For freedom to thrive, college campuses must die

For the first time in the history of American higher education, three female university presidents this week announced themselves as the ideological sponsors of terrorism.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill appeared before the House Committee on Education on Tuesday to explain the sharp increase in anti-Semitic incidents on their campuses since the October 7 attacks in Israel. All three women claimed that calling for the genocide of Jews does not necessarily violate the code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment at their universities.

To a woman, they all responded that such utterances required “context.” Their well-coordinated responses represent a comprehensive and wholesale green light to student terrorists to terrorize Jews and American patriots in the United States of America.

Every donor needs to denounce these ideological terror cells masquerading as universities, withdraw their financial support, and demand the resignation of these vanguards of terror posturing as administrative leaders. They are the moral equivalents of the Weimar Republic intellectual terrorists who provided the intellectual ammunition for the Holocaust in the years preceding the rise of Nazism.

Some might say Tuesday, December 5, 2023, was the day academia died.

The road ahead is a long one. There will need to be purges. The universities need to be defunded and shut down.

As a philosophy professor of 26 years, I can say that academia is not dead. The universities are living, breathing national security threats that function as indoctrination centers and bastions for nihilistic activists whose twin goals are the destruction of the American republic and of Western civilization. They are breeding grounds for enemies of the state. They are beyond reform. One deals with them the way one deals logically with any national security threat.

So academia did not die on Tuesday. Rather, December 5 should be remembered as the day the world saw the rot, moral corruption, and evil that have been festering for decades in our nation’s institutions of higher learning.

When one watched the smug smirk of Penn’s Liz Magill in her refusal to condemn calls for genocide against Jews — “It is a context-dependent decision,” she said in response to a question from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) — one saw the look of a supercilious, evil woman, a harbinger of darkness and malice. She also acted as a ventriloquist for her minions: today’s professoriate.

To make matters worse, one of America’s leading intellectuals, Jonathan Haidt, took to X (formerly Twitter) to declare the following:

As a professor who favors free speech on campus, I can sympathize with the "nuanced" answers given by U. presidents yesterday, about whether calls to attack or wipe out Israel violate campus speech policies. What offends me is that since 2015, universities have been so quick to punish "microaggressions," including statements intended to be kind, if even one person from a favored group took offense. The presidents are now saying: "Jews are not a favored group, so offending or threatening Jews is not so bad. For Jews, it all depends on context." We might call this double standard "institutional anti-semitism." University presidents: If you're not going to punish students for calling for the elimination of Israel and Israelis, it's OK with me, but ONLY if you also immediately dismantle the speech policing apparatus and norms you created in 2015-2016.

My first response to Haidt’s evil collusion and appeasement was: Please tell me this a deepfake response! One cannot be serious that there can be any nuance to and sympathy for attacks against Israel, or to wipe out Israel. This is sheer lunacy. These college presidents are not nuanced. They are complicit with evil. They are morally reprehensible and should be forced to resign — but not before being mercilessly grilled before their university boards of directors.

Calls to attack and wipe out Israel are incitements to violence. Anyone who makes excuses for top-tier administrators who not only aid and abet these student terrorists, but who themselves are architects of programs that make such hate-mongering policies possible, is, by default, a sponsor of domestic terrorism.

The disgraceful display of Hamas supporters parading through our city streets and university campuses and the calls for genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel are incitements to violence. They are not, therefore, protected speech.

So what is to be done? Mass arrests of student terrorists who both exercise violence against Jewish students and who use the language of incitement would be a place to begin. Deportation of foreign nationals guilty of such crimes would also be advisable. The university administrators are like Iran and Hezbollah operatives: They fight their proxy wars through the students. They need to go.

In a culture where ethical relativism is the norm, the issue is this: We will need to be very selective in deciding who gets let into any newly created reason-centered university. Rational discrimination should be the order of the day. Not everyone can be let into the future.

This was the promise of liberalism. Then the barbarians at the gates entered the cities, and the cities became jungles. Rational exclusion is the only way forward: We welcome a cadre of pro-American, pro-Enlightenment students who value life and appreciate liberty.

The road ahead is a long one. There will need to be purges. The universities need to be defunded and shut down. Some professors may need to be tried for treason and sedition. Students will need to be expelled by an administration that realizes that academia has become a cancerous tumor destroying America from within.

People have asked me what will replace it. I’m not yet sure. A body rid of a malignant tumor does not ask itself what will replace the tumor. The body grows into health and robustness. Then and only then can human imagination flourish and produce a vital alternative.