JNS
The president achieved the seemingly impossible goal of undoing the woke grip on schools that is destroying American society. And it was easier than anyone thought.
Progressive academics have been among the loudest voices calling for a new “resistance” to the second administration of President Donald Trump. But their angry rhetoric and vows to fight what they consider to be a threat to everything they hold dear was shown to be little more than hot air. The first time a leading bastion of the left like Columbia University was faced with a choice between fighting and surrendering to Trump, it folded like a cheap suit.
The issue was Columbia’s toleration and even encouragement of antisemitism. The Ivy League school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side had become one of the most prominent and outrageous examples of the surge of Jew-hatred that has swept across the country and the globe since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led Palestinian assault on Israel.
The administration in Washington demanded that the university make some drastic changes in its admissions and disciplinary policies, as well as to place one of its most problematic departments—the one devoted to Middle Eastern studies—under “academic receivership” for at least five years. And it made it clear that if Columbia didn’t comply, it would lose every cent of the $1.2 billion that it receives from the federal government every year.
A mere eight days after the administration issued its ultimatum, Columbia waved the white flag and acceded to every one of Trump’s demands.
That decision has been met with weeping and wailing from the left. Liberal and progressive pundits are depicting it as a triumph of an anti-intellectual populist movement, reminiscent of the anti-Communist McCarthyite hysteria of the 1950s, and the potential end of American higher education.
Pearl-clutchers claim it will end academic freedom and destroy the university system itself, something that will harm American national security. More hardline leftists who support Israel’s destruction and seek to normalize antisemitism, such as Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, are more blunt. They say that if Trump gets away with it, he will swiftly move on to destroying every other vestige of dissent, thus ending democracy and beginning a new era of fascism.
A watershed moment
This is the sort of rhetoric that we’ve become accustomed to from Trump’s opponents. They have been accusing him of destroying democracy so long that much of the country is numb to their protests.
But this time, his foes are not wrong to be alarmed. Far from just another culture war spat or kerfuffle about something he or Vice President JD Vance has said to upset liberal sensibilities, what happened at Columbia is a watershed moment not just for that university or others like it, but for a struggle that impacts all of American education and society as a whole.
Yet what Trump has done isn’t something that will destroy higher education or freedom for everyone else. It is just the opposite. That it may also be a turning point in the battle against antisemitism, as important as that would be, is just a sidebar to a victory in the broader struggle against a set of toxic ideologies that seeks to tear down not just American exceptionalism but Western civilization itself. It is no exaggeration to note that if this move and other related decisions stand up, as they should, to judicial scrutiny, Trump may have just saved not merely American education but the West.
The long march of the left through higher education, as well as other sectors of society, peaked in the last five years. After the moral panic of the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) became not merely ubiquitous throughout American society but mandatory throughout academia, the arts, the corporate world and, thanks to the Biden administration, throughout government.
The “anti-racism” movement that foisted critical race theory (CRT), intersectionality, settler/colonialism and DEI on the country may have been represented to the public as an effort to encourage greater equality. But it is nothing of the kind.
It was a Marxist poison, spreading throughout society and the education system, bent on fostering a permanent race war and demolishing the values of the Western canon as the foundation of the American republic. Instead of equal opportunity, it demanded “equity”—a thinly veiled agenda for racial quotas that would favor some groups labeled as victims and disadvantage those considered “white” oppressors. It was an attack on the very principle of individual liberty.
That it both legitimized and encouraged antisemitism—because CRT falsely deems Israel and Jews as “white” oppressors—was just one aspect of the impact of the DEI culture that became the new orthodoxy that could not be questioned. It was a belief system so pervasive that it became mainstream in academia in the current generation, and it spread quickly everywhere else after 2020.
Getting a job in academia became largely impossible without first taking a DEI pledge. That conservatives had become largely extinct in the academy was part of this. But it’s also true that antisemitic hate for Israel became not just normalized, but treated as evidence of virtue.
So firm was the progressive hold on education—in the K-12 system, as well as in college and post-graduate studies—that many observers despaired of ever being able to change it. Few believed that anything could prompt the sort of wholesale reform that might return existing schools, including the most prominent like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia, to their former position as bastions of Western values. That was the reasonable rationale for the creation of new institutions of learning, such as the University of Austin or the state of Florida’s revamped version of its New College, where woke orthodoxy would not reign.
With the existing education hierarchy run by a generation of administrators and faculty who had been indoctrinated in leftist doctrines, what reason was there for hope that they might be persuaded to discard an intellectual fashion that was almost universally accepted and punished heresy with censure and unemployment?
Uncle Sam’s leverage
As it turns out, the answer to that question was simple. Money.
Strip these institutions of the vast sums they get from the federal government for a wide variety of programs—and even those with vast endowments, like Harvard ($50.7 billion), Yale ($41.4 billion), Princeton ($34.1 billion), Penn ($22.3 billion) and Columbia ($14.8 billion)—would find it difficult to continue to operate. Threats from wealthy donors outraged by the way campuses had become hostile environments for Jews, or the way the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT wouldn’t say that advocacy for the genocide of Jews was against their institution’s rules, could cause trouble. But no angry alumni had the same sort of leverage as Uncle Sam, the primary funder of higher education in the United States since World War II.
Those horrified by Trump’s efforts are right when they say it is a case of the government interfering in academia. One prominent critic, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber, acknowledged in an essay in The Atlantic that antisemitism is a bad thing and ought to be looked into. But he asserted that placing strings on federal funding, even when it concerns some university elements behaving badly, ought to be beyond the pale.
But what the likes of Eisgruber ignore is that the government has been laying down standards for schools for decades, with no one protesting. Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it has been a given that no entity that receives federal funding can engage in racial discrimination. Title VI of that act also encompasses discrimination on the basis of religion and ethnicity, something that administrations of both political parties, including those of Presidents Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump, agreed applied to Jews.
As even liberal writer Franklin Foer also noted in The Atlantic, had any other group been treated as Jews have been since Oct. 7, Columbia’s administration wouldn’t have tolerated it for a second. For more than a year, Jews (except those willing to publicly abjure their faith or peoplehood and its connection to the Jewish state) have been harassed and subjected to intimidation, shunning, silencing and even violence.
Liberal hypocrisy
The same is true of every other academic institution where pro-Hamas mobs ran amuck in the last year and a half. If chants for violence against African Americans or Hispanics were routinely voiced—or takeovers of school buildings on behalf of the efforts of hate groups or terrorists targeting those groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazis—had taken place, everyone knows what would have followed.
There would have been no prolonged soul-searching on the part of universities and colleges. Nor would administrators have engaged in bended-knee negotiations involving attempts to appease those behaving in this manner. They would not have issued statements crafted to avoid antagonizing the supporters of these people.
Instead, the punishments would have been swift and peremptory. They would have involved expulsions of students and firings of any institutional employees or teachers with a minimum of due process. Nor would any school have accepted it for a minute if one of its academic departments were taken over by those whose teachings advocated such things.
Yet all of the above happened on campuses where administrators were not merely afraid of angering the protesters; it was painfully obvious that most of those institutions were sympathetic to them.
The influence of DEI was made clear in admissions. Not only were students who fit into approved minority categories favored in the process, and most Jews placed at a disadvantage; those from foreign countries rife with antisemitism, who paid full tuition rather than being on scholarship, were also given precedence, to the point at which they formed a clear majority of those studying at the school. It was no surprise that many of them, like Mahmoud Khalil, whom the Trump administration is seeking to deport, were leaders of the antisemitic and pro-Hamas agitation.
It’s equally true that elite schools like Columbia appear to have favored admission of those who engaged in left-wing activism while high school students are often advised to downplay or omit mention of Jewish and especially pro-Israel extra-curricular activities.
Moreover, many of these same institutions have been notorious for their intolerance of anything that smacked of conservative thought. As Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz pointed out, Eisgruber “acceded to the destruction of his school’s classics department and drove out the classics professor who protested.” And, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Wax learned, speaking up against DEI or other left-wing policies can lead to efforts to fire even a distinguished and much-honored tenured professor such as herself.
This has led to a situation in which it is virtually indisputable that it has become almost impossible for anyone who is open about having conservative beliefs or support for Zionism to get hired or achieve tenure at the overwhelming majority of colleges and universities in any humanities department.
So, this is not about academic freedom or free speech, principles that the left ignores whenever it concerns those who don’t subscribe to its prejudices.
The intolerant left
Some claim that conservatives should not be celebrating, since interference in academia can cut both ways, and a future Democratic administration might punish conservative schools in this same way.
Such allegations are ludicrous.
Even if Trump’s measures withstand the scrutiny of the courts, as they should, the notion that academia will soon be controlled by the right is absurd.
More to the point, such actions have already happened in those rare cases where schools resist prevailing liberal fashion. This was on display with the state and city of New York’s successful campaign to force Yeshiva University to recognize an LGBTQ club, despite its violating the school’s Orthodox Jewish beliefs.
Regardless of what one thinks about gay rights, such bludgeoning of an institution of higher learning into compliance—accomplished with the same threat of denial of public funding that Trump is using—with what a government thinks is right or wrong, was cheered by outlets like the New York Times and reported as a triumph of virtue over prejudice.
This happened at the same time that the Times was editorializing that pressure on Columbia to stop engaging in DEI practices and tolerance of antisemitism was proof of Trump’s authoritarianism.
Saving higher education
Nor should we take seriously the notion, also endorsed by the Times, that threats of defunding over woke ideology will not only destroy universities but make the United States less competitive when it comes to the development of new technologies and medical advancements. To the contrary, as author Heather Mac Donald has persuasively written, it is only by ridding the academy of the increasingly widespread practices that are substituting DEI racial quotas for excellence can the decline of American institutions, including those devoted primarily to math, science and medicine be reversed.
And that is exactly what Trump has given American higher education a chance to do.
But the impact of what the administration is doing will go far beyond academia or the Jewish community, though the support it gives to Jews who have been under siege since Oct. 7, is of enormous importance.
The ease with which the administration has defeated leftist radicals who have seized control of much of American life, while few were paying attention until it was too late, is encouraging. All sorts of institutions will now opt to discard their harmful practices, rather than face the loss of government funding.
It is no longer possible to view the war on the West that progressives have promoted as having only one inevitable outcome. America now has a chance to regain its footing and reject an ideology rooted in Marxist hate for the Western canon that also fueled antisemitism.
Seen in this light, leftist ideologues and their liberal fellow travelers are right to lament the president’s resolve on this issue. Their hypocritical accusations of tyranny should be dismissed as nothing more than gaslighting on the part of those who have gleefully sought to suppress their opponents.
Whatever else Trump accomplishes in the rest of his second term, if he continues to press forward on this front, he will have helped ensure America’s future and to keep Jews safe in a way that will mark his administration’s opening months as a turning point in American history.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
