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.
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.
I would do it the other way around: let the research facilities be the only thing the universities keep. Everything else is taken and moved into the community college system.
I agree. The PRC has penetrated many businesses (and universities. I think private, top drawer companies can keep a tighter lid than academic bureaucrats.
From the sea to the river, this is what Hamas delivered: death, destruction, despair and disgrace. From Harvard to Penn, the "intellectuals, professors and students, are at it again. For shame, no thought, no brains.
As one of the 1960s and 1970s leftist who did a great deal of protesting, I would agree and take some responsibility for the current state of our grandchildren. Personally, I saw the influence on us coming from the USSR and Cuba. I was very influenced in high school by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and by the Third World Liberation Front demonstrations at University of California, Berkeley, which is my alma mater, and where my father worked. However, we came out of the WWII generation. Some of our parents were walking wounded. And, remember that in the 1960s there were still colleges, clubs, hotels and neighborhoods who would not admit Jews (or black Americans). There were maybe different problems in the academy prior to the 60s. Our generation also contributed to a broadening of the student bodies and I think inclusivity in a democracy is important. In my family we have always started at community colleges and transferred to State colleges or universities. I have found that the community colleges, for the most part, as they serve less affluent and more vocationally oriented students, seem to have less of the "liberationist" orientation. My grandson just graduated from a local community college with a two-year degree, and the graduation ceremony was lovely. No protesting. Many of the students were the first college graduates in their families and there was just an atmosphere of happiness and pride overall.
My father, uncles, and all their friends also served in the Second World War. My both parents, their cousins, and everyone they knew were poor children during the Great Depression.
Far from being the walking wounded, they were giddily happy to be alive, have jobs, and start families. They stayed that way.
No one I knew growing up took part in violent demonstrations. We might have differed politically, but we had other chores to do and as we grew older never forgot where we came from, the hardworking middle class(es) who appreciated a country that had done so much for so many.
The United States isn't perfect, but most of us never drank the poisonous communist Kool Aid.
I am certainly glad that you are looking back with regret.
Israeli Jews now suffering from the PC “rot” pervading America’s best colleges need to face up to the fact that except for the black Civil Rights Movement, which Jews have strongly supported for over a century, above all for self-protection from “racism” targeted at them, EVERY PC cause since the 60s has been led by Jews: the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, the LGBTQ+ movement—all founded and led by Jews for the past sixty years. And all these Jewish-led movements, without exception stressed the struggle for justice for the oppressed against their oppressors. The greatest popularizer of the 60s view that America’s entire history has been a catalogue of oppressors oppressing the oppressed—slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the endless oppression of workers by rich capitalists, for starters—has been the Jewish historian Howard Zinn. And even more influential in the generalized PC to expose and fight oppressors wherever they can be found has obviously been the great Jewish public intellectual and gadfly Noam Chomsky. The idea that somehow there could be a carve out protecting Israel from this American PC, Jewish-led intellectual war on oppressors has always been preposterous. Jews joined blacks to fight oppression in the American South and South Africa, and now that fight has come for Israel. Too bad for Israel that the defenses that worked for so long with American Jews in general to protect Israel from the oppressor-oppressed paradigm are simply not working anymore. Israel’s massive slaughter of Gazans has now not only caused the court at The Hague to indict top Israel leaders as “war criminals,” it has more damagingly for Israel focused the attention of progressive oppression fighters, especially young Jews and Gentiles alike, on the whole history of Zionism and what the great Palestinian historian Rashid Kahledi of Columbia has called “the Hundred Years’ War against the Palestinians.” Viewed through the PC lenses mostly created by American Jews, this history for progressives seems to contain within it the same kinds of oppressor-oppressed paradigms that Jews have fought against in segregated Alabama and apartheid South Africa. It’s very hard to see how Israel can now defend itself against the oppression paradigm brilliant Jews have fought for so long. As progressive Millennial and Gen Z progressives take control of America away from strongly pro-Israel (and pro-Trump!) it seems Israel faces a much different political future in America than it has enjoyed in the Holocaust-dominated past.
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.
I would do it the other way around: let the research facilities be the only thing the universities keep. Everything else is taken and moved into the community college system.
I agree. The PRC has penetrated many businesses (and universities. I think private, top drawer companies can keep a tighter lid than academic bureaucrats.
From the sea to the river, this is what Hamas delivered: death, destruction, despair and disgrace. From Harvard to Penn, the "intellectuals, professors and students, are at it again. For shame, no thought, no brains.
As one of the 1960s and 1970s leftist who did a great deal of protesting, I would agree and take some responsibility for the current state of our grandchildren. Personally, I saw the influence on us coming from the USSR and Cuba. I was very influenced in high school by The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and by the Third World Liberation Front demonstrations at University of California, Berkeley, which is my alma mater, and where my father worked. However, we came out of the WWII generation. Some of our parents were walking wounded. And, remember that in the 1960s there were still colleges, clubs, hotels and neighborhoods who would not admit Jews (or black Americans). There were maybe different problems in the academy prior to the 60s. Our generation also contributed to a broadening of the student bodies and I think inclusivity in a democracy is important. In my family we have always started at community colleges and transferred to State colleges or universities. I have found that the community colleges, for the most part, as they serve less affluent and more vocationally oriented students, seem to have less of the "liberationist" orientation. My grandson just graduated from a local community college with a two-year degree, and the graduation ceremony was lovely. No protesting. Many of the students were the first college graduates in their families and there was just an atmosphere of happiness and pride overall.
"Some of our parents were walking wounded."
My father, uncles, and all their friends also served in the Second World War. My both parents, their cousins, and everyone they knew were poor children during the Great Depression.
Far from being the walking wounded, they were giddily happy to be alive, have jobs, and start families. They stayed that way.
No one I knew growing up took part in violent demonstrations. We might have differed politically, but we had other chores to do and as we grew older never forgot where we came from, the hardworking middle class(es) who appreciated a country that had done so much for so many.
The United States isn't perfect, but most of us never drank the poisonous communist Kool Aid.
I am certainly glad that you are looking back with regret.
The rioters of the ‘60s are now demonstrating ‘Keep your government hands off my Medicare and Social Security,”
Israeli Jews now suffering from the PC “rot” pervading America’s best colleges need to face up to the fact that except for the black Civil Rights Movement, which Jews have strongly supported for over a century, above all for self-protection from “racism” targeted at them, EVERY PC cause since the 60s has been led by Jews: the Women’s Movement, the Vietnam Antiwar Movement, the LGBTQ+ movement—all founded and led by Jews for the past sixty years. And all these Jewish-led movements, without exception stressed the struggle for justice for the oppressed against their oppressors. The greatest popularizer of the 60s view that America’s entire history has been a catalogue of oppressors oppressing the oppressed—slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the endless oppression of workers by rich capitalists, for starters—has been the Jewish historian Howard Zinn. And even more influential in the generalized PC to expose and fight oppressors wherever they can be found has obviously been the great Jewish public intellectual and gadfly Noam Chomsky. The idea that somehow there could be a carve out protecting Israel from this American PC, Jewish-led intellectual war on oppressors has always been preposterous. Jews joined blacks to fight oppression in the American South and South Africa, and now that fight has come for Israel. Too bad for Israel that the defenses that worked for so long with American Jews in general to protect Israel from the oppressor-oppressed paradigm are simply not working anymore. Israel’s massive slaughter of Gazans has now not only caused the court at The Hague to indict top Israel leaders as “war criminals,” it has more damagingly for Israel focused the attention of progressive oppression fighters, especially young Jews and Gentiles alike, on the whole history of Zionism and what the great Palestinian historian Rashid Kahledi of Columbia has called “the Hundred Years’ War against the Palestinians.” Viewed through the PC lenses mostly created by American Jews, this history for progressives seems to contain within it the same kinds of oppressor-oppressed paradigms that Jews have fought against in segregated Alabama and apartheid South Africa. It’s very hard to see how Israel can now defend itself against the oppression paradigm brilliant Jews have fought for so long. As progressive Millennial and Gen Z progressives take control of America away from strongly pro-Israel (and pro-Trump!) it seems Israel faces a much different political future in America than it has enjoyed in the Holocaust-dominated past.