There’s No Academic Freedom to Incite Hatred

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There’s No Academic Freedom to Incite Hatred

TOPSHOT - Pro-Palestinian students of Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrate as they march from the City Hall to the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia on April 25, 2024. College campuses across the US braced for fresh protests by pro-Palestinian students, extending a week of increasingly confrontational standoffs with police, mass arrests and accusations of anti-Semitism. (Photo by Matthew Hatcher / AFP) (Photo by MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images)

Yaakov Menken / @ymenken

Rabbi Yaakov Menken is the executive vice president of the Coalition for Jewish Values, the largest Rabbinic public policy organization in America.

As both President of Princeton University and the immediate past Chair of the Association of American Universities Board of Directors, Chris Eisgruber has a powerful voice in the academic world. And at least thus far, Princeton has been only a minor target of government investigations of antisemitism.

This has positioned Eisgruber to lead the pushback from university administrators and faculty against demands from the Trump administration and Congress that they do more to combat Jew-hatred if they wish further federal funding. And he is guiding America’s most elite educational institutions along a predictable path to failure.

Princeton historically prided itself on excellence, and shaped my understanding of political movements, public policy, and technology in ways that influence my work every day.

This is why I find Eisgruber’s monotonous drumbeat of cries for “academic freedom” so disappointing.

Academic freedom is valuable when it enables pursuit of truth, not as cover for bigotry. The ability to spout hate does not obligate the American taxpayer to support it. Stripped of high-sounding verbiage, Eisgruber is advocating for the “right” of antisemites to inculcate hatred in America’s future leaders, free from the pesky burdens of America’s civil rights laws.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits an institution receiving federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

The Trump administration clarified that Jews do not lose this protection for also sharing religious practices. A university that supports denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, characterizing Zionism as a racist endeavor, or otherwise judging Israel by arbitrary standards applied nowhere else, is rightly ineligible for government funding.

History provides a sobering precedent.

Germany stood at the pinnacle of academia for nearly two centuries. But then, even before but especially after the First World War, ancient and pernicious hatred rebranded itself as a meritorious academic discipline: “Antisemitism.” This gave Hitler’s genocidal evil an intellectual veneer; half of the architects of his Final Solution held doctorates from Germany’s, and the world’s, finest schools.

When the Nazis purged Jews from government positions and universities in 1933, they cast prejudice as beneficial, calling their edict the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service.”

The truth was precisely the opposite: the brain drain of scholars like Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Lise Meitner permanently ended Germany’s status as the global leader in scientific research. German universities ruined their own reputation by prioritizing bigotry over scholarship.

The parallel is obvious.

Today America’s elite universities demand “academic freedom” to teach “Anti-Zionism” instead. And the brain drain is already happening, on Eisgruber’s watch and under his nose.

When Princeton joins other leading schools putting antisemitic mythology on the curriculum, giving tenure to hateful professors, and supporting student organizations that back Hamas terrorism against Jews, Jewish students rightly choose to go elsewhere.

American academia suffers the consequences.

Today we are seeing hesitation in the face of harassment, equivocation where there should be enforcement. Formerly elite universities, in and beyond the Ivy League, now substitute antisemitic indoctrination for anthropology, archaeology, history, religion, sociology, and a host of other academic disciplines.

To claim that this comports with the reputed priorities of the Ivy League is laughable.

If academic freedom means tolerance for anti-Jewish discrimination, its schools will follow Germany’s in reputation and authority. Yet learned professors obfuscate, blaming government control rather than hatred for Germany’s lost academic prowess.

They have it backwards.

The Nazis put university-grown hatred into practice; President Donald Trump and Congress are fighting to save American academia from that same bigotry. Their demands are as simple as they are morally proper: enforce Title VI. Protect Jewish students as they would any other group. Draw the line between free expression and harassment. And ensure compliance with the law that is a core prerequisite of federal funding.

As an alumnus, I am not condemning the university, but “speaking up,” in the words of its recent campaign, for what it is supposed to represent. The Ivy League should be leading the way in upholding civil rights, rather than fighting against what is both necessary and right.

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