Universities under attack

In a recent article in Saturday’s Financial Times (“Universities challenged”, May 10), one of our leading journalists, Simon Kuper, asked an interesting question: Why are our universities under attack?

“[U]niversities are in crisis internationally,” he wrote, “far beyond Donald Trump. Perhaps no other existing institution is less in sympathy with our times. In fact, that’s largely why Trump is attacking them.” He quotes Cornelia Woll, president of Berlin’s Hertie School, who asked a recent conference: “Why do so many people hate universities?”

There is something puzzling about the surprise shown by Kuper and Woll. Surely, it’s because universities have gone to the Left just at the time when so many western countries are moving to the Right. This isn’t just about party politics, though that is a factor. America has elected Trump for the second time in three presidential elections and has elected a right-wing Republican majority in both houses of Congress. In Britain, there is talk of a possible Reform government after the recent local and mayoral elections. In Germany, the conservative CDU/CSU alliance became the largest group in the Bundestag, with 28.5% of votes, while the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) with 20.8% doubled its share and achieved its best result in nation-wide German elections, moving into second place, without any other party willing to work with them. In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni,  elected in 2022,  is a Catholic and a conservative, and believes in defending “God, fatherland and family”. She is opposed to same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting. In eastern Europe, Hungary and Slovakia have both elected right-wing authoritarian governments, while Romania is poised to follow suit.

But the move to the Right is more than just about party politics or even economic policy. It’s more about a cultural shift to the Right on key issues like immigration, law and order, changing views on trans rights and growing opposition to the European Court of Human Rights and recent decisions by British judges about immigration.

British and American universities, however, have increasingly moved to the Left on political and cultural issues, perhaps especially about Israel and Gaza in recent years, with sit-ins, library occupations, demonstrations and the widespread harassment of Jewish students. This is led by students, but a younger generation of academics have supported their students’ views, and university administrators in Britain and America have failed to deal with these problems. Recent visitors to Oxford will have seen tents and banners attacking Israel outside the Radcliffe Camera; the university took a long time to close down these protests.

When Kemi Badenoch was Equalities Minister, her attack on Critical Race Theory in 2020 received 2.4 million views on Twitter. An open letter, attacking Badenoch, was signed by numerous academics. Guido Fawkes did some research into the views held by some of these academics, which included predictable attacks on Israel (the Israeli Prime Minister was a “butcher” and Israelis were “bloodthirsty”), the Royal Family, white racism (for allegedly causing, among other things, obesity in non-white people), on people singing Rule Britannia on the last night of the Proms (a Director of Black Studies equated it with celebrating mass slaughter), individual British Prime Ministers like Boris Johnson (“human scum”) and Sir Keir Starmer (a “middling white guy plank of wood with a haircut”).

On 11 December 2023, Professor Niall Ferguson wrote a scathing attack on the state of American universities in The Free Press. He started by comparing the academic Left today with the academic Right in Europe in the 1920s, citing Julien Benda’s famous book, La Traison des Clercs. Benda had charged that those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind had instead ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds”. “A century later,” Ferguson wrote, “American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it. For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marvelled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory’, and apologists for Islamist extremism.”

Many looked on incredulously during the Congressional hearings into antisemitism at leading American universities as a succession of college presidents, including Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, failed to answer the questions from Republicans who attacked them for failing to deal with the harassment of Jewish students. The presidents fell back on an ill-defined notion of free speech.

In the same article, Professor Ferguson criticised Harvard’s President Gay: “The reason Claudine Gay’s carefully phrased answers on Tuesday infuriated her critics is not that they were technically incorrect, but that they were so clearly at odds with her record—specifically her record as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the years 2018–2022, when Harvard was sliding to the very bottom of the rankings for free speech at colleges. The killing of George Floyd happened when Gay was dean. Six days after Floyd’s death, she published a statement on the subject that suggests she felt personally threatened by events in distant Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, she wrote, illustrated ‘the brutality of racist violence in this country’ and gave her an ‘acute sense of vulnerability’. She was ‘reminded, again, how even our [i.e., black Americans’] most mundane activities, like running. . . can carry inordinate risk. At a moment when all I want to do is gather my teenage son into my arms, I am painfully aware of how little shelter that provides.’ In nothing that Gay said last Tuesday did she seem aware that Jewish students might have felt the same way after October 7.”

The only reason leading American universities finally started to act was because major donors — the chief executive of Apollo, Marc Rowan (a Penn graduate), Pershing Square founder Bill Ackman (Harvard), and Stone Ridge founder Ross Stevens (Penn) — made it clear that they would no longer support  support institutions run in this way.

Bill Ackman wrote at the time, Gay “has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history. Because of her failure to condemn the most vile and barbaric terrorism the world has ever seen, for supporting rather than condemning 34 Harvard-branded student organizations who hold Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric acts, for failing to enforce Harvard’s own rules on student conduct, and for her other failures of leadership, President Gay catalyzed an explosion of antisemitism and hate on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard’s history.”

During one of these congressional hearings, President Gay was asked “at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” She replied: “It can be, depending on the context.”

Simon Kuper attended an event at the Paris university Sciences Po. Several university heads had gathered to discuss how best to deal with political problems facing their universities. “But each time a head of a university tried to speak,” Kuper writes, “a masked student would rise from a group of pro-Palestinian protesters in the audience and read a statement of several minutes accusing that official’s university of being ‘complicit with Israeli genocide’. The protesters didn’t want a discussion. They drowned out any attempts at one by making discordant noises on sound systems they had brought in.”

Kuper’s conclusion was as disappointing as any statement by the American college presidents: ”I don’t think they [the protesters] did anything to help people in Gaza, whose problem isn’t western universities but the Israeli army.” Not, note, Hamas.

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