After Oct. 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses.
Americans knew previously they were intolerant, left-wing and increasingly non-meritocratic.
But immediately after Oct. 7, the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.
Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred.
Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?
After the George Floyd riots in 2020, reparatory admissions — the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population — increased.
Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20% and 40%, despite whites making up 68%-70% of the general population.
The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy.
One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20%-30% of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10%-15%.
At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities.
Huge numbers of students have entered universities who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.
Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of top-flight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs.
Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by diversity/equity/inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading — or all three.
The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work.
And, presto, an epidemic of antisemitism naturally followed.
In such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated.
“Gender, Black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental, and green”-studies courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors.”
Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2 trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.
Faced with an epidemic of antisemitism, university administrators now claim they can do little to curb the hatred. But privately they know should the targets of similar hatred be instead Blacks, gays, Latinos, or women, then they would expel the haters in a nanosecond.
What is the ultimate result of once-elite campuses giving 70%-80% of their students As, becoming hotbeds of dangerous antisemitism, and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students?
At the current rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.
These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.
Victor Davis Hanson is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.