For much of the Medieval period, Jews in the West were subject to compulsory segregation, confined to urban ghettos in order to isolate, control, and monitor them. This segregation was justified as a form of moral protection for the surrounding Christian population from a people long portrayed as spiritually corrupting, alien, and irredeemably unclean.

In contemporary Canadian higher education, the Jewish community increasingly finds itself confined to a different kind of ghetto — an intellectual one that serves many of the same functions as the old: isolating Jewish perspectives, containing them within narrowly prescribed spaces, and treating them as sources of moral and political contamination requiring management rather than engagement.

What has happened on my campus in Montreal over the past several years reflects a broader transformation in our informational and institutional culture.

Social media has fragmented public discourse into ideological echo chambers in which people are rewarded less for intellectual seriousness than for emotional conformity. The algorithms governing online attention are designed to maximize engagement, and outrage is among the most effective ways to achieve it. Content that provokes anger, fear, or moral exhilaration spreads farther and faster than content that encourages complexity, restraint, or ambiguity. Attention has become currency, and increasingly, extremism outcompetes moderation in the marketplace of ideas.

Our academic institutions are not immune to these pressures. In many cases, they are beginning to mirror them.

There was a time when public-facing programming at my college — symposiums, conferences, and educational events advertised to the wider community — approached sensitive political issues with an ethic of balance and intellectual pluralism. During the 2008 International Women’s Week symposium, for example, the college hosted a panel titled “Women and Peacebuilding in the Middle East” featuring........

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