U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs decided Wednesday to reverse the Trump administration’s decision to withhold billions of dollars in funding from Harvard University.
This decision, which is likely to be overturned, can be seen as the product of “lawfare” on behalf of the Democratic Party, for which the academy is a crucial political base, or favoritism for a powerful local interest.
But set political bias aside.
What the decision really represents, at its core, is a failure to understand the origins of campus antisemitism.
Harvard didn’t become a dangerous place for Jews simply because of sudden, irrational hatred. It became antisemitic precisely because of the “woke,” anti-American ideology that had taken hold on campus, which sees Israel and, hence, Jews as major beneficiaries of the free and meritocratic order they want to destroy.
I have written about this problem extensively over the years. I attended Harvard both as an undergraduate and as a law student. In the latter capacity, I was the president of the Law School’s Alliance for Israel.
At the time, Harvard was one of the most pro-Israel campuses in America, though the election of Barack Obama in 2008 heralded the arrival of a hitherto fringe marginal of left-wing radicals into the political mainstream.
Obama began preparing to take office amid Operation Cast Lead, a war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza triggered — like all such wars — by Hamas terror attacks on Israeli soil.
Obama avoided taking a stance, and the campus was largely quiet. But the far-left began to mobilize behind the Goldstone Report, a slander that was later retracted but which falsely accused Israel of committing “war crimes” in its fight for self-defense.
One member of the Harvard faculty complained bitterly that there was not enough space for anti-Israel voices on campus. His problem was not that such views were being censored; rather, he wanted such views to enjoy protection from intellectual scrutiny.
His view was still a fringe phenomenon, but it heralded the rise of an illiberalism that exploded in the “encampments” of 2024, which occpied space, while shutting down debate.
I struggled to understand the origins of this sentiment until I attended one of the economics classes in which my girlfriend (now wife) was enrolled.
The professor railed against the American economic system, teaching that success was the result of privilege, not hard work or ingenuity.
It struck me: hating America in that way required hating Israel, too, because one could only see Israel’s success as the result of colonial oppression.
Judge Burroughs acknowledged in her ruling that antisemitism was a problem at Harvard, and that Harvard and other universities had done too little to stop it. But she indulged the liberal illusion that antisemitism is a severable problem from the broader governance of the university.
It is like believing you can get rid of weeds in your garden by trimming them at the stem, rather than pulling them firmly out by the root — all of them.
In her ruling, Burroughs claimed that antisemitism was merely a pretext for the Trump administration to impose its broader ideological views on the university.
The truth is exactly the inverse: antisemitism is a product of ideological rot at Harvard and elsewhere, and unless these institutions can be restored to their own founding principles, academic freedom will not be possible on campus — not for Jews, or for anyone.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Zionist Conspiracy Wants You, now available on Amazon. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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