The Universities: What is to be done?

by Donna Robinson Divine
April 16, 2025
Read the original article in The Times of Israel.

President Trump’s policies aimed at penalizing universities for failing to protect Jewish students have unleashed a raft of denunciations from atop the perch of academic institutions with distinguished status and, significantly, with large endowments. These prestigious universities became the staging ground for holding butchered Israelis responsible for the horrors perpetuated on them– defying logic if not expectation—and laundering a narrative with a tight grip on media accounts of October 7. Restyling barbarism into an impulse for liberation folded Jews—on and off campus—into the list of malign influences driving injustice not only in the Middle East but also across the globe suggesting an antisemitism so deeply ingrained to warrant due alarm.

Nonetheless, even many in the academy who called attention to the spread of campus antisemitism, see nothing good in leveraging federal funding as a means to halt odious attacks on Jews. Requiring universities to create a safe environment for Jewish students or lose research grants has been branded an assault on higher education insisting the focus on antisemitism is nothing but a pretext likely to stir more hatred for Jews than end it. Citing historical analogies culled from the excesses of the McCarthy era, few, if any scholars draw comparisons between the actions of the current administration and the deployment of troops in the past by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy to enforce civil rights for African Americans. No one in the faculty lounge seems to be asking why Jews deserve less protection than other American minorities. Or perhaps, more importantly, no one condemning federal policies as posing a lethal danger to educational values has proposed anything remotely approaching an effective alternative.

Moreover, whatever the motivation, President Trump’s directives have caught the attention of an academy that has been more than willing to take no action to shield Jewish students until their budgets were at risk. Put on notice, there is a rush to find ways to accommodate the demands coming from Washington if only to keep funds flowing. One might reasonably reckon such a response an implicit acknowledgement of past indifference if not of actual guilt.

It is, however, important to say explicitly that restoring funds and bringing order to university operations will be insufficient if the aim is to return academic credibility to American higher education. For decades, universities have failed to fulfill their core educational mission not only because of the deeds done on their premises since October 7 but rather because of the words flowing through their curricula. Too many courses became harnessed to a social activism seeking to remake the world rather than to understand it. Campus idioms became the soundtrack for protests within and without the well-groomed grounds of the university. A world divided between oppressors and oppressed comes pre-installed with free speech replacing academic freedom. It awards credit to feelings, not to thinking, to narrative and not to empirical evidence.

Activist Palestinian movements quickly found common ground with this dedication to purifying a globe riddled with injustice, wreaking havoc from one to another generation—claimed as the inevitable outcome of a history gone wrong. What has become an indelible part of the Palestinian story is that 1948 did not simply signify the establishment of a Jewish state and the loss of a homeland, it imprinted an evil on the world that demands atonement and redemption. Turning Southern Israel into an abattoir on October 7 purportedly showed how this history could be reversed, if not deleted, giving campus protests—joining together faculty and students—their radical energy, ample funding, and message.

October 7 thus jolted the Middle East Conflict into an apocalyptic realm substituting the call for ‘two states for two peoples,’  with the cry for ‘From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free,” discounting the many times Palestinian leaders rejected the idea of a state that required sharing the land. Instead, the message that a Jewish state necessarily deprived Palestinians of the chance to create their own became the mantra. Coiled around a narrative of catastrophic defeat [nakba], Palestinians became the enduring metaphor for the innocent victim of an historic injustice. For that reason, October 7 rapists, kidnappers, and mutilators were transubstantiated by activist scholars into icons of liberation to see in these atrocities models for emancipatory impulses. A struggle possessed of such emotional power imbued so-called social justice warriors with the belief that Hamas was fighting for pure and sacred goals even if a rational analysis would surely demonstrate that what was promised with such a strategy could never be achieved. A distorted history combined with a magical thinking about politics produced the currents for protests turned into rituals performed to make amends for past wrongs.

Totally lost beneath the calls from university faculty and administrators for civil discourse, freedom of expression, rules of engagement, respect for the deep feelings aroused by the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict was the core principle that should have been paramount for the academy: namely, how to offer students an education giving them credible knowledge about the history and politics of the Conflict so many embraced as a righteous cause without even the faintest idea of what the slogans emblazoned on their banners or shouted out in their marches actually meant. University courses should show students how to think about the Middle East, not how to imagine this Conflict aligning with how they see themselves.

It is said that campus protests are a generational voice. If so, they are also a distress signal. And none of us who cares about education should ignore it. Those of us writing about Israel and the Middle East Conflict are something of expert witnesses on how a radically and thoroughly a hegemonic lexicon can degrade scholarship, a degradation radiating well beyond the campus perimeter. Instructed by pre-programmed courses, university graduates are primed to think rigidly, if not robotically, about the Middle East, as they graduate and take up work in professions and disseminate the orthodoxy they imbibed as students.

RESTORE THE UNIVERSITY BY REVITALIZING ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP 

It is long past time to rebuild universities by acknowledging the monumental losses incurred by encouraging social activism to overwhelm and eventually replace intellectual inquiry. A university worthy of prestige should open the mind rather than close it with slogans, boycotts, or barriers.

For what is it we scholars are trying to accomplish? Our goals are not only to increase our knowledge of the Middle East but also to raise questions about how the region  became what it is today. Surely academic progress is measured not only in the discovery of answers but also in the production of the next set of questions to probe, and as important, the creation of future generations prepared to offer their wisdom from the  information they discover. Opposition to President Trump’s policies thus demands engagement with, not withdrawal from all of the issues including those aimed at defending Jewish faculty and students. For rejecting them betrays the foundational values that have rightfully bestowed honor on the university when it was actually a purveyor of knowledge and wisdom.

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