Pro-Hamas protests expose the massive failure at the heart of American higher education

The response of American universities and college campuses to the mass murder, burning, rape, and kidnapping of Israelis by Hamas has left many of us with burning questions.

How can American college students celebrate, and many university presidents remain ambivalent or silent, in the face of brutal Hamas attacks? It seems beyond comprehension that students and faculty members praise Hamas’s atrocities. The non-judgmentalism and lack of moral clarity on the part of university administrators in response to this barbaric act appears not only irresponsible, but reprehensible.

This moral laxity represents a major failure at the heart of American higher education.

The war with Israel provided a window into the ugly side of higher education. Just as parents of K-12 students were horrified to learn what their children were being taught during the pandemic-era school closures, it’s prevalent at many colleges. People are starting to wake up to moral insanity.

Hamas-Israel War Reveals World’s Oldest Hatred in American Higher Education

This will only further deepen the crisis of trust in higher education, which Gallup reports has been declining for nearly a decade.

Something is deeply broken at our elite universities.

The moral relativism encouraged in American classrooms contributes to this disease. We were warned about this in 1987, Alan Bloom wrote: “There’s one thing professors can be absolutely sure of: nearly every student entering college believes or says they believe that truth is relative. ”

Bloom said that the relativity of truth is not just a theoretical insight, but also a moral postulate. That is the virtue that can be taught to students.

He said modern universities teach no truth, only lifestyle. Postmodern ideologues emphasized this even further, convincing a generation that there is no objective truth, no objective right or wrong, and that all moral statements are simply about power relations.

Back in 1943, C.S. Lewis warned in The Abolition of Man: “This is the tragedy of our situation, that we continue to seek the very qualities that make it impossible…In a kind of appalling simplicity, we are.”

Pro-Hamas protests force Jewish students into hiding. How can America allow something like this to happen again?

C.S. Lewis understood the effects of miseducation on a nation.

Even Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard University, warned us about what was happening in 2006. He wrote, “Harvard today tiptoes away from moral education, has little interest in providing it, and is ashamed to admit that it does not want to do so.” Why? He says, “There is no consensus on what constitutes good character.”

Turning to higher education, he writes, “Great universities, universities that disproportionately educate the nation’s future industrial, political, and judicial leaders, are I have a hard time explaining the whole point of education: anything resembling moral principles or moral propositions, and that ultimate values ​​are isolated within the curriculum, if not removed entirely. Masu.”

Well, why are we so shocked today? Warning signs were everywhere. And since 2006, the situation has become even more intense. Many schools have changed their curriculum. In too many places, ideology has become more important than scholarship.

There has been a deliberate project to dismantle the Judeo-Christian worldview and Western civilization and replace it with the ideology of neo-Marxist critical theory, including postcolonial theory, all the while seriously taking the claims of radical Islamism. It has refused to accept (i.e., its intention) the annihilation of Israel by terrorist organizations and governments such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran).

Widespread student support for Hamas attack exposes ‘moral bankruptcy’ of US higher education

These currents have led us to a place where the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement seeks to undermine Israel by declaring it an “apartheid state.” We are seeing the creation of no-Jew zones on college campuses. And this was all before his October 7th. But it does give insight into why students called Hamas assassins “resistance fighters” who were “taking back the land from the colonizers” and “from the rivers to the seas.”

So how do we fix what is broken in higher education? Some say we just have to protect free speech and protect students (particularly Jewish students). I certainly agree with that. But is that enough?

Some have suggested that I should start teaching ethics courses. But teaching ethics is only as strong as its underlying moral foundation. Still others are calling for us to return to a liberal arts focus with greater emphasis on critical thinking. It certainly helps, but it’s not enough.

Let me suggest something more fundamental.

First, we need to move away from the radical skepticism promoted by the secular academy, which holds that there is no truth or objective moral right or wrong.

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Second, we need to return to the old educational model of teaching moral formation based on objective reality.

Third, we need to return to our Judeo-Christian traditions. Only Judaism and Christianity have the ethical and spiritual roots to restore our moral sanity and the foundations of civilization. In particular, we need to expose our students to, or at least familiarize them with, the Bible and the teachings of Jesus. I hope more things like this happen.

He added that faith-based universities, which continue to operate on a more rooted and vibrant model of higher education, one that values ​​character and religious faith rather than just ability, should not be ignored. I’ll keep it. The interplay between faith and reason in the Middle Ages gave rise to the first universities.

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These are solutions based on my experience as a university president and now as a president. Your opinions may differ, but we all need to think hard about how to fix what is clearly broken in higher education. It is said that what is taught in universities today will be practiced in the streets tomorrow.

Or, as historian Victor David Hanson puts it, it only takes five years for a wild idea in a faculty lounge to emerge into popular culture. There are a lot of upside-down ideas percolating in the faculty lounge now for everyone to see.

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