In an article published by the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity last week, history undergraduate Samuel Rubinstein agreed with the university’s Emeritus Professor of Mediterranean History David Abulafia that the Twitter tirades of Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of Postcolonial Studies in the University's Faculty of English, were “a disgrace”.
Gopal’s remarks have included claims that “White lives don’t matter”, comparing the chair of the government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities with Joseph Goebbels, and a flurry of unsavoury remarks about Hindus.
She swiftly took to Twitter to bash Rubinstein’s piece as a “hatchet job” that used ”beloved white supremacist tropes” – as well as complaining that the newspaper was compromised by a “conflict of interest” as its writers had “vociferously lobbied for” introducing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of antisemitism on campus.
But unfair as her remarks are, they are entirely unsurprising for modern academia. Her approach is not merely a symptom of so-called “wokery” but a consistent feature of the intellectual tendency toward utopianism throughout the centuries, which is so frequently accompanied by an unwillingness to confront the reality of its own brutality.
It is notable how so many academics today who see themselves as ‘enlightened’ so frequently crumble into the arms of philosophies that prop up the worst forms of irrationality.
The late Harvard scholar Paul Hollander, who fled communist tyranny following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, concluded that this was down to cloistered academic research leading intellectuals toward a toxic cocktail of ruthless utopianism and a false idea of human behaviour – combined with the frustration that an academic career did not provide the opportunities for economic mobility offered by other more professions.
This was certainly true historically. The Enlightenment, for instance, contributed to new and distinct forms of antisemitism. The works of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau - frequently fetishised by progressive policy-makers - suggested that “reason”, translated into a "general will", could forge a Republic justified in purging those judged to reject its principles.
Although this equally sought to suppress Christian fervour, Jewish traditions were often seen as still more pernicious and irrational, and thus subject to even more vitriol. The militant “Reason” of these thinkers facilitated the development of Marxist materialism and its critique of capitalism. Despite Marxism's international and non-denominational character, often attracting Jews frustrated by their experience of discrimination, it was frequently intolerant toward Jews, who were an easy target for Marxists’ hatred of capitalism, tradition, and community.
The nineteenth century saw a backlash against what many perceived as the Enlightenment’s over-emphasis on reason, in which romanticised notions of violence and nationhood suggested that any element which undermined these mythical national visions must be eradicated, with Jews often providing an obvious target. Later, paired with the quasi-religious faith vested in Darwinism, the idea of a supreme Aryan race versus inferior groups was fine-tuned.
Just as scores of Nazi-era intellectuals contributed to the doctrinal justifications for the Holocaust, so too seminar rooms on both sides of the Iron Curtain played host to throngs of thinkers whose intellectual heirs can still be found bitterly sparring over whether the lofty visions of Stalin or Trotsky, Chávez or Che Guevara should be most lauded.
The only hope of countering these trends within the Academy is to fight back from inside. Yet the personal and economic risk associated with an academic career for those who do not subscribe to these ideas means that capable students are binning postgraduate studies in droves, leaving the fate of most campuses to the meddling and mediocre.
Georgia L. Gilholy is a journalist and director of media at the Pinsker Centre @llggeorgia.
