Elite Universities Still Failing To Learn Lessons Of Shameful Response To Anti-Semitic Hate

Floor Speech

"I've spoken recently about the existential choice facing America's most elite universities. In the wake of October 7th, an alarming surge of anti-Semitic hate swirled around the loftiest campuses in the country.

And as we're all painfully aware by now, the responses of university administrators were not exactly profiles in courage -- from the equivocations and weak public statements to the absurd double standard invoked in testimony before Congress.

After months of alumni uproar and pressure from the public, Harvard and Penn appeared to recognize that it was time for new management.

As I've said, universities shopping for Presidents would do well to focus their search on rigorous scholarly integrity, moral clarity, and a rock-solid commitment to the even enforcement of free speech.

Unfortunately, we're still waiting to see any real signs that these universities have actually taken the lessons of the past few months to heart.

Harvard, for its part, rolled out a new "Presidential Task Force on Combatting Anti-Semitism' to much fanfare. It sounds promising -- that is, until you learn that the choice for co-chair of this panel has a record of calling Israel a "regime of apartheid.'

The university has also made no plans to terminate an exchange partnership with a university in the West Bank that proclaimed "glory for Martyrs' in the wake of October 7th and whose students have even been arrested for planning a terrorist attack with weapons supplied by Hamas.

So you'd be forgiven for assuming that cutting overt ties with terrorist-affiliated organizations would be Step One in any serious effort to reform a university.

These responses would be laughable if they didn't have such clear, measurable, dangerous consequences.

Just last month, a poll showed one in five Americans between the ages of 18-29 doubts that the Holocaust happened.

Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us when we marinate young people in post-modern critical theory that "subjectivizes' norms, and endlessly "deconstructs' the wisdom of the ages, and "problematizes' and assails the very notion of objective truth.

The Holocaust is not an alternative fact. It is not simply a narrative to be questioned by a student's "lived experiences.'

And yet twenty percent of the young people in this country doubt whether the most vile and systematic genocide of Jews in the history of the world ever happened.

And the most elite universities vying to shape their minds have now spent months in an embarrassing public struggle to avoid reckoning with their role in a rise in anti-Semitic hate.

If these institutions ever hope to reclaim any mantle of cultural authority they once held, they might want to start with taking the world's oldest form of hate a bit more seriously."

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