As the toll from Hamas’s slaughter in southern Israel climbs, the intellectuels de gauche that infest the halls of academia want in on the action too. A parade of heinous applause is oozing from our campuses, clapping from tenure’s grimy crevices and cheering from the usual alliance of goofy student organizations.
Some of the student statements, dripping with the priggish pontifications and smug self-satisfaction so proficiently mastered by the 19-year-old liberal-arts major, are less a press release than they are an advertisement for bringing bullying back in schools. In one tedious screed from the George Washington University Students for Justice in Palestine, which is apparently a thing, students offered nine paragraphs of cringy declarations such as “every Palestinian is a civilian even if they hold arms” and “we will be caged no longer.”
Statements have erupted from other equally precocious little kiddos on campuses nationwide, provoking demands from alumni and the public for the host universities to distance themselves from the student organizations. Universities have ignored the cries, as the tail wags the dog on campus. The kids aren’t alright, but the campus–industrial complex does nothing out of either fear or agreement.
To wit, most universities could save themselves a headache by releasing a two-sentence statement reminding the world of their raison d’être: “Some of our students speak when they should listen. We have reminded them of that fact.” Harvard tried, but instead of the sharp moral clarity the school offered after the invasion of Ukraine and murder of George Floyd, administrators instead served up a mealy-mouthed word salad that read like it was written by committee.
Now the idea that every institution in America has to have an opinion about every U.S. or overseas political event is a silly one and always has been. We don’t need Colgate toothpaste to weigh in on Hamas; we only need it to make minty-fresh dentifrices that ward off gingivitis. There is likewise no inherent value in Major League Baseball’s taking pyrrhic political stands on voter laws or Bud Light’s quixotic (and short-lived!) effort to advance progressive ideals on justice at the expense of decades’ worth of brand-building. The political Right just wants institutions to shut up and do their jobs. Schools should teach, baseball should entertain, the military should defend the country, Bud Light should get high-school juniors tanked. Nothing less, nothing more. This is an immutable law of the culture wars. Progressives demand that every entity be progressive. Conservatives crave simple neutrality.
The silliness turns serious when an institution’s students or employees go off the reservation and associate their own views with those of their host university or business or nonprofit or whatever. Then it is right to demand clarification. Progressives love phrases such as “silence is compliance.” Very well, then. If George Washington University agrees that murdering infants in their cribs, raping and abducting women, and kidnapping Holocaust survivors is an ends-justify-the-means sort of thing, then it is right and proper for America’s employers to treat degrees from George Washington University as a warning rather than a perk.