Panel says: Calm down, love the Ivy League

Don’t count Jews out of the Ivy League — despite the virulent hatred of Israel and Jews exhibited by many leftist professors and administrators at those schools since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Nor should the Trump administration force the Ivies to reform by withholding billions in federal contracts — which will backfire and set a bad precedent of government meddling in private institutions.

That was the upshot of an all-day symposium held Sunday at the Center for Jewish History, which brought together professors, rabbis, independent scholars and journalists to address this question: “The End of an Era? Jews and Elite Universities.”

“I certainly don’t think that we should abandon great citadels of learning or be chased out of them, although to be there takes fortitude that I don’t think should be asked of every student,” said Maimonides Fund Scholar in Residence Rabbi David Wolpe in the opening address.

Wolpe said that “it was a dream” of earlier generations that Jews be admitted to schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, and that Jews had invested not only money but their souls in those institutions.

Jews should stay and battle for the minds of the leaders being cultivated there, and for liberal democracy more generally, Wolpe and other speakers agreed. That included the day’s most controversial panelist, financier and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman, a Trump ally, whose presence among the speakers generated a protest from some Center for Jewish History affiliates.

Ackman defended Trump’s sallies as reasonable attempts at reforming inefficient and biased universities, and said that Harvard’s administration should negotiate with him.

Not so, said Emory University’s Deborah Lipstadt, President Joe Biden’s former antisemitism envoy.

“What we’re seeing now is an attack on elite universities in the name of antisemitism, which does exist on the campuses,” she said. “But what scares me is if the universities that are fighting back win, they will say we won despite the suggestion that we were antisemitic — or despite the Jews — and if they lose they will say we lost because of the Jews. … Either way, the Jews lose.”

Several panelists said that the expressions of antisemitism that erupted at elite campuses during the latest Mideast war should not have surprised.

In the 1920s, the Ivy League invented modern admissions practices in order to limit the burgeoning number of Jewish students who were entering on the merits of high test scores, according to Columbia historian Rebecca Kobrin. They did so in order to safeguard their status as bastions of a Protestant elite, an effort that continues today in quotas against Asians.

For decades, starting in the 1960s but continuing until today, pro-communist and pro-Islamist scholars such as Edward Said influenced generations of their leftist colleagues in the humanities to question the moral and political legitimacy of Israel. Some fields, such as sociology and modern languages, have become almost entirely hostile to Jews and Israelis.

“A young scholar trying to get a job teaching Middle East studies who had the views of those of us who think Israel has the right to exist would find it very difficult,” said historian Jeffrey Herf.

Nowadays, the administrative regime of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — which seeks to guarantee equal outcomes, and posits a world of “oppressors” and “oppressed” — puts Jews “outside the orbit of empathy,” in Wolpe’s words.

Even so, the proceedings threw into sharp relief how enmeshed Jews have become in academia. According to psychologist Stephen Pinker of Harvard, 40% of Harvard’s faculty is Jewish, as is 40% of its Nobel laureates. That has occurred even as universities across America have become more international in their student bodies.

“It ought to be obvious that Trump’s efforts are going to bring about the exact opposite of what his admirers think is going to come about,” said critic Paul Berman. “There’s no example in modern history of a large train of thought stamped out by a government or executive action.”

The only answer to pernicious thinking, he said, “is through a battle of ideas and writers and thinkers, through argument.”

Others, such as Pinker, said that universities need to articulate a clear set of principles and rules — and to stick to them.

Not to mention, hire a strong leadership. A few speakers cited the timorous leaders who have churned through the presidencies of Harvard and Columbia.

“In order to be a leader, you have to be disagreeable,” Wolpe said, citing what he said was a lack of humility, a failure of courage, and a lack of empathy among Harvard’s leaders.

Columbia journalism professor Nicholas Lemann said the fact that Columbia had had four presidents in the last 22 months had contributed to the fraught atmosphere on campus.

A member of Columbia’s task force on anti-Semitism, Lemann said that he had lost friends because of his participation in the task force but that it would be issuing frank recommendations soon.

As anti-Israel demonstrations have picked up this spring, those nostrums can’t come soon enough for Ivy league students.