The dissonance between campus protests against Israel and the academic silence surrounding the killing of protesters in Iran exposes a sharp—and painful—paradox: the growing aversion of significant segments of Western academia to Western values themselves. As Israeli intellectual Tomer Persico has argued, this hostility often reflects a deeper discomfort with modernity—that is, with a worldview that places the human being, rather than God, at the center.

Building on this insight, I want to suggest that hostility toward modernity often functions less as a critique than as a form of self-definition. It allows academics to imagine themselves as revolutionaries and activists, thereby imbuing their professional lives with moral meaning. Yet beyond its intellectual weakness, this posture has concrete political consequences. Chief among them is a systematic evasion of

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In critical-progressive research across the humanities and social sciences, the logic is by now familiar. At its core lies a claim to a single universal truth, of which the researcher alone is custodian by virtue of academic credentials. This truth is positioned against the West and modernity. In doing so, it rejects liberal commitments to open........

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