The Academic left in America has a proud history of standing against wars. And they did try to resist the Zionist pressure over the Gaza war debate. And to Biden's credit, he didn't stoop as low Trump is going to get muzzling debate and finishing careers when it will come to Israel.
Last year, Chris Rufo, the influential right-wing strategist who spearheaded the campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., initiatives, told me about his ambitions for a second Trump presidency. He hoped, he said, to see Donald Trump’s administration aggressively investigate Ivy League institutions that, according to Rufo, practice “rampant” discrimination against white, Jewish and Asian students and faculty members, particularly through D.E.I. programs, which aim to boost the representation of groups deemed underprivileged. If they were found to have violated the law, he wanted the schools put under a federal consent decree, “so that the federal government can get them into compliance by force.”
More broadly, he imagined a complete transformation of American academia. “If you have the full weight of the White House, the full weight of the Department of Education and a platoon of right-wing lawyers trying to use all of the statutory and executive authority that they have to reshape higher education, I think it could be a thing of tremendous beauty,” he told me.
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Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. T
hough Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.
In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.
“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.