Academia’s Crisis of Moral Clarity
(The First Essay of my book draft, "My Year of Angst and Antisemitism," plus bonus content at the end)
(The Burning of the Library of Alexandria, Unbekannter Künstler, 1876)
Let’s start with the question:
How did academia, once the champion of human reason and human rights, wind up on the wrong side of October 7th?
October 7th was, by no stretch of the imagination, the most evil day since 9/11, which almost no one in my generation was old enough to remember.
So October 7th was the most profound and painful demonstration of human evil that most of my generation had ever borne witness to.
It was the largest episode of femicide and infanticide in living memory.
And yet, academia, whose halls are filled with ostensibly the most educated and wise human minds, found itself taking sides with the baby killers and the rapists.
Not one major American University condemned it. Not one.
And these are universities whose campuses are covered with safe spaces and sexual health resources – whose bathroom stalls all bear signs sayings “if you or anyone you know has been the victim of a sexual assault or sex trafficking, call this number.”
These are universities who have made women’s liberation and reproductive rights among their most cherished values.
And, yet, these same universities have been covered with students dressed up like the October 7th rapists and professors leading rallies calling this femicide “exhilarating.”
The question is very simple: how did this happen?
What happened to our universities?
What has become of human reason?
The answer is, unfortunately, just as simple.
Benjamin Franklin once said that man only invented rationality so that he could rationalize his most irrational behaviors.
Academia is built on rationality.
Its goal is to advance human flourishing through the intellectual pursuit of truth.
But an over-focus on rationality and reason can yield the opposite effect.
By sequestering academics in remote ivory towers, we have removed them from the world of everyday life. We have turned them into reclusive priests who spend all of their time with books and theories but not with flesh and blood. And, in their long hermitude, they have clearly lost their humanity.
Moral clarity is the ability to see the difference between what is clearly right and what is clearly wrong.
It does not take a philosopher who was right and who was wrong on October 7th.
However, if you take a philosopher, place him at an elite academic institution where he must compete with other philosophers for prestige, and you incentivize controversy, then you cannot be surprised if you end up with philosophers who would take the side that is so clearly wrong.
In academia, it pays to be provocative, and there are no adverse repercussions.
So our academics, brave intellectuals that they are, began radicalizing, first themselves, then their students.
Meanwhile, the less radical elements of the university, like the president, are focused preserving the university’s prestige.
That means fundraising and application farming.
The university president’s job is to improve the school’s image, so if hiring more and more radical faculty will do that, then that is what they will do.
The crisis of moral clarity in our universities does not come from its radicals – they know exactly what they stand for – it comes from its moderates.
The “moderate white man” as Martin Luther King said in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”
The radical professors are fully in on the new leftism and its decolonization and antizionism at all costs. Read their work, listen to their speeches, they all say the same thing: they want a Marxist Revolution, and they want it now.
For many years, no one took the threat of antizionism seriously because, it seemed, it was merely a new intellectual fad in colonialism.
However, as anyone can see, it is much bigger than that. Antizionism has a clear goal, the eradication of the State of Israel, and it will co-opt as many other liberal movements as it needs to to accomplish that.
What is far more horrifying, however, is that the moderate intellectuals of the universities have been so silent for so long.
They are on these campuses. They are teaching these students. They are on committees with these professors.
Don’t any of them feel a responsibility to teach their students that femicide is wrong?
Don’t they want to tell students that dressing up like terrorists is not a respectable way to protest? Don’t they care?
At the end of the day, when all is said and done, all of the moving and shaking at the universities will accomplish nothing other than prolong the War in Gaza and anger and frustrate the Jewish students.
Israel will never make security decisions based on what Harvard students think.
But what about all of the students on all of these campuses?
What about the hundreds of thousands of students who were indoctrinated last year?
What kind of an intellectual life is there for someone who cannot tell the moral difference between Hamas and Israel?
As an educator, I would be ashamed.
It is the teacher’s responsibility to cultivate the minds of young people, and, instead of watering their minds, our universities have been poisoning them.
How many diplomas did Harvard grant to Hezbollah supporters last year?
100?
1000?
10,000? (Including the graduate schools)
What about Berkeley? Or Penn? Or Columbia?
The absence of moral clarity is shocking.
Not only did these students take Hamas’ side, but they even went so far as to praise Hamas and call for Hamas to attack Jews in America.
Would you want to be friends with a person like that?
Would you want your daughter to date a man who said that Israeli women deserved to get raped because they are occupiers?
Would you want your son to date a woman who thought Hersh Goldberg-Polon was a terrorist?
It is hard to tell which is worse with these students: their heart-wrenching callousness, or their mind-breaking stupidity.
But, at the end of the day, do we expect much more from 18 and 19 years olds than callousness and stupidity?
Especially from the generation of iPad kids and school closures.
But their professors should know better. Where are they?
Where are they when Jewish students are cowering in the library?
Where are they when masked monsters deface the kosher dining halls?
Where are they?
There has never been a clearer case of wrong and right than there is in this war between Israel and Hamas.
Yet our brightest teachers and students cannot see that.
Every professors who values liberalism and the pursuit of truth has an obligation to stand for moral clarity in this moment.
For thousands of years, academics, from Socrates to Galileo, gave their lives for the honest pursuit of truth.
Yet still, even with tenure protecting them, our modern thinkers cannot find the courage to stand up for what is right.
Has everything Israel has done in this war been righteous? No. Are there times when Israel is the bad guy? Sure.
But is there any doubt as to who we should support in this war?
Absolutely not.
If our academics and universities cannot make the moral distinction between Israel and Hamas in this war, then we may need new academics and universities.
~
The book that follows is a series of essays and poems I wrote throughout this year in response to events as they unfolded.
If you follow the essays chronologically, you will be able to follow my thinking as it developed, and you will be able to see how I arrived at the conclusions I came to.
The thesis, after many years of study, is simple:
There are radicals in the universities actively using antizionism to turn their students against Jews, and there are moderates who are turning a blind eye to them and letting the schools suffer as a result.
If we want to fix the schools, the moderate teachers must take a stand, and we must root out the radicals who are producing the most antisemitic students.
Otherwise, we risk going further down this slippery slope.
Spread Love, Spread Light,
Am Yisrael Chai
~
~
Bonus Content at the End!
After so many of you have asked, we have finally set up a youtube channel!
In other news, we are in the process of developing a podcast. Stay tuned, that should be coming out within the next few weeks.
And, finally, for those of you who are interested, WE HAVE MERCH!
