Israel Hayom.
Very expensive and highly rated US universities have been accepting growing numbers of Middle Eastern students for the past 20 years or more. These are students able to afford the wildly expensive full tuition required at top institutions. They make it possible for universities to offer scholarships to Americans who could not possibly pay the tuition themselves.
Faculty who showed up as a group during protests on the Columbia University campus were praised for standing in solidarity with their students, and for supporting the protests taking place at Columbia and on many university campuses. However, faculty were not standing in solidarity so much as taking a victory lap. They had taught their students well. A student at Columbia or another highly rated university who might want to learn about the Middle East will be hard-pressed to find academic scholarship that is not extremely critical of and hostile toward the Jewish State. Indeed, it is increasingly uncommon to read scholarship that even calls Israel the Jewish state. More often, a student will read about an invented place named “Israel-Palestine.”
Certainly, if one takes a course that relates in any way to the Middle East, or if Israel is mentioned in a class that actually has nothing to do with Israel or the Middle East, the student is very unlikely to hear anything remotely positive about Israel. At the same time, a growing percentage of students arrive on campus with anti-Jewish and even pro-Hamas support already well established. These are both foreign students and Americans.
Very expensive and highly rated US universities have been accepting growing numbers of Middle Eastern students for the past 20 years or more. These are students able to afford the wildly expensive full tuition required at top institutions. They make it possible for universities to offer scholarships to Americans who could not possibly pay the tuition themselves.
However, many students from countries that are not democracies and where Jews no longer live, that is, countries of the Middle East outside of Israel, do not arrive on campus with the values of Western democracies. At the same time, faculty whose anti-West and anti-Israel ideology has become standard fare, especially in departments of Humanities and Social Sciences have helped create extreme bias against Israel. As we have seen on many campuses, this has led to exclusion of, as well as violence against, Jewish students. Before arriving at college even some American students have already been taught that Israel is an illegitimate country and that Jews are “oppressors.” The diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in some US schools result in antisemitic and anti-American ideology that is then reinforced and elaborated on in college.
Certainly, what we have been seeing on university campuses cannot be described as reasoned, well-informed concern for lives in the Middle East. More accurately, we are witnessing blatant antisemitism and well-funded chaos. Thousands of similar tents and thousands of students shouting similar slogans on hundreds of campuses across the US do not represent a spontaneous, grassroots movement.
Nor does the response of faculty and administration whose campuses have been overtaken by protesters suggest that any major change will occur. Of course, when this semester ends, there may be quiet for a while. But the ideology that considers both Israel and America as evil, and that allows for antisemitism and anti-Americanism to be normalized is a systemic problem, one that is not going away. There are other schools available for students besides the highly rated and highly problematic ones. And for Jewish students, there are a number of Jewish schools. And there is Israel.
Originally published in Israel Hayom.