The surge of antisemitism on U.S. college campuses following the Hamas terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is the culmination of a decades-long process by which higher education has been handed over to leftist ideologues who hate the West, America and Israel.
That’s the analysis of Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson, also head of the Legal Insurrection Foundation that advocates for free speech and Western values.
Jacobson told JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin that at the heart of the problem is the lack of ideological diversity at American colleges, where conservative and pro-Israel professors are rapidly becoming extinct in an atmosphere where the woke left is intolerant of opposing ideas.
He says the left understood that “if you can take over education, you can shape a generation. And we gave our kids to them. We turned our kids over to the radical left who had taken over education.”
According to Jacobson, hard-left anti-Zionists and professional agitators, such as members of the antisemitic Students for Justice in Palestine, are organizing the protests that have created hostile campus environments for Jews. But the problem goes deeper than that. The atmosphere is such that support for “Palestine” has become a matter of political fashion, and so the facts of the conflict don’t seem to matter.
While the institutional capture of almost all of higher education seems irreversible, Jacobson says there is a way to effect change: Strip these schools of their federal funding. Federal intervention is necessary not so much to save the academic institutions but to protect Jewish students—and American society—from them.
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