"Three generations of rot. Is the academy in the west beyond repair?"
Israelis have been following the unrest and anti-Israel agitation on US campuses closely. Today, we share a column by a leading Israeli public intellectual who wonders if it's too late to fix it.
Rabbi Chaim Navon is a leading Israeli public intellectual. A committed philosophic conservative, he’s a popular author and a widely read columnist.
Rabbi Navon is a research fellow at the Tikvah Fund, an author, thinker, columnist. He teaches halachah, Talmud, and Jewish thought at Har Etzion Yeshivah (“The Gush”), Lindednbaum Yeshivah, and Midreshet Nishmat. He has published ten books, including the bestsellers Eve Didn’t Eat an Apple and Striking Roots, as well as three novels. His latest book, Freedom Is, is a dystopian novel.
Rabbi Navon is a weekly columnist for the Motzash section of Makor Rishon.
We’ll return to Rabbi Navon’s column just below, but first, a quick review of this past week’s posts:
SUNDAY (05/19): We began the week looking at how Israelis had marked Yom Ha'atzmaut. We compared the two competing, simultaneous Independence Day ceremonies that took place this year: the traditional state ceremony with the lighting of the torches and the alternate ceremony, where instead of lighting a torch, people extinguished an already lit torch.
MONDAY (05/20): A few weeks ago, reports circulated that the Biden administration may sanction the Netzah Yehuda infantry battalion. We heard from Rabbi Avidan Freedman on why the administration has threatened sanctions. Why was this unit created, who serves in it, is it really as problematic at the President suggests, and if so, why?
TUESDAY (05/21): We shared parts of an interview featured in Yediot Ahronot with Major General (res.) Gil Regev. Regev was a pilot in the 201st Squadron, the first squadron of American-made Phantom fighter jets in the IDF during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the interview, Regev reflects on where Israel is today and whether or not his grandson will continue to live in the country.
WEDNESDAY (05/22): Mati Gill, former Chief of Staff for Israel’s Minister of Public Security, is still optimistic about Israel’s prosecution in the war, but he says, we have lost the war of narratives. In this week’s podcast, Mati tell us what Netanyahu needs to say to the Israeli people and why.
THURSDAY (05/23): On Wednesday evening, at 6pm Israel time, the families of five female soldiers, Agam, Daniella, Karina, Liri and Naama, released the horrifying footage of the moment they were violently taken hostage by Hamas terrorists from the Nahal Oz base. We felt it important to share this footage here on Substack as well. The family of Ron Arad is also speaking out, so we share what they’ve had to say at this moment and the warning they’ve issued to the families of today’s hostages.
We turn now to Rabbi Chaim Navon and his latest op-ed in Makor Rishon, sections of which we’re sharing below, with a translation into English.
Rabbi Navon is a very talented writer; personally, I look forward to the appearance of his new books. What’s significant about this brief column from last weekend’s paper, and the reasons that we’re sharing it, are (a) the fact that Israeli are following what is unfolding in the West on campus, sometimes in great details, and (b) for most Israelis, what’s happening here at the moment is not seen as the real cause of the venom sweeping across US campuses. As you read, note that in his column, Navon dwells on philosophers and what they contributed to the decline of American academe, and doesn’t even mention Israel’s current war.
Incidentally, because the column is written for Israelis, note that Navon has to explain, for example, what Scarsdale is. He tells his readers that it’s like Ramat HaSharon. I think it’s more like Ramat Aviv, but reasonable minds can differ, even about Scarsdale …
Navon is hardly alone in his assessment in these parts, which makes his column a good, quick window into how some Israelis (and definitely not only those on the right) see what is unfolding across the ocean.
Three Generations of Decay: Perhaps Academia in the West is Already Lost
What used to be a radical idea on the fringes in the 1960s, has now become reality
At a conference of extreme left-wing activists in Chicago, 300 black activists were present, which was a tenth of all those present. As compensation for the injustices of slavery, they demanded and received half of the voting rights. Following that, the conference strongly condemned the “colonialist Zionist war.” The year was not 2024, but 1967, and the war was the Six Day War. In those years, Emory Douglas, the legendary “Black Panthers” illustrator, used to draw “Zionist pig” decorated with stars of David. Those who study the student riots in the 60s learn that the violent occupation of the campus by rioters is not a novelty for students in the 21st century.
It’s amazing how much the sixties still influence our lives. We will not be able to return to normality until we deal with the ideas and images they have instilled in the Western world. Sixty years ago today, 12 young men set fire to their draft warrants for the Vietnam War, thus launching the long and violent student protest campaign against the war. The protests contributed to the poor way America ended that war. “We made a compromise with the communists,” a witty American critic concluded at the time: “They got Vietnam, we got good music.”
… …
… unfortunately, the spirit of the sixties has not disappeared …. The hippies turned to the path that the German student leader Rudi Dutschke called “the long journey through the institutions”—if they failed to burn down the university, they could simply take it over. Many of the student leaders became distinguished professors. Douglas, the illustrator of the Zionist pigs, became, among other things, a graphic design lecturer at the University of Michigan. Six years ago he briefly resurfaced in the public arena, when his students protested a lesson that they said compared Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler. Today this comparison has already become the academic mainstream.
In the sixties, the radical ideas that dominate campuses to this day were formulated. … … Mao was the communist Chinese dictator whom the youth of the West adored, and Marcuse the neo-Marxist philosopher who in many ways was the forerunner of today’s extreme left. Marcuse despised the liberal value of freedom of expression, and called to silence anyone who did not think like him …What was then a radical idea on the fringes, has nowadays become a reality.
Even more than the philosophy of the sixties, the images and mindset were influential. Among these, the deep contempt for the bourgeoisie stands out. Next to the graffiti that declared “Don’t trust anyone over thirty”, the students also wrote “You don’t know hell, if you didn’t grow up in Scarsdale”—which is an affluent bourgeois suburb of New York; a kind of American Ramat Hasharon. Was it really twenty years after Auschwitz that Scarsdale was the best example of hell? The infantile rioters of the 1960s forcefully suppressed the possibility that a real hell is always destined to break out underfoot, and that it is the bourgeois society with its institutions and habits, with its beliefs and patriotism, that prevents the hell from swallowing us all. The most spoiled generation in history never faced the real horrors of life, so they invented imaginary horrors for themselves elsewhere.
All this is turning on us again today, as in a bad movie. After three generations of radical decay, academia in the West may already be lost, and nothing good will is going to emerge from it in the near future. This time, the rot does not start with the students, but with their teachers. This deplorable situation obliges us to expose the distorted ideas, the false images and the distorted lifestyles planted by the heroes of the 1960s in our culture, and to present a reasonable alternative to all of these—which will probably sprout outside the academy.
Ronald Reagan was the conservative governor of California in the 1960s. He sent the National Guard to quell the student riots, declaring that “the hippie looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like a cheetah.” Sensitive noses still smell the stench: the repulsive smell of childish hypocrisy mixed with ignorance, arrogance and blind bigotry. It’s time to ventilate the room.
Events here are moving too quickly for us to know with certainty what we’ll cover this coming week, but here, at least at the moment, are our plans.
SUNDAY (05/26): On Yom Ha-Atzma’ut, the members of Kibbutz Be’eri had a very moving ceremony. Part of it included a video about their members that sought to capture their optimism at this moment. We’re adding subtitles and will share it.
MONDAY (05/27): We have hoped for quite some time to write a bit about the doctors who declare hostages deceased, based on scant, but critical evidence. We’ve delayed that piece a few times because of unfolding events, but hope to finally get to it this week.
TUESDAY (05/28): Israel is obviously a country in which places play a critical role in national consciousness. The Kotel. The Old City. Ammunition Hill. And many others. We share a lovely column from last week’s papers that argues that we should derive great inspiration from Highway 1, the main highway that leads from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. It’s a charming piece, but also profoundly important.
WEDNESDAY (05/29): Rotem Sella is a leading conservative Israeli thinker and the head of Sela Meir, Israel’s premier conservative press. We hear his take on the current situation, why he opposed, even as a conservative, the judicial reform, what he thinks Netanyahu ought to do, and more.
THURSDAY (05/30): Even almost eight months into this war, new stories of heroism and selflessness continue to emerge. One of Israel’s TV stations recently aired a video about a Bedouin man who saved eight Jewish men who had fled the Nova party. They meet up with him for the first time, tell what happened, and share how afraid of him they were, and how deeply indebted to him they will always feel.
FRIDAY: (05/31): Amos Yadlin, the legendary former head of IDF Intelligence, continues to be a major intellectual presence in Israel. He recently wrote a column arguing that Israel needs a new roadmap, an entirely new way of conceiving of its future. We share portions of his column here.
Speaking from "academia in the West", I'm perfectly happy to declare the whole thing a lost cause and light the match myself, at least for many departments and fields. Certainly for the entire administrative apparatus, for all the fiscal and financial arrangements that make private universities like a Harvard or a UChicago what they are.
But I do have some nuances and criticisms for Rav Navon:
1) These institutions are, in many ways, the height of bourgeois society. That call is coming from inside the house. The Marxists are right about this: bourgeois society plus industrial production, the formula for modern capitalism, generates its own crises and its own cultural "traitors", without needing a foreign agitator and without the solution of simply denying the foreign agitator a job. In the United States, academics do not adopt these views as outside infiltrators; they adopt them to improve their prospects on the job market as they move up the ladder. The problem is most severe in fields that have the worst jobs crunch, and least severe in fields like mine (in STEM) where the standards of merit are clearer and jobs more available.
2) So Israel's socialist founders had a thing or two right about how to run an academic system. Public ownership of universities and other commanding heights of culture allows the State to demand that cultural institutions represent the broad public instead of defaming it.
3) But the Americanization of Israeli academia has been a net negative. Nissim Mizrahi has an excellent paper showing that Israeli sociologists have tended to publish American-type views on Israel in their academic work because, as it turns out, they are sent to go train in America in order to get jobs.
4) But the State of Israel needs to step up and represent itself, culturally and academically, in more nuanced ways than the old Labor Zionist establishment, the self-critical "New Historians", or the American-trained post-Zionists are ever going to achieve. Last autumn my mother watched a documentary, subtitled into English, on pre-State Israeli history, produced by Kan. It presented a mish-mash of old establishmentarian Labor Zionist pride and New Historian narratives. It left her with the impression that it was really quite understandable the Arabs were so angry at all these Jews suddenly showing up as immigrants and taking their land, because its own narrative line was that Zionism consisted of a bunch of Jews showing up from Europe and buying up land. This is even more vulgarized than what was taught to me in summer camp as a child, and here it is from the mouths of Israeli professors on Kan! Why neglect an angle the State is already funding out of sheer contempt for "leftist academics"?
"Three generations of rot. Is the academy in the west beyond repair?"
Yes. Here is my program:
Tax their property, heavily. They sit on billions of dollars of investment and real estate. They should be taxed on the same basis that useful businesses like dry cleaners and coffee shops are taxed. Abolish the tax deductions for contributions
Wage and price controls. Million dollar presidents and $400,000/yr. professors who only teach graduate seminars every other year, should have their pay slashed. Federal GS scales would provide good guidelines. If they can make more money in private businesses they should be encouraged to do it. The tuition for an undergraduate degree should not exceed the price of a nice middle class sedan.
Admissions. I can't imagine a worse system than the one they have now. A lot of people would like to see an examination system like the French Baccalaureate, German Abitur, or British A-levels. But given the dismal state of American high schools, I think it is a waste of time and effort.
Reorganize the education requirements for entry into the professions. Why do we require undergraduate degrees to get into medical school? The Med schools only require 5 courses. the other 27 are wasted. Law schools are even worse. BAs were not required by law schools until the middle of the 20th Century. BAs should not be a prerequisite for any job.
Universities should not receive Federal Research contracts. If they have excellent research facilities, those should be spun off into separate entities. Los Alamos and Oak Ridge are a model. If faculty value research over teaching let them stop baffling and terrifying undergaduates.