist monoculture for decades, where those who deviate from the party line learn to keep their heads down.

Welcome to the party, Deborah.

Second, in case you think she has been red-pilled, she has this to say:

We are at a crisis point. Unless this situation is addressed forcefully and unequivocally, one of America’s great institutions, its system of higher education, could well collapse. There are many in this country—including those in significant positions of power—who would delight in seeing that happen. The failure to stand up to disrupters who are preventing other students from learning gives the opponents of higher education the very tools they need.

I’m going to go out on a limb here to suggest that “those in significant positions of power” means the Trump administration.

Higher education has already sacrificed its moral authority by crushing free inquiry, by racist admissions practices, and by the ideological capture of many its departments by an explicitly anti-western creed. It has also already bent a knee to federal power when the Obama administration demanded that campuses restrict the campus due-process rights of those accused of sexual assault. In short, higher education likes to market itself as a magical oasis of inquiry and wonder, but it really has already sold its soul to those who wield power. Perhaps if Lipstadt had done a title search she would have understood.

The past few years have been a debacle for higher education. The antisemitism on campuses. Plagiarism scandals. The most damaging was the Biden student debt forgiveness brouhaha totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, because that 1) forced all Americans to pay off the debts of the privileged and 2) showed that higher education is a bad personal investment.

The federal government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on higher education just over the last few years. For what? A repressive ideological, mostly anti-American monoculture that serves as a debt trap for students. For higher education, the calls of chaos are coming from inside the house.

What to do about that is a topic for another time.

There’s another article today in the New Yorker by Nathan Heller:

“There is a nearly impossible choice being put to university leaders at this point,” Andrew Crespo, a professor at Harvard Law School, told me. “On the one hand, you have outside funders, including the federal government, who have the ability to threaten the university’s ability to operate. On the other, you have the mission of the institution.” Caught in the middle is the influence of universities on fields as disparate as medicine and art. “This is not about any one institution,” Crespo said. “It’s about higher education in the United States, and whether it is going to survive and thrive or fade away.”

I visited Harvard this past autumn, during a period when two dozen professors were barred from entering the main library on campus—a punishment meant to show that the university penalized all unsanctioned speech comparably. Earlier that year, pro-Palestinian student activists had undertaken a “study-in” there: wearing kaffiyeh scarves, they had studied together silently with messages such as “Israel Bombs, Harvard Pays” (a call for divestment) taped to their open laptops.

You catch the gist. Crespo thinks that outside funders, whether the feds with taxpayer money or donors, should just give their money and shut up. The problem is that over the past few years the antisemitism and plagiarism scandals have burned up that last bit of trust that makes such “no questions asked” funding possible. Ask Bill Ackman.

Heller finds it noteworthy that the kaffiyeh-clad protesters “studied together silently” in the library. I think the popular perception, both on-campus and off, is that the kaffiyeh is a symbol of antisemitism. What should a Jewish student, Israeli or not, think when passing such protesters who are quite openly stating that they want her dead?

The article spends a lot of time dealing with speech, petty rules by the Harvard administration that is trying to walk the fine line between allowing speech and trying to balance various constituencies. However, this just misses the point, which is that speech and expression should be properly aligned with the mission of higher education.

Heller seems to think it’s okay for protesters to wear some provocative things like the kaffiyeh, but would he feel the same about a swastika? How about the badge of the Ukrainian Azov Brigade, the unit heroically fighting the Russian invader, which resembles Nazi runes? What about somebody wearing a pro-AfD or Geert Wilders t-shirt or something that says “Protect the Unborn”? Is what you can wear merely dependent on the power relations on campus?

If Heller and campus administrators have to think about these examples, then they can only do so in reference to some external standard. Why can a student wear or display one thing but not another? It seems that the standard they are using is not some lofty appeal to higher ideals, but rather an expedient calculation of what standard will allow the campus to function. This means “freedom of speech” (or the odious “freedom of expression”) is susceptible not to some natural, moral order but rather to who holds the power. If that is the case then why shouldn’t the holders of the power of the purse get their say?

As to “freedom of expression”, Lipstadt grasps the main points which are that it is different from freedom of speech and that there are limitations to freedom of expression on a college campus. Occupying buildings, disrupting classes, or setting up encampments are wrong in general, and have no place in an institution of higher education, no matter what the cause.

A university student should be capable of articulating their position in a way that goes beyond empty slogans on laptops and radical scarves. If they are unable to make a reasoned argument, then why do they have a claim on external funds? What societal purpose do they serve?

The problem, one that Heller graciously outlines, is that by 2025 Harvard is no longer able to articulate a moral vision of the role of higher education in modern American life. To denounce donors for wanting a say in how the money is spent as something antithetical to the mission of the university ignores the evidence that higher education has long made its mission subject to practical campus power.

What Lipstadt ignores in her description of the craven administration at Columbia/Barnard is that it was the faculty in their support of the pro-Hamas demonstrators who played a key role in the affair. We can talk about faculty governance or the need to separate academic and administrative affairs , but that only works if the faculty itself is beholden to a higher moral code of education regarding free inquiry and academic integrity, as opposed to being the plaything of the shifting currents of power.

There is a larger lesson here for society at large, which is the practical limitations to the mantra of “diversity.” The more identities that you have without a tie to a common code, something that many of our intellectual betters dismiss as ”supremacy” or “dominant ideology”, the more your members isolate from one another and your community dissipates. There has to be a common basis for people to live and work together

The inevitable result of “diversity”, and of the chipping away at a common identity and community, is not so much a Hobbesian state of nature as a Marxist one in which those who rule claim to do so merely by holding power; might makes right.

It’s time for us perhaps not to have a purge of higher education, that’s how the Left operates, but perhaps a colonic.