The Miseducation of the American Mind:
Academia’s Moral Crisis
Since October 7th, academia has been in crisis. With only a handful of exceptions, American universities have been embroiled in a bitter battle over the intellectual legitimacy of antisemitism and the role of the university in protecting Jewish students.
In many ways, Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation might look like the end of this month of madness, but it is only the beginning.
If the past month has shown us anything about America’s most renowned academic institution, it has shown us an unbelievable lack of moral courage and academic integrity.
Harvard is only the tip of the iceberg. If the board of America’s flagship university has shown this much moral weakness, then imagine how rotten things are downstream at lesser known universities.
We must remember that President Gay resigned over plagiarism allegations, not her comments before congress. As outrageous as antisemitism has been at Harvard, it had nothing to do with this resignation.
The Harvard Corporation, along with 1000 faculty members, chose to keep her after her congressional testimony.
We must also remember that Harvard kept President Gay after the first set of plagiarism allegations came out.
She only resigned after the second set of allegations, which happened to come out at the same time that Harvard noticed a 20% drop in students accepting their early acceptance offers.
In the face of antisemitism and academic dishonesty, Harvard has been equivocal.
In the face of lost prestige, Harvard found its resolution.
President Gay’s resignation is the canary in the coal mine; it shows us just how polluted and hypocritical our educational system has become. It shows us that the Academy has abdicated its responsibility to educate American minds, and it shows us that our intellectual leaders lack academic integrity.
It shows us just how far our once hallowed institutions have fallen.
So let us begin where every Ivy League student ought to begin, with the University Honor Code.
Harvard’s Honor Code vs. Its Plagairist President
The Harvard College Honor Code reads:
“Members of the Harvard College community commit themselves to producing academic work of integrity – that is, work that adheres to the scholarly and intellectual standards of accurate attribution of sources, appropriate collection and use of data, and transparent acknowledgement of the contribution of others to their ideas, discoveries, interpretations, and conclusions. Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs.” (Bold my own)
When I was in school, every student had to sign something at the end of every major assignment pledging their honor that they did not violate this code on that assignment.
At Princeton, where I attended, a violation of this code resulted in an immediate year-long suspension.
Students accused of plagiarism were brought before a committee where they stood trial for the alleged crime of academic dishonesty.
There were two major problems with the Honor Code while I was in school. One, that students could receive extreme punishments for unintentional, often unknown, forms of plagiarism, and two, that it encouraged rampant cheating.
The rule at Princeton was that no faculty members could be in the room when a test was being administered. The students’ honor alone would prevent cheating.
That, of course, meant that all allegations of cheating during exams had to come from other students. Very few students are willing to snitch on their peers, so what would often happen is that the most egregious cheaters were never punished while the accidental offenders generally got the maximum punishment.
Having had friends get suspended for a year for minor transgressions, I was appalled that President Gay got off scot-free for her first offense.
Harvard said that, while she had done things which clearly violated Harvard’s Honor Code, they were not egregious enough to merit punishment.
If I were a Harvard student on suspension or academic probation, I would be furious. The abject hypocrisy is absurd.
How on earth could a university expect a higher level of academic integrity from 18-year-olds than from its president?
Culture spreads from the top. If the university president stands for moral clarity, the students will stand for moral clarity. If the president equivocates on antisemitism, the students will equivocate on antisemitism. If the president plagiarizes, why should the students not plagiarize?
Integrity matters, and there is none left in the Academy.
The Harvard Corporation voted to keep the Harvard President who had violated the Harvard Honor Code.
Can you imagine a greater hypocrisy?
The whole thing stinks from the head.
But if the head is rotten, so is everything else.
Over 1000 Harvard faculty members signed the petition to keep President Gay, despite the allegations of plagiarism.
What does that say about their academic integrity? And what right do those professors have to expect their students to be academically honest?
Harvard has an integrity problem. They have an antisemitism problem too, but the integrity problem may actually be more urgent.
How many academics and teachers has Harvard produced in the past ten years? How many of them are now faculty members at other universities? How many other university presidents have the Harvard Crimson bleeding from somewhere in their backgrounds?
Downstream Effects of Academic Dishonesty
The Ivy League institutions are trendsetters in higher education. Everything they do, their decisions, their policies, and their ideologies influences all of the other universities in America.
The Ivy League sets the standard for educational practices, admission criteria, and research priorities for almost the entire academy.
Harvard has come under scrutiny for all three.
The educational practice known as “peer review,” is a cornerstone of academic freedom. All academic work must be reviewed by other academics to ensure its veracity and authorship.
The Harvard Corporation had a moral obligation to extensively review President Gay’s work before selecting her as the President. As we all know, this did not happen.
Harvard’s shortest-serving president was appointed after the board’s shortest-ever deliberation. By all accounts, it looks as though Gay’s appointment was guaranteed before she even applied.
Consider the message this sends to academics at every other college hoping to rise through the ranks.
Two of my advisors were denied tenure while I was at Princeton. Both of them were beloved educators. The reason that they, and most academics, were denied tenure was because their research was taking too long.
“Publish or perish,” as the saying goes, and they perished.
My thesis advisor, one of the only women in the History Department at the time, was working on a book about English seamen in the 17th century.
Her research database included over 100,000 names, all of which had to be cross-referenced to check for redundancies. And all of the names had to be parsed from handwritten manuscripts.
After seeing that President Gay was fast-tracked to university president despite her plagiarism, I feel a deep anger on behalf of my advisor.
Had she committed more plagiarism, had she cut more corners, had she been more dishonest, she might have kept her job.
Clearly, schools like Harvard care more about image than integrity, so, clearly, aspiring academics should care more about their academic image than preserving their intellectual honesty.
While those of us not immersed in academia have only just been learning about this, the academic world has known about it for a long time. Claudine Gay’s academic credentials were called into question from the very beginning.
How many years has this been going on for? How many years has Academia been this way? How many schools have been corrupted?
The whole damned lot.
There are over 3000 colleges and universities in America, most of them you have never heard of. But out of the top ten in the country, four have had outrageous leadership crises in the past two months alone
Harvard’s crisis is well-known.
Penn’s crisis is the same.
Columbia’s president, by contrast, found a way to dodge the congressional hearing. Although her campus is one of the most violently antisemitic, she avoided most of the scrutiny.
Cornell, by contrast, has actually done something.
The only reason they did anything, though, is because antisemitism had gotten so bad on campus that the university had to mobilize the national guard to protect Jewish students. The governor of New York had to get involved.
For anyone who saw the video of the Cornell professor praising the violence of October 7th, this is not surprising.
What do you think that professor was teaching his students?
No one who saw that video should have been surprised that Cornell is producing violent antisemites. The students learned from their teachers.
Something has happened in Academia that made a professor think he would be safe to openly praise violence against Jews at a rally.
Clearly, he thought his job would be safe. How on earth could he have thought that?
Quite simply, because no one had ever been punished for it before. As Claudine Gay made abundantly clear, calling for violence against Jews is completely permissible within Harvard’s Code of Conduct.
And if it is good enough for Harvard, it is good enough for Cornell.
But the problem is neither Harvard nor Cornell; the problem is ubiquitous.
Academy has an antisemitism problem.
For every academic who would publicly praise violence against Jews, there must be 100 who do it in private.
For every academic stupid enough to physically separate the Jewish students from the non-Jewish students, there must be 100 who know how to do it spiritually.
For every academic who has been caught for plagiarism, there must be 100 who have not been.
Every university in America is downstream of Harvard. This moral turpitude in the face of dishonesty and antisemitism is disgusting.
Almost every American I know older than 30 has been utterly dumbfounded by the antisemitism in Gen Z.
The majority of Gen Z believes that Jews are oppressors and that Israel is an apartheid state and see no problem with vandalizing Jewish spaces.
Where did they learn that?
Not from their parents – the numbers of older Americans who believe these things are just as low as they were ten years ago.
So where did they learn it?
At school, of course.
The only reason the Cornell professor got in trouble is because someone filmed it.
If we took a survey of his past students, what percentage of them do you think would harbor antisemitic beliefs? What percentage think Israel is an apartheid state?
In fact, that is what I believe we should do with all of the American universities.
Given that Harvard is in the limelight, we can use them as our example.
The Harvard Corporation should survey all of its students to determine what antisemitic beliefs they harbor. Then, they should aggregate the data and locate clusters of antisemitic thought.
I imagine that these clusters will exist around certain professors, certain departments, and certain on-campus groups.
This is the perfect task for a political scientist, especially one good enough to teach at Harvard. The data could not be more accessible.
There has been an antisemitic infiltration of the American Academy. It has been aided and abetted by people who lack academic integrity and allowed to spread unchecked through every classroom in America.
This academic crisis has been years in the making. If we cannot be honest about just how ubiquitous this problem is, we will never be able to solve it.
Harvard’s crisis of moral clarity is a perfect demonstration of the rotten state of academic affairs.
Perhaps the most telling of all of Harvard’s hypocrisies is their newfound love and appreciation for the First Amendment.
I cannot count the number of academics I have seen lambast the Jewish people, but I can certainly count the number of times I have seen them engage in open debate: zero.
I have not seen a single academic debate about why Israel should or should not be considered an apartheid state. Nor have I seen one that questions whether or not “From the River to the Sea,” is a call for Jewish genocide.
If the Academy suddenly holds free speech to be so sacred, where are the debates? Why are the schools more comfortable watching their students march through the streets committing acts of vandalism than they are with open discourse?
In 2017, Milo Yiannopolis was denied the right to speak at Berkeley by an angry mob. The same for dozens of conservatives across the country. At the time, the right to free speech gave way to students’ feelings.
But now, free speech is back in vogue.
If this is really the case, as the universities claim, then I will happily offer to come to any campus and debate any professor on Israel’s right to exist and the antisemitic tendencies of antizionism. Nothing would make me happier. I would even let the other side decide on terms.
However, if the schools are unwilling to hold these debates, then we should reevaluate what purpose they serve in our society.
It is a hard but real truth that we must accept – Gen Z has been miseducated.
Our primary school education was gutted by budget cuts, No Child Left Behind, and Common Core.
Every year, we have asked public school teachers to do more with less. We expanded their class sizes, and we fired their assistants.
We gave our high school teachers no help in the misguided hope that the colleges would give our students the remedial education they needed. Now we are discovering that the teachers at the most prestigious universities need a remedial education of their own.
The harsh reality that no one wants to face is that our young people are ignorant beyond belief. Nothing short of a complete educational overhaul will be enough to fix it.
We are failing our students left, right, and center.
But a moral failing cannot be fixed by amoral institutions.
For all of the money we have wasted on education over the past 25 years, we have failed to teach our youth the most important lesson of all: how to discern the truth from the falsehood.
We have tried to educate them in a bog of moral relativism.
Students who are taught not to choose between two ideas for fear of offending the other one will never learn right from wrong.
Equivocal universities attract equivocal professors.
Equivocal professors produce equivocal students.
Equivocal students can be convinced of anything.
While it has been extremely difficult in the past 3 months, I try not to hold any of my Gen Z peers accountable for their blatantly antisemitic beliefs.
When we graduated from high school, they never talked about Israel.
After we graduated from college, it seems like that is all they talk about.
It does not take a genius to figure out what happened – it takes a genius to figure out why no one has done anything about it.
There is a price for moral bankruptcy, and it is far greater than the billions of dollars in donations Harvard is currently hemorrhaging.
If the American Academy does not take a hard look in the mirror and recognize that antizionism is an illiberal and anti-intellectual philosophy that is infecting everything it once held sacred, then worse days will endure.
If, however, the Academy decides to put antizionism on intellectual trial, then we may be able to salvage what remains of the Ivy League’s prestige.
For more of my work on education, see: