River News: Our View

The biggest misnomer in American society today is the use of “institutions of higher learning” to describe colleges and universities across the country, and this week gave us two mortifying examples of why that is, one of those here in Wisconsin and another of course in the halls of Congress.

After we take a studious look — to use an old education term — at the actions of three university presidents in testimony before Congress and of the UW Board of Regents, it’s best we walk back the use of the term “institution of higher education or learning” completely in talking about what really are no more than ideological beehives.

Only these beehives produce hate, not honey.

It’s not higher education these people are facilitating, in fact; it’s a higher form of moral rot. And we mean that personally.

First, there were the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay), Penn (Liz Magill), and MIT (Sally Kornbluth), who shockingly could not say that calling for the genocide of Jews was against their schools’ code of conduct.

It needed context, they said.

There was appropriate backlash, and Penn’s Magill resigned under pressure, though as of this writing the presidents of Harvard and MIT are still around swimming in their disgusting sewage, backed by their equally disgusting boards of regents and hundreds of faculty members. 

They should all be fired. Instead of rallying against the re-exposed hatred of the most oppressed people in human history, they have stood to celebrate plans for their extermination.

Our position on this might surprise some, given that we are pretty much free speech absolutists around here. 

Indeed, there should never be a blanket ban of even the most obnoxious and morally corrupt speech, even “Kill the Jews.” 

To appreciate the best ideas of humanity, people must be able to tolerate the worst; only through differentiation can come moral clarity.

The problem for the university professors is, what they were trying to provide “context’ for was not speech but conduct. All three — and many more — campuses have become incubators of hate and that hate has expressed itself in the most vile and threatening ways against on-campus Jewish students who have rightly become afraid for their personal safety. 

At Harvard, to cite just one example, a group of students crowded around an Israeli student in a menacing way that in fact constitutes a crime. At Penn, Jewish students allege in a lawsuit that pro-Palestinian protesters have followed them to class, yelling “you dirty little Jew.” Graffiti on campuses around the country have stated such expressions as “Shoot a Jew in the head.”

One can argue whether anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic. One can argue that promoting genocide, vile as it is, is free expression in an academic publication or even a newspaper. One can’t argue, however, that hawking Jewish students and exhorting people to go out kill those who live among them is merely speech. It is not speech, it is stalking and incitement, and allowing calls for genocide on these campuses is nothing but a summons for people to act.

And whether or not any such attack is undertaken, these groups are guilty of terrorizing these students. Imagine how you might feel if every night before you head to bed your next-door neighbor were to post this message on Facebook: “Go out and shoot your neighbor tonight.”

It is interesting to us that progressives think Donald Trump is guilty of incitement by urging his followers on January 6 to march to the Capitol and protest “peacefully,” while protesters intimidating Jewish students and calling for their murder is not.

That’s the context of the current campus crisis, and it shouldn’t have taken but a split second for the university presidents to answer the obvious. The problem for the university presidents wasn’t that calling for genocide is context-dependent; of course it is. The problem is that the context on their campuses is and has been self-evident at least since October 7 and in many instances before that.

And no one should buy the answer that these three university presidents are themselves victims and are not antisemitic. Of course they are antisemitic, for they hesitated not one instant to provide cover for the anti-semites guilty of the hateful conduct, a cover we all know they would not proffer to white supremacists or advocates of, say, Palestinian slaughter. 

Giving aid to the enemy is to be the enemy; a fellow traveler is a traveler.

All of which brings us to the shameful tally by the UW Board of Regents, which voted narrowly to reject a deal that would fund raises for 34,000 UW employees in exchange for reclassifying some Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) staff positions. Assembly speaker Robin Vos had used the funding as leverage. 

Let’s be clear about what happened: The regents sacrificed pay raises for 34,000 employees, not to mention a new engineering building. They rejected a total investment of almost $1 billion to protect a relative handful of DEI positions.

DEI is one of a few Trojan horses that have transformed our universities and colleges — not to mention corporations — and is the primary culprit in the rise of institutional anti-semitism on our campuses. Another of the tools in the totalitarian toolbox, which lasted for far too long, was affirmative action and its attendant racism.

In short, any specific totalitarian and anti-human ideology — anti-semitism is the authoritarian formula of the moment — always brings along its infrastructure of infiltration, the political scaffolding and policy frameworks extremists use to institutionalize their ideology.

For the progressive left, that political infrastructure is DEI. It compartmentalizes everybody into an identity group, deconstructs the individuals within those groups until they are mere commodities to be politically traded like baseball cards, and then labels the groups oppressors and oppressed. Oppressors and disfavored groups are to be stalked, shunned, driven out, and even executed because they provide no value to society.

Free expression has no place in the toxic universe of DEI, for free speech and its infrastructure, liberal democracy, thrive on debate and dialogue and ultimate synthesis. Free expression is the true home of diversity.

On the other hand, the goal of DEI actually represents the destruction of diversity, not the synthesis of ideas but the absolute victory of one set of ideas over another, victory achieved not by merit but by brute force, not by critical thinking but by a gun to the head: Go out and shoot a Jew because — well, they all are, by birthright and true nature, oppressors.

That’s why, at Harvard, pronoun “abuse” violates the code of conduct but the genocide of Jews might not, depending on the context.

That’s why, at the University of Wisconsin, 43 DEI positions are more important than 34,000 employees. That’s why, at the University of Wisconsin, the infrastructure of DEI ideology is more important than the brick-and mortar infrastructure of an engineering building.

Students don’t matter. Employees don’t matter. Ideology matters. 

To call theses entities institutions of higher learning is to mock the notion of learning. They are ministries of ideology, dorms of propaganda, libraries of victimization, and lecture halls of moral decay.

More than that, we cannot say, except that they pose a grave danger to the United States of America and its constitutional foundations.

To defeat these immoral cabals, and to stand with Israel and with Jewish people everywhere, are the most important human rights missions any of us can undertake right now.