Congressional hearings were academia’s Big Tobacco moment

The testimony may have been in the US but you can bet your bottom dollar that if it had instead been three vice-chancellors of British universities being asked the same question, the answers would also have been the same. That’s because the real issue isn’t the three presidents themselves but rather the mindset and intellectual climate they represent and from which they are drawn — which is no different here. Last week’s session was held to examine how US universities were responding to the escalation of antisemitism on campus, with Jewish students repeatedly intimidated and — yes — bullied and harassed. It has been clear since October 7 that university authorities have not merely been dilatory in dealing with this — they have, in the main, ignored them and in some cases appear to have been actually supporting them.

That applies in spades here, too. Two weeks ago a Jewish speaker at Cardiff Student Union was shouted down for daring to speak against a resolution on “How to spot lies and propaganda from the state of Israel”; he had to be escorted out for his safety. Similar scenes are happening on our campuses almost everywhere. UCL’s branch of the University and College Union voted for a motion supporting “Intifada until victory” and Jewish students across the country report academics making similar comments in lectures and seminars – with hostile groups of fellow students chanting antisemitic slogans and making life intolerable for them. This week’s JC reports academics at the LSE posting, “Good morning, Palestine…Solidarity to the long Palestinian revolution!” on October 7, with a smiley face and a red heart emoji, and expressing “solidarity” with “the resistance”. As in the US, very few university authorities are doing anything about it.

None of this is in any way surprising, given that the university authorities on both sides of the Atlantic are drawn from the same intellectual pool as lecturers — and are the same people responsible for teaching the students for whom harassing Jewish students has become part of the uni experience.

This is the crux of it. In recent decades universities have changed their raison d’etre. Instead of striving to be places which promote and enable intellectual inquiry and learning, they now see themselves as political actors, with delivering societal change their fundamental purpose.

Allan Bloom’s 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind shows how even then academia was being taken over by moral relativism — an outlook which is antithetical to ideas of truth, critical thinking and actual knowledge. Bloom exposed how show the core intellectual tools of logic and critical thinking had been replaced with instinct. This provided the bedrock on which more modern ideas such as identity politics and Critical Race Theory — which essentially posits that all whites are inherently racist and that it is racist to argue against race being the defining feature of society — could sit.

And since Jews are seen as “white”, they cannot be the subject of racism. Moreover, they are rich, they control the media and they are colonisers of Palestinian (who are “black”) land.

Crucially, these are not intellectual models that can sit alongside other models as competing ideas. They are activist ideas, which must destroy previously existing ideas of intellect and inquiry, through such notions as “de-platforming”, “safe spaces” and an obsession with “diversity”. Object to or criticise these notions and you are by definition exposing your own racism.

Which brings us back to the three university presidents. There is one significant difference between what happened last week and the tobacco industry testimony: social media. Back in the 1990s, the footage of their dissembling was broadcast on that day’s news. After that, it was only seen when TV news editors decided it was relevant to show it. Today, clips of the university presidents have been shared millions of times, and will continue being shared many more times. The reach of the clips will be far greater.

It’s easy — and appropriate — to bemoan the impact of social media in spreading hate. But it has an upside. There was an immediate impact from the uproar among those people whose brains have not been assimilated by Critical Race Theory. Ross Stevens, a Penn alumnus, said that he would withdraw a $100 million worth donation to the university “absent a change in leadership and values at Penn in the very near future.” The next day, Penn president Liz Magill resigned. She is an irrelevance, however. What matters is that the universities now stand fully exposed for what they have become.