There have been demands that the three presidents – of Harvard, MIT, and Penn – step down because of their refusal to define calls for genocide of Jews as “harassment” and their insistence that it be put into “context” instead. The president of Penn has already resigned.
But I’m not at all sure that most of those calling for their dismissal understand the magnitude of the problem. It’s not about the presidents; they are merely the visible tip of an iceberg.
And “iceberg” isn’t really a good metaphor, either, because the problems in academia are enormous and have been visible for decades to those with a mind to look and understand. These three women probably weren’t even aware of how abhorrent their weasel words were, because on campus such utterances would be absolutely standard, or even considered not anti-Semitic or anti-Israel enough. After all, if the “context” of which they spoke is the poor beleaguered ever-the-victim Palestinians (or their enabling supporters) calling for genocide on Jews or Israelis, then that would make such calls perfectly okay on many if not most of today’s campuses.
So it’s certainly not just these three universities or just these three presidents. Many many colleges, and most administrators, have to have the same sort of attitudes to have been promoted to the point of getting anywhere near a presidency. Leftism and wokeness is required. It is the campus water in which these big fish – and littler fish – swim.
Take a look and listen:
The magnitude of the problem is way beyond what most people ever suspected. There’s a reason that this author – and others – are asking whether Gen Z is lost:
This lack of education [of Gen Z], made worse by the pandemic, not only makes these young people less capable – it also empowers propagandists of the extremes to twist history for ideological purposes.
Political pluralism has now been all but extinguished on many university campuses. Liberal-arts faculties at elite colleges are overwhelmingly left-leaning. Among professors, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 20 to one. In some fields, like sociology and English, this ratio is more than 40 to one.
So by “lack of education,” the author doesn’t mean lack of attendance at schools and even universities. He means lack of education in actual knowledge and the values of Western civilization.
Which brings us to the Red Cross:
No surprise.
Both the situation in academia and the state of the Red Cross – and so many other institutions – illustrate Sullivan’s first law, which is this: “All organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing.” Robert Conquest stated something similar.
Looking up O’Sullivan, I learned that he made the following observation in 2001:
After all, radical Islamists have three advantages on their side: demography (the populations of Islamic nations are increasing while the West suffers a ‘birth dearth’); rapidly growing Islamic diasporas in the West, fueled by illegal immigration; and official Western policies of multiculturalism (which not only encourage immigrants to retain their original cultural identity but even promote the ‘de-assimilation’ of previously assimilated minorities in the West)…the decline of Christian belief and social influence; and the habit of respecting other cultures as unities while treating the West as a kind of multi-cultural supermarket in which Western civilization is merely one rather dusty shelf. To these trends politicians add appeasement, both diplomatic (of neighboring North Africa) and electoral (of local Muslim constituencies)”
He leaves out what I think is the biggest influence: postmodern leftism, which defines jihadis as put-upon victims of Western oppression, and therefore excuses anything such people do, no matter how vile and barbaric. The left has utterly abandoned any overarching principles such as defense of human rights or the rights of women not to be gang-raped, as long as the perpetrators are groups defined as victims of the West. One might think that Jews have been the quintessential victims over time, but they have been re-defined as white oppressors for the purposes of modern leftist thought. That is not because of anything Israel has ever done, which is nearly always better than what 99% of the countries of the world do and is also better than what any other country under the same sort of attack would do. It is because Israel is a haven for Jews, and Jew-haters have been defining Jews as oppressors – and child-murderers, for example – since long before the Jewish state came into existence.
[NOTE: And yes, the three university presidents are women, and the university has been “feminized.” But far more important is that universities have been almost wholly taken over by the left. The problem will not be solved by male presidents, because just about all possible candidates conform to the same system of values as the three women presidents who testified in Congress.]
