In the past half-century, America’s great universities – once the crown jewels of Western liberal education – have undergone a quiet but radical transformation. What began as a well-intentioned embrace of cross-cultural exchange and international awareness has, in many institutions, metastasized into something corrosive: a fundamental distortion of mission, curriculum and values that has helped turn elite campuses into ideological hotbeds of anti-American and anti-Israel activism and sentiment.
To be clear, there is a crucial distinction between international understanding, which broadens the mind, and unchecked globalization, which dilutes purpose, flattens values, and undermines the civic mission of the university.
In the mid-20th century – the 1950s and ’60s – foreign undergraduate students at elite schools like Columbia University made up a small, manageable proportion of the student body: roughly 2-3%. These students, often the children of diplomats, scholars, or pro-Western leaders, were typically individuals who respected the values of American democracy and saw their studies here as a privilege.
Today, that number has exploded. At Columbia, the foreign undergraduate student population is now about 19%, and foreign graduate students make up about 39% of the full-time graduate student body. Universities, in pursuit of tuition revenue and global rankings, have actively prioritized foreign enrollment.
This trend might be defensible if it were anchored in a commitment to liberal values and mutual enrichment. But in practice, the influx of foreign students has too often reinforced ideological hostility toward America’s founding ideals – and toward Israel and the Jewish people. Thus, it’s no accident that the universities with the most radical anti-Israel protests – in which bloodthirsty slogans in support of Hamas are commonplace – are also among those with the largest foreign student enrollments.
Increased enrollment of foreign students has been accompanied by increased hiring of foreign faculty. Consider the case of Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani, father of Zohran Mamdani, the New York City Assemblyman, mayoral candidate and Democratic Socialists of America member who has made anti-Israel activism a political calling card. Mamdani père is no fringe figure. He is a longtime tenured professor at Columbia and holds the prestigious Herbert Lehman Chair in Government – named for New York’s first Jewish governor and later U.S. senator, who was a staunch supporter of Israel and a lifelong champion of liberal democracy.
Which is ironic, to say the least, given Professor Mamdani’s view of Israel as an apartheid state and support for the anti-Israel BDS movement and his portrayal of the U.S. as the fountainhead of genocidal evil. At a 2022 Asia Society panel promoting one of his many books, Professor Mamdani claimed that Adolf Hitler took inspiration for the Holocaust from Abraham Lincoln, declared there is “no difference between nationalism and colonialism,” and argued that the Allied powers in World War II shared the same goals as the Nazis. He called America the “genesis of what we call settler-colonialism.”
He’s also asserted that suicide bombers should be seen not as terrorists or barbarians but “first and foremost, as a category of soldier” – a view he defended in his 2004 book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror.
That such views emanate not from marginal provocateurs but from senior faculty – in this case, a professor ensconced in a chair named for an American Jewish statesman – is a grotesque subversion of the university’s founding ideals and a betrayal of its civic and moral responsibilities.
This didn’t happen overnight. For decades, the humanities and social sciences at many elite institutions have deliberately dismantled the intellectual foundations of American civic education. There was a time when courses in Western Civilization, America’s funding principles and the core values of democracy were seen as essential training for leadership. That time is gone.
Columbia’s famed “Western Civ” course, for instance, officially called Contemporary Civilization, is still a two-semester core curriculum requirement, along with a year-long course on masterpieces of Western literature. However, in the wake of student protests against “Eurocentrism” and books written by “dead white men,” the Core now includes non-Western, race-and-identity-obsessed authors and works on anti-colonialism, gender, and “climate justice,” and students must complete two “Global Core” courses focused on cultures outside the U.S. and Europe.
What replaced the Western canon was not international understanding but global grievance. And what replaced liberal patriotism was radical post-nationalism. In this environment, Jewish identity is recast as privilege, Zionism as racism, and Israel as a foreign occupier – regardless of history, law, or fact. Jewish students who speak up are often marginalized or harassed, while faculty and administrators turn a blind eye – or worse, cheer the hostility on.
Universities now behave less like civic institutions and more like global conglomerates, competing for revenue, prestige and political leverage. But on another level, they more closely resemble party schools – not in the conventional sense of partying, but in the tradition of one-party states – where the university’s mission is to indoctrinate students in the ideological party line.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracies enforce orthodoxy instead of ensuring fairness. And students – foreign and domestic – are taught to disdain the very freedoms that made their education possible.
This isn’t internationalism. It’s ideological globalism: rootless, resentful and dangerously unmoored from truth.
Nor is this a question of academic freedom; it’s a matter of national security and institutional accountability. Tax-exempt universities that receive billions in federal funding should not be immune from scrutiny when they hire foreign faculty who openly espouse anti-American, anti-democratic, extremist views. Congress has a duty to investigate how these appointments are made, who is funding them and what impact they have on the ideological climate of higher education. At stake is not just the integrity of our universities, but the resilience of the civic values they are meant to preserve.
The American university should once again serve the American people – including its Jewish community. It should uphold freedom of thought, not ideological fashion; serious scholarship, not political propaganda; and a sense of national purpose, not the emptiness of nihilism.
Otherwise, we risk losing not only our universities – but the very values they once helped define and defend.
