America cannot build a future on this house of cards, so we should all get serious about inspecting our foundations.
Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman weighed in on the question of campus antisemitism this week, reacting to some laughably bad congressional testimonies. Pressed on Tuesday by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, Harvard President Claudine Gay, and MIT President Sally Kornbluth refused to categorically say calls for Jewish genocide violate their rules against bullying and harassment. Instead, they claimed, such a determination would depend on the “context.”
Later that night, Ackman tweeted, “If a CEO of one of our companies gave a similar answer, he or she would be toast within the hour. Why has antisemitism exploded on campus and around the world? Because of leaders like Presidents Gay, Magill and Kornbluth who believe genocide depends on the context.”
“To think,” he added, “that these are the leaders of Ivy League institutions that are charged with the responsibility to educate our best and brightest.”
Indeed.
My “Breaking Points” colleague Saagar Enjeti replied, “Ackman and those most upset over this core objection is that they are not included as marginalized within the DEI regime. This is wrong. The correct objection is that the DEI regime itself is illegitimate and unamerican.”
After Gay released a Wednesday statement vaguely claiming Harvard would “[hold] to account” anyone who “calls for violence against Jewish students,” Enjeti added, “Ackman and others leading the campaign do not care one iota about actually destroying DEI, defunding universities, destroying elite centers of power or protecting speech. They only want those institutions ideology to respond to their grievances in the same way they do for BLM.”
This raises an important question: Will Ackman and other powerful Democratic donors now spend their considerable resources dismantling the vast ideological infrastructure that brought us to this moment, where university presidents dodge questions about genocide with confounding legalese? What about all the establishment Republicans who’ve expressed their outrage? Will Mitch McConnell take a sledgehammer to academia’s nonsense?
Unlike, for instance, Black Lives Matter or the spectrum of LGBT causes, Israel is one of the very few issues on which elite opinion is genuinely split.
