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As a college student in the 1960s, I was assigned the essay topic “Who is the Contemporary American Hero?”

In my essay I explained that since I couldn’t say whom society called a hero, I would describe my hero. I outlined an acquaintance of my parents who lost a job because he had stood up against immoral and unethical behavior demanded by his employer.

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Since I hadn’t exactly answered the essay question, I assumed I’d get a less-than-stellar grade. I didn’t expect what happened: the teacher spent every moment of the next one-and-a-half hour class session ripping my essay, and me personally, to intellectual, moral, and ethical shreds in an amazing exhibit of intellectual corruption and bullying. (I dropped the class.)

Fifty years later, I stand by that essay and affirm the moral bankruptcy of American academia that was first demonstrated to me by that professor.

Israel is the whipping boy of the academic class. The BDS movement grows stronger on college and university campuses every year. Attacks on Jewish college students increase. Where are the complaints from the Jews within the university community?

That Jewish faculty members on college campuses are mostly liberal and secular comes as no surprise; those are major characteristics of the university, after all. Do they believe the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic canards that flow through the universities like water? Or are they too weak to stand up to them?

A young acquaintance obtained a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a field that was influenced by Noam Chomsky. Although she began graduate school with strong pro-Israel leanings and disdain for Chomsky’s worldview, I watched as her need for professional success warped her into a Chomsky political look-alike.

During the bus bombings in Israel in the late 1990s, I asked a professor of the Holocaust why I never read anything from Holocaust professors comparing Nazi propaganda and the start of the Holocaust with the anti-Israel propaganda we were reading then. Her response: “That’s not my area of expertise.”

Whistle blowing is not a popular activity. Reporting a coworker for theft, or going above a boss to report unethical behavior, can have negative repercussions on a person’s career. Despite that, people in the private sector, with no tenure or other job protections, make moral judgments with great regularity. Many change jobs because they can’t buy into certain corporate behaviors. Others lose their jobs when they speak out.

In the private sector, paying a professional price for one’s beliefs and behaviors is expected. Shallow people don’t do it; truly successful ones – the people other people respect – do it when it is necessary.

Often, what happens once one person speaks out is that others start to speak as well. We saw this with the long list of women who reported sexual misconduct against them by former president Bill Clinton after the first woman spoke out.

Sheep are afraid to start anything, but once someone else begins they gain the courage to add their voices. When sheep see something that looks wrong but those who should speak up don’t, the sheep no longer trust their own judgment. They often abandon their opinions and accept the other side: after all, the people who are in a position to know have said nothing, so there must be nothing to say.

It’s easy to rationalize keeping one’s mouth shut: “It’s not my area of expertise,” “I like her personally and don’t want to make waves,” “I need the money,” etc.

In the 1968 movie “Counterpoint,” in which a USO orchestra is captured by the Nazis, a lovely female musician believes she will be saved if she becomes intimate with the Nazi commander. She debases herself and earns the scorn of her peers – and dies anyway. Kissing snakes doesn’t protect from snakebite.

Standing up against evil is not anyone’s area of expertise. It is not an activity to which most people aspire. But at some point, the best of us realize that whether it’s our area of expertise or not, we have to do what is right.

So, what about Jewish university professors?

For thirty or forty years, those who might have prevented the landslide against Israel have kept their wimpy little mouths closed. They’ve worried about their 403-Bs, their grant funding, their schedules, and their professional reputations. They’ve disdained the intelligence and morality of their coworkers, assuming the silence of others means they’ve bought into the anti-Israel, anti-Semitic rhetoric. They’ve hoped to blend into the woodwork.

But Hillel taught (Pirkei Avos 2:6), “In a place where there are no men, endeavor to be a man.”

Even when we might be criticized. Even when we might lose our professional reputations. Even when we might lose our jobs. The price may be high but the reward – self-respect – is far higher.

Because the alternative, as the beautiful musician in “Counterpoint” discovered, is to be fully aware of your self-debasement as you are destroyed by the very force to which you prostituted yourself.

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Hanna Geshelin has spent most of her career as a writer and editor.