The rise in antisemitism on college campuses since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel has ignited debates over the limits of free speech and the type of environment that universities want to create for students. However, the crisis in higher education runs much deeper than the rules governing protests or universities’ better-late-than-never embrace of institutional neutrality. The root of America’s collegiate ills, such as the reemergence of the “oldest hatred,” lies in the ideological capture of students and faculty.
Antisemitism has long been a feature of ideologically closed societies. Most notable is the 1930-1945 Nazi regime that produced the horrors of the Holocaust. A horror in which 6 million innocent Jews were murdered simply because they were Jews. However, antisemitism was also a major element of the 20th century’s other great totalitarian regime: the Soviet Union.
Indeed, many modern talking points on anti-Zionism, which are used as a cloak for antisemitism, are derived from Soviet propaganda. The KGB even supervised the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Republic, which issued brochures such as the “Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism.” Modern supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah and their useful-idiot fellow travelers on college campuses are reinvoking these same tropes in their accusations against the only Jewish state.
Antisemitism has likewise been a perennial feature of political extremism. A closed worldview needs enemies, so Jews have historically been the scapegoat for the failures of corrupt and autocratic rule. The communists used Zionist conspiracies to deflect blame for the economic and social problems of the Soviet Union. Soviet-supported dictatorships in the Middle East used similar tools to deflect responsibility for their own shortcomings. Campuses have seen a similar dynamic ever since the Port Huron Statement of 1962, when leftist groups openly declared their intention to capture universities. Now, after decades of incubating, educating, and fomenting activist politics both in the classroom and through educational bureaucracies, the same blame-the-Jew games have burst forth.
Another parallel between our current campus climate and that of communist regimes is public shaming— a key feature of Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s and Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Forced public confessions for ideological offenses were central to the elimination of political opposition. At America’s universities, the expurgation of dissidents shows how narrow the Overton window of acceptable discourse is in places where even small speaker events are shut down over perceived slights and manufactured outrage.
Some of us have “lived experience” with this sort of thing. When I faced cancellation for a post about Supreme Court nominations, I encountered the Soviet-style DEI bureaucracy at Georgetown University. The inquisitors from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action wanted nothing more than my confession of guilt to appease students who were angered by my critique of racial preferences. As I detail in my book Lawless, the diversicrats tried to get me to admit and repent for my offenses against political correctness.
Eventually, IDEAA absolved me on a technicality, but put out a 10-page report noting that if I were to make similar comments again, I would be creating a “hostile educational environment” that would return me to the Star Chamber. No sane person could work like that, so I quit.
That entire investigation was designed to ensure my loyalty and submission to prevailing leftist orthodoxy. The struggle sessions demanded of apostates liken modern universities to the fanatical atmosphere of revolutionary regimes.
So, it should be no surprise that this ideological control spreads to teachings about the Middle East. Political science, history, and area studies departments focus almost exclusively on European colonialism and its attempt to subjugate non-white peoples, typically through “exploitative capitalism.” Israel is at the center of this “settler-colonialism,” according to the Left, so all violence in the Middle East is presented as resistance to Israeli aggression.
This same view as the Arab nationalists of the 1960s and the Islamists of the 1970s, both supported by the Soviet Union, is now being parroted to America’s college students. Meanwhile, all history before the World War I-era division of formerly Ottoman-controlled territory among European powers or the status of Jews in Muslim lands is ignored. The Arab-Israeli wars, which even after 70 years may have only killed 150,000 people on both sides, are more closely studied (and Israel’s self-defense condemned) than any larger-scale conflicts such as the Iran-Iraq War or the actual genocides in Syria and Kurdistan, which have each left more than half a million people dead.
This type of education unsurprisingly produces students who have a dogmatic view of a specific, intractable problem whose root is the refusal to accept the existence of a pluralistic state in the ancestral Jewish homeland. Campus encampments are the result of this disingenuous advocacy reaching its logical endpoint: incoherent (“Queers for Palestine”) activism.
As university governments resemble one-party states, with even deans of elite law schools quailing under pressure from DEI commissars, it’s no surprise that they suffer from the same pathological sclerosis as the Soviet Union. Antisemitic encampments and investigations into faculty speech are just another feature of the illiberal capture of the university.
It’s high time to tear down those ideological walls and return universities to their original missions, with a focus on scholarship and education rather than activism and indoctrination.
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Ilya Shapiro is the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute and author of the forthcoming Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites. He also writes the Shapiro’s Gavel newsletter on Substack.
