Columbia University and Yale University appear to be in a competition to see who will be the poster child for antisemitism, intimidation, and polemics trumping serious insight or discussion of world affairs. Historian Martin Kramer warned 14 years ago that Columbia was entering a tailspin.
Columbia President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik essentially surrendered to the antisemitic mob of both students and professors just days after testifying she was unaware of antisemitism on campus. The university’s rabbi urged Jewish students to leave campus, and its chief operating officer prevented a Jewish professor from entering the main campus for his safety.
At Yale, President Peter Salovey’s leadership has also failed. His desire to be all things to all people in order to prioritize his own popularity over principle is catching up with the university. As provost of Yale in 2011, Salovey pulled the plug on the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism due to faculty complaints that it identified antisemitism in contemporary society and that it was not rooted enough in the past.
Following Yale’s decision to replace YIISA with a pared-down program that would remain blind to contemporary antisemitism, Salovey undertook a concerted effort to raise funds from Arab countries engaged in Israel-bashing and Jew-baiting. Salovey showed the same moral cowardice when he and the Association of Yale Alumni, whose appointees he controls, manipulated elections to Yale’s governing body to prevent opposing voices or fiduciary responsibility.
Universities have parried high-profile donor revolts by framing them as attacks on academic freedom. In reality, donors protect academic freedom by signaling that universities must protect diversity of thought. They are the checks and balances. Universities prioritizing indoctrination and political activism over core research and debate should enjoy no entitlement to donor dollars.
The problem, however, is that universities such as Columbia and Yale as well as the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have strayed farthest from their core missions, are those with the greatest endowments. When one pole of the political spectrum fully captures the university and its resources, the checks and balances of alumni donations lose their meaning.
Perhaps, then, alumni should take a different tack and boycott graduates of universities that prioritize political posturing and activism over research and education. I have visited dozens of universities on behalf of the Alexander Hamilton Society, a nonpartisan organization that brings national security professionals to campuses to lecture or debate to infuse a sense of reality onto campuses overtaken by theory.
I can testify first-hand that there is little difference between the education offered today by Columbia and Yale and honors programs at state colleges. If anything, the students I meet in honors programs at less prestigious universities are more impressive.
The truth is that the value of an Ivy League university is no longer its rigor, but rather its alumni network. Remove that from students, and the value of falling hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt evaporates.
Blacklisting Columbia and Yale graduates may seem unfair, and it would be for the class of 2024, but all other students have the opportunity to transfer if they do not want to associate themselves with their university brand. Any employer or institution that prioritizes rigor of research and its own business or institutional interests over the politics and ego of its activism-obsessed youngest members should think twice about whether a Columbia or Yale graduate is really a better fit than a graduate of the University of Mississippi, Pennsylvania State University, or one of the U.S. military academies.
Theory is for those who lack libraries and experience. Many of the protests appear silly to outsiders because the shrieking girls of Yale and the antisemitic mobs of Morningside Heights are too self-unaware to realize that they have less life experience and real-world knowledge than many of those to whom they seek to preach.
If Columbia and Yale students are not cowards and have the courage of their convictions, they should transfer. If they do not, they should forfeit the access to the leg up on employment they believe their degrees confer.
When Columbia and Yale become pathways to struggle and lackluster job prospects, perhaps then university governing boards will reconsider the paths they now hew.
