Campus Politics

Liel Leibovitz offers an interesting perspective on the current wave of identity politics on college campuses in Tablet, arguing that American universities have become “whirlpools of downward mobility” and that Jewish students should stop attending them. Between 1911 and 1913, 40% of the student body at Penn and Columbia were Jewish, while Yale, Harvard, and Cornell were 25% Jewish. Liebowitz argues that this “the century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away”, partially because of the Israel Palestine issue on college campuses, which made him leave NYU.

It’s not just that the number of Jewish students in the Ivies are plummeting—Harvard’s class of 2020, for example, is only 6% Jewish. It’s that the universities themselves, responding to a host of larger cultural, social, and political trends, have divested themselves of the values and practices that have made them mighty engines of American intellectual and economic growth as well as a springboard for striving Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike….

Last month, the student-run College Council at Williams, one of the nation’s top-rated liberal arts colleges, denied the request of a new student-run group to be recognized as a Registered Student Organization. The group, Williams Initiative for Israel, is dedicated to promoting Israeli culture and the Jewish state’s right to exist. The council provided no reason for its refusal, and, breaking with protocol, allowed anonymous voting, scrubbed names of participants from the protocol, and disabled the livestream of the council’s meeting, deeply compromising the transparency of the voting process. The decision violates Williams’ own Code of Conduct, which states that the school shall be “committed to being a community in which all ranges of opinion and belief can be expressed and debated. … The College seeks to assure the right of all to express themselves in words and actions, so long as they can do so without infringing upon the rights of others or violating standards of good conduct or public law.”