Universities play a pivotal role in human development. They generate knowledge that leads to the creation of new technologies and modes of organisation, which are then used by companies to create value and jobs. When universities misconstrue their mission, innovation lags behind, jobs become obsolete, and societies lose out to other countries that become more innovative and productive.
An activist university is a legitimate choice, but it is not the most effective way of fostering opportunities for citizens. The case of Latin America speaks volumes in this regard.
The current war between Israel and Hamas is causing death and devastation in Gaza, but it is also taking a toll on some of the world's most prestigious universities.
This war has caused real hardship on both peoples involved (as well as huge amounts of cynical fake suffering and denialism) and it is our hope that it will conclude as soon as possible, bringing peace and stability to the people of Israel and Gaza.
However, there is another parallel war that uses the Gaza conflict as a platform for its own objectives. The other war is an assault on democracy, freedom of thought, women's rights and selected minorities, including Jews. Within these groups, anti-Semitism is not a bug, it is an attribute. It is, in fact, one of their defining characteristics.
On some of America's most exclusive campuses, these groups of protesters set up illegal encampments, disrupted classes and exams with megaphones, flooded social media with anti-Semitic slurs, and blocked Jewish students from entering classrooms. Administrators, boards and many faculty members stood by indifferently. In some cases, university buildings were spontaneously defended by porters and cleaners. It was only when the US Congress and graduates reacted that administrators stepped in and took some action.
The media's portrayal is misleading. It would appear that many of them have entered a state of “suspension of disbelief” when reporting on the war in Gaza. They repeat the casualty figures provided by Hamas without considering the credibility of the source, without corroborating the figures with independent sources, without consulting experts or comparing them with other similar conflicts, i.e. without applying the basic rules of journalism. It is as though Pablo Escobar had become the main source of information on drug trafficking and all the media published his reports as the whole truth.
It is incomprehensible that human rights groups support Hamas, which has kidnapped women, children and the elderly, murdered and tortured many of them, and engaged sexual abuse systematically. The moral inconsistency is mind boggling. One explanation is that many of these people are ignorant. They have never visited Gaza. They do not speak or read Arabic, nor do they know the geography or history of the area and the different peoples who live there. Their shouts and chants reflect their desire to be fashionable rather than any genuine solidarity with people they know nothing about.
At their core, many of these protesters are racists, even if they do not acknowledge it, and I am not referring to overt anti-Semitism but to deeper feelings. Years of post-modern education have led them to relegate the individual and interpret everything in terms of racial categories (within a toxic framework of decolonization narratives and intersectionality of victimhood).
When the victims and perpetrators of a conflict are white (as in Ukraine), there is no need to demonstrate or set up encampments. When the victims are non-white, but the perpetrators are also non-white (as in Syria, Iraq, Tibet, Kurdistan, Darfur, Myanmar or Nagorno-Karabakh), it does not spark their outrage either. They only become indignant when the perpetrators are (or appear to be) Westerners and the victims are not. This paradigm, in which race encompasses all human experience, can explain why Syria's dictator murdered 500,000 Arabs without raising an outcry at Harvard or Columbia. These people don't know Israel and they don't know that more than half of its population comes from Arab countries. In their cartoon world, the war in Gaza is a colonial vestige where a white army is fighting a native population.
This is not a very popular or widespread movement. According to a survey by Generation Lab, less than 8% of university students have taken part in protests. Camps were set up in less than 2% of America's more than 5,000 universities. This movement bears no resemblance to the anti-Vietnam War protests or Martin Luther King´s marches; it is more akin to the Hitler Youth (from whom they copied the human chains to prevent Jews from entering classrooms) or the Ku Klux Klan when it tried to prevent African Americans from entering classrooms in the 1960s. The elites who distil their hatred of Israel fail to understand how detached they are from the rest of society. The vast majority of American society opposes Hamas (in the May 2024 Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, more than 80% said they supported Israel).
This wave of radicalised minorities from the world's elite universities proves once again that there is no correlation between academic degrees and moral decency. This single-minded state of absolute certainty is actually the antithesis of university education, which should encourage the exchange of ideas, dialogue between different opinions, and a willingness to follow the evidence in the pursuit of truth. Too many universities have chosen the opposite path by nurturing cultural hegemony and silencing the voices of dissent.