WAR ON KNOWLEDGE

The animus against foreign students, who bring enormous economic and cultural benefits to US higher education, is not only xenophobic but hugely damaging to American soft power

- Ian Buruma

US Vice President JD Vance could not have made his point more clearly when, in a 2021 speech taking aim at American universities, he quoted former President Richard Nixon’s line that “professors are the enemy.”

Despite being a graduate of Yale Law School, Vance has been an eager foot soldier in President Donald Trump’s war on the country’s elite universities, which includes starving them of research funds, depriving them of foreign students, and trying to interfere in what is taught and how.

To “Make America Great Again,” Trump is now actively engaged in destroying some of the institutions that made the US great in the first place. But what is motivating this frenzied attack on institutions which foster medical and technological breakthroughs, among the many other benefits they provide?

The charge that Harvard University and other top schools are hotbeds of antisemitism is rich coming from a president who professed to recognize “some very fine people” among torch-carrying neo-Nazis who screamed that “Jews will not replace us.” Indeed, the MAGA definition of antisemitism seems to be limited to critics of the current government of Israel. Thus, in their view, opponents of Binyamin Netanyahu, or anti-Zionists, must be antisemites.

There are undoubtedly some actual antisemites among pro-Palestinian student protesters—and perhaps among their teachers, too—but that is hardly a reason to crush higher education. The stated aim of eradicating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses is nothing more than an excuse to attack the academy’s leftists and liberals, many of whom happen to be Jews. And if America’s university system breaks under the pressure, Jews are most likely to be blamed.