Higher education may have finally crossed the line.
With the horrific massacre, rapes and infant murders and kidnappings Hamas proudly perpetrated in Israel, much of the American academic community, especially at elite universities, sided with . . . Hamas.
It is not playing well.
Harvard has been the most talked-about example, because, well, it’s Harvard.
Dozens of Harvard student groups released a remarkably callous statement saying Israel’s government is “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ violence.
And Harvard’s President Claudine Gay released an initial statement so ham-handed that she spent the rest of the week trying to row it back.
The Harvard students have since deleted their statement, though it still lives on the Internet, of course.
They deleted it because many major firms announced they won’t hire anyone on the list. Some have even asked for membership lists of the student organizations involved so they can make sure not to hire any students who belong.
A group called Accuracy in Media has been sending billboard trucks around Harvard Square naming the students involved, which some have called “doxing,” though publicly naming the public authors of a public statement hardly seems to rise to that level.
Winston & Strawn, a top law firm where Democratic Vice President Walter Mondale was once a partner, rescinded a job offer for an NYU law student who issued a pro-Hamas proclamation.
This was followed by Harvard’s Kennedy School losing billionaire philanthropist Idan Ofer and his wife Batia from its board.
“Unfortunately, our faith in the University’s leadership has been broken and we cannot in good faith continue to support Harvard and its committees,” said the couple, worth $20 billion.
You have to be a very big donor to be on Harvard’s board; to have two seats you have to be bigger still.
Billionaire alumnus Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund founder, slammed Harvard too and was joined by a number of his fellow CEOs.
The message: Harvard is no longer morally worthy of our money, and we don’t want to hire its students.
The major law firms, hedge funds and Wall Street houses have had enough of woke students.
Business Insider reports one hedge-fund founder trashes applicants as a “bad cultural fit” when he encounters résumés listing woke activities.
And it’s not just Harvard: Ackman also called out another Ivy League institution, the University of Pennsylvania.
And at the University of Michigan, a business professor smirkingly posed for photos as he tore down posters with names and photos of people Hamas took hostage, while a Cornell diversity and inclusion officer came under fire for social-media posts celebrating the Hamas attack as “resistance.”
Similar events took place at the University of Virginia, Stanford, George Washington University, Swarthmore and a host of other elite schools.
Sen. Marco Rubio summed up the objections: “For decades cowardly college administrators have enabled our universities to become nests of Anti-American/Anti-Western activism. This week student groups at our most ‘elite’ universities signed their names to proclamations siding with savages who murdered & mutilated babies and raped & desecrated the bodies of dead women. And across America college students” with “federal taxpayer subsidized” loans “celebrated the murder of Jews.”
Famed historian Victor Davis Hanson observed: “Americans knew higher education practiced racist admission policies. It has long promoted racially segregated dorms and graduations. And de facto it has destroyed the First Amendment. But the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.”
It’s almost amusing to see the shocked reaction of elite university students and administrators to the notion that people might object to their statements.
In their insular worlds, endorsing murder, rape and torture isn’t objectionable so long as the perpetrators are deemed “oppressed.” It turns out others disagree.
There may be a sea change in attitudes.
We’ve long known higher education breeds a lot of silly — and sometimes dangerous — ideas.
We know its admissions policies are racist, especially against Asians.
(“The left hates Asians,” Elon Musk tweeted in response to a story about an Asian applicant with near-perfect scores who was rejected by all the top schools to which he applied.)
But this is too much.
In much the same way George Floyd’s death sparked a nationwide movement to change policing, the moral blindness of our alleged betters in elite universities is finally producing meaningful blowback and calls for fundamental change.
That’s good. It’s time — past time — to change this increasingly toxic industry.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.