President Trump’s efforts to address antisemitism on our higher education campuses using suspensions of research grants as leverage has drawn widespread attention. And rightly so. He has moved many schools to review and strengthen their policies for protecting the rights of Jewish students by getting them to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to settle claims of indifference to antisemitism by conditioning the resumption of the grants on the remedial action.
But another, even more complicated campus problem requires his attention as well. A research article the other day in the Wall Street Journal by two professors – one of government and the other of philosophy – confirms what President Trump and many of us have been intuitively claiming for years. It points to a massive data base that shows college courses dealing with the Middle East lean sharply left.
According to the writers, “college teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.”
They say their study and conclusions are drawn on something called the Open Syllabus Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of more than 27 million syllabi appearing on the web. They used it to see how contentious subjects like racial bias in the criminal justice system and the Israel-Palestinian conflict are taught “with an eye to whether professors expose students to the broad scholarly controversy around these issues.” And their conclusion was, “We found they usually don’t.”
They went on to say that they also looked at the most assigned texts that focus on the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and found that the most commonly assigned works were sharply critical of Israel. Those that show sympathy for Zionism are less popular.
They also note that in the majority of cases, books highly critical of Israel were stand-alones and not assigned together with books favorable towards Israel. Alarmingly, they refer to “the minority of professors who teach …not only the dominant texts but also work that is critical of them “
It is frightening to see that this sort of thing is embedded in our higher education. It is not hyperbole to suggest that our students – our future leaders – are in the thrall of dedicated ideologues who are proselytizing in the guise of educating.
So, it is no wonder that antisemitism is reaching epic proportions. Yet given our traditions of free speech and intellectual freedom it is difficult to envision how it can be dealt with.
