Premier university campuses in the United States of America such as the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are under siege. The siege has not been affected by revolutionary students protesting along the lines of the anti-Vietnam war protests of the 1960s. It is the Wall Street bankers, CEOs, and the Republican-dominated Congress that are hacking voices of dissent to pieces.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza witnessed protests on many American campuses. Conscientious students raised slogans along with their Palestinian-Arab counterparts against the killing of innocent civilians. The American state apparatus, as usual, conflated the protests with anti-Semitism. The heads of these universities were summoned before a Congressional committee. The latter, consisting chiefly of Republicans, pulled no punches in asking lacerating questions.
One of the representatives asked the head of Harvard University, “Why is it that only one per cent of the Harvard faculty members voted for Donald Trump whilst he polled almost fifty per cent of the popular votes in the Presidential elections?” The lack of a favourable electoral fervour for Trump among the Harvard faculty members was deemed as a marker of a ‘lack of diversity’ on campus! Questions were also posed regarding the percentage of conservative professors on university campuses.
Since the heads did not have the data on conservative faculty members, Congressman Joe Wilson called it a case of a “shameful revelation of there being no diversity and inclusion of intellectual thought as a result of which anti-Semitism is rife on campuses.” It is pertinent to draw attention to research conducted by Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden on anti-Semitism among young American adults.
From a sample set of 3,500, Hersh and Royden concluded that “anti-Semitic attitudes are rare on the left but common on the right, particularly among young adults on the right.” Historically speaking, Edmund Burke, touted as the father of modern Conservative thought, openly harboured an antisemitic worldview. During the French Revolution, the threat of Jacobinism crossing the English Channel loomed large.
Burke’s riposte to the event Reflections of the Revolution in France which has served as a Bible of conservatism, was laced with anti-Semitic rants. In one place, Burke, whilst rebuking the French, wrote, ‘‘Every person in your country, in a situation to be actuated by a principle of honour, is disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life except in a mortified and humiliated indignation… The next generation of the nobility will resemble the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers usurers, and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their masters.’’
The history of America’s Gilded Age is also full of antiSemitism. Sven Beckert in his book The Moneyed Metropolis has noted that when New York was raking in dollars, the rogue bourgeoisie of the city engaged in rampant anti-Semitism. Beckert writes, ‘‘Elite anti-Semitism spread in the 1880s and especially in the 1890s for a number of reasons. For one, economic competition, especially in the world of investment banking, gave Protestants a strong incentive to isolate their Jewish competitors from some of the social networks that were the lifeblood of their particular line of business.
Moreover, the influx of thousands of unskilled workers from the ghettos of Eastern Europe to New York in the late nineteenth century helped to link the bourgeois fear of workers to the fear of Jews, especially because Jewish workers showed an exceptional tendency to embrace trade unions and socialism.’’ With all this, one is sure that Congresspersons would not be comfortable teaching the real history of anti-Semitism in the US and how bourgeois conservative philosophy had openly embraced it in the past.
The Inquisition was also used to attack what is pithily and lugubriously labelled by Conservatives as ‘liberal wokism.’ In a radio interview, Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, who has been leading a right-wing crackdown on liberal education and pioneered the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law wherein public-school teachers are not allowed to instruct on sexual orientation or gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade, said that American universities have become the hotbeds of ‘anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism’. ‘
DeSantis’s rancorous rant was nothing but an uncanny echo of Douglas Altabef’s (leader of Im Tirtzu, Israel’s largest grassroots Zionist organization) March 2021 essay in The Jerusalem Post wherein he called to stop ‘woke winds at Israel’s borders’. The rich have also joined the bandwagon. Since the war started, it was Marc Rowan, Apollo’s CEO, who commands a fortune of $6 billion, who declared that he was closing the chequebook for the University of Pennsylvania. His action was not motivated by the alleged calls for a ‘Jewish genocide’ but by a Palestinian literary festival in October held at the university which he deemed to be ‘hate-filled’.
Soon other billionaires such as Ross Stevens, Elon Musk, Leslie Wexner and Bill Ackerman joined the bandwagon. Since the war started, three Palestinian students have been shot in Vermont and Jewish students claim to be threatened on campuses. In late October, Reuters reported that anti-Semitic incidents had risen by 400 per cent in the US. The heads of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard have been forced to resign.
The conservative Republicans have had their pound of flesh. Republican Party Congresswoman Elise Stefanik posted on her X handle ‘two down’. The tone of her post seemed as if she was flying a combat aircraft and dropping missiles on her enemies. One is sure that sooner or later when the MIT head resigns, Stefanik will be posting ‘All down, yeah…mission accomplished.’
The message that emanates from this academic inquisition is that criticism has its limits. The ideal university is a place where one can engage in a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’. And it is this latter bit that academicians and politicians in America have failed to safeguard. For me, it is no surprise. The forces of Hindutva had once said this for the stellar historian Romila Thapar: ‘‘The stupid lady should be stripped of her nationality. Kick her out.
The kick should be of such force that she remains dead on the ground.’’ Three cheers for academic freedom, lest we say, ‘long live academic freedom’.
(The writer is PhD Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA and author of the book, Against the Current)