Playing the far right's game: academics and the Gaza conflict

To the type of American who rises to positions of power in academia, Elise Stefanik is a contemptible figure. The US representative from New York is a MAGA loudmouth. She was a moderate conservative in 2016, with no liking for Trump. But she quickly saw that, to save her career, she needed to embrace his personality cult, which she did with gruesome enthusiasm.

She sold out her party and her country, and as so often happens, once she had started selling out, she couldn’t stop. She became an apologist for assaults on the American republic she had sworn to protect. She aided Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by making transparently false claims of electoral fraud. Even after Trump incited a fascistic mob to storm the capitol, her very own workplace, she endorsed and defended him.

Put yourself in place of Harvard University President, Claudine Gay, or Sally Kornbluth, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or University of Pennsylvania President, Liz Magill, and imagine what they think of Elise Stefanik. These are moral academics committed to anti-racism, democracy, and human rights. Or so they say. Stefanik is the handmaiden of a political crime boss.

And yet Stefanik destroyed the Ivy League administrators from the most unlikely of vantage points: the moral high ground.

News and videos of their confrontation have gone round the world.  Stefanik asked the academics whether calls for the genocide of Jews on their campuses constituted bullying or harassment under their disciplinary codes. And none of them could give a straight answer.

Afterwards, Stefanik and the rest of the US right could enjoy their moral superiority and revel in an undisputed victory.

Stefanik said afterwards that “the pathetic, moral depravity on display by the three university presidents from Harvard, MIT and Penn, I’ve never witnessed anything like that. I asked the question in such a way that it was an easy yes, that calling for the genocide of Jews in fact does violate their policies and code of conduct when it comes to bullying and harassment. Their answers were pathetic.”

As donors pulled out saying that if any business leader equivocated on genocide they would be fired on the spot, the academics said they were merely trying to defend the protection of free speech in the first amendment to the US constitution. But universities have imposed so many restrictions on free speech in the supposed interest of favoured minorities, the defence did not wash.

As so often, I thought Steven Pinker had it right when he said that unless universities had consistent free speech policies, stopped intimidation and heckler's vetoes, and “disempowered the DEI bureaucrats, responsible to no one, who have turned campuses into laughingstocks”, they had no leg to stand on. If academics in the US and UK can be driven out of their jobs for agreeing with JK Rowling, then universities have no right whatsoever to ask true liberals to defend them.

Despite the hubbub, two points of wider importance were missed

Compromise: if not now, when?

All progressive forces in the US ought to be focused on stopping Donald Trump returning to power. They should be doing everything they can to win over wavering Republicans. But just look at them.  Instead of trying to protect American democracy, they are playing parts straight out of right-wing caricature. They don’t support the cause of a Palestinian homeland, they support Hamas. They don’t call for an end to Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip, they call for the destruction of Israel from the “river to the sea”.  And it is not just students who do it. Such is the depth of hatreds in the academic left, university administrators – “the adults in the room” to use the annoying cliché – cannot just say that calls for the mass murder of Jews are wrong.

So abject is their failure, the Donald Trump fanbase can denounce them while privately thanking them for their stupidity. God help them and God help the West if US progressives do not learn how to challenge the right before next year’s election

What are Jews meant to do?

The editors at the Jewish Chronicle asked me a decent question: should Jews start looking for universities that were safe spaces?  It would require a handful of universities to be willing to say that, in their corridors at least, anti-Jewish racism was not tolerated. Then, Jewish students could say, “Harvard or Oxford are awful, but I will be OK at Yale or Cambridge”.

I began my answer by going back to a time when class prejudice rather than racial prejudice was the chief concern of liberal-minded people.

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When I applied to Oxford University in 1979, my father was appalled. He was a socialist and believed that Oxford was a bastion of conservatism. If I had to ignore his better judgment and go to a hidebound institution that took most of its students from private schools, I must apply to one of five Oxford colleges that boasted they were safe spaces for working- and middle-class students.

Hertford, St Peter’s, Brasenose, Keble and St Catherine’s colleges advertised that they, unlike the rest of the university, were not filled with the children of the upper class. Rather than look for Etonians, they “welcomed” state-school pupils.

In these colleges, students would not be on the receiving end of the sneering snobbery of the English class system. But altruism did not motivate them. As 93 per cent of pupils went to state schools, they could have the pick of the brightest. It was the smart business move. Today, that world has gone. In 2022, the proportion of places offered to state-school students was 68 per cent at Oxford and 72.5 per cent at Cambridge.

But other prejudices have replaced the class prejudices of the 20th century.