CHICAGO: The current crisis engulfing the U.S. campuses is a toxic mix of the influx of Qatari and Chinese funding on one hand and ideological indoctrination on the other.
CHAOTIC PROTESTS ROCK U.S CAMPUSES
Some of the recent scenes around the prestigious Columbia University (CU) campus in New York City were reminiscent of those played out thousands of miles away a few years ago on the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus in the Indian capital city of New Delhi. Before Columbia, the “azadi“ (a Hindi/Urdu word of Persian origin, meaning freedom) chants reverberated the leafy JNU campus in the Aravalli hills. Full disclosure: the author is a JNU alumnus who spent four years at JNU—two as a graduate student and two as a research scholar before coming to the U.S. for graduate studies.
Very similar to JNU, where those chants meant calls for the breakup of the Indian state, the “azadi” chants of CU were a call, among others, for the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. They were to “instill fear among Jews,” posted (on X) Suhag Shuka of the Hindu American Foundation. For the context, she wrote, “the slogan being bastardized for Palestine was first chanted by Pakistani militias in 1989, to instill fear amongst Kashmir’s indigenous Hindus before hundreds of thousands were raped, massacred and ethnically cleansed.”
As Shai Davidai tried to enter the CU campus, he found himself locked out. His ID card, which gave him access to university buildings, had been deactivated because the university could not “guarantee his safety.” “Earlier today,” Davidai posted on X, “@Columbia University refused to let me on campus. Why? Because they cannot protect my safety as a Jewish professor.” Israel-born Davidai is an assistant professor at CU and a fierce critic of the pro-Palestinian protests around the U.S. campuses.
On many campuses—mostly wealthy Ivy League colleges like CU in America’s predominantly Blue areas—the protests that claimed to highlight the sufferings of Palestinians in the wake of the war in Gaza, turned anti-Israel, antisemitic, and violent.
At Columbia, an Israeli supporter’s flag was stolen and burned. The protesters also hit him. Jonathan Lederer, the victim of this assault, described his ordeal in great detail, which was also captured on the video. At Yale, another Ivy League college, the milling crowd chanted for the “annihilation of Israel.” A Jewish student “was poked in the eye with a flagpole and needed hospital treatment.” Some of those who find actual violence in speech, tried to undermine these incidents behind the “hierarchy of life” argument.
The situation became so toxic and unmanageable that Columbia switched to hybrid instruction for the remainder of the semester. Those who felt unsafe attending in-person classes were given the option of attending their classes remotely. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House and third in command in the U.S. government, visited the CU campus in New York, home to a sizeable population of Jews. Mr Johnson was highly critical of the university’s handling of the situation, which has failed to ensure the safety of Jewish students on campus. The Congress has some leverage over many of these elite institutions as they avail of federal funding and enjoy tax-exempt status.
Mr Johnson called on the president of CU to resign. “Administrators at Columbia have proven themselves to be incapable of achieving their basic responsibility—keeping students safe… Congress will not be silent as Jewish students are targeted on campus,” wrote Speaker Johnson on X.
LEFT INFILTRATION OF THE U.S. ACADEMIA
In India, the leftists planted their foothold in elite Indian institutions through a power-sharing deal they made with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. As part of the deal, an openly leftist historian and academic, Saiyid Nurul Hasan, was appointed Education Minister of India in 1971. Nurul Hasan’s policies would ensure a leftist stranglehold over Indian institutions for years to come.
In the U.S., rumours about the communist infiltration of educational institutions during the Red Scare of the 1950s may have seemed exaggerated and premature. The thought of Soviet comrades running American schools and colleges may have also seemed far-fetched. However, by the 1980s, we found those elements deeply entrenched in academia.
As the fears of the Marxist takeover of American institutions took a backstage momentarily, a new form of leftism started taking shape. Economics, the mainstay of classical Marxism, lost out to “race” and “gender” with the added element of “decolonization.” We see a similar manifestation in India in the narrative of the Aryan invasion and “caste atrocities.” The Culturally Marxist Left, according to Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation, “has increasingly used racial and sexual characteristics as determinants of victimhood status and thus as reasons for the supposedly aggrieved to tear up the system.”
As one of the first examples of the tectonic shift taking place on American campuses, we saw Jesse Jackson, a civil rights leader tied to the legacy of Dr Martin Luther King, take out a precession of about 500 students at Stanford University, California, on January 15, 1987. Robert Curry, in his article on Intellectual Takeout, writes that Jackson and his group were protesting “Stanford University’s introductory humanities program known as ‘Western Culture’.” For Jackson and the protesters, the problem was its lack of “diversity.” The faculty and administration raced to appease the protesters, and “Western Culture” was formally replaced with “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.” This quest for diversity would later turn into a full-blown regressive and discriminatory DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) bureaucracy.
DECOLONIZATION PEDAGOGY
Post-colonial leftist scholars, such as Michael Foucolt and Jacques Derrida, started the tradition of radical activism under the guise of “social justice.” Consequently, on campuses, particularly in humanities departments, the pursuit of knowledge and truth took a back seat as the process of decolonizing the curriculum began in earnest. The decolonization movement targeted every part of the academy—from curriculum to faculty and bureaucracy, from literature to science, and even time and space.
Like many left-communist movements, decolonization professes violence as a means to achieve its ideological goals. According to Franz Fannon (Wretched of the Earth, 1961), “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.” This violence, for the anticolonialist, “itself is redemptive and therapeutic.”
The decolonization pedagogy, designed and implemented in coordination with the leftist college bureaucrats, turns students and researchers into activists. A course in “decoloniality” and “settler colonialism,” for example, teaches future teachers and administrators to deconstruct the society in which they live and then promote their views at work, in dining halls, dormitories, and throughout campus.
Decoloniality in the classroom “requires decentering dominant groups to make space for marginalized voices and experiences.” Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.”
The current crisis engulfing the U.S. campuses is a toxic mix of the influx of Qatari and Chinese funding on one hand and ideological indoctrination on the other. It has exposed the vulnerabilities of the Western education system. Education in the humanities has become unpalatably toxic while science faces the crisis of replication and is reeling from the damage caused by Covid dogma. The model based on the Socratic Dialogue and the Enlightenment seems on the verge of collapse. Can it be saved?
The author is a Chicago-based award-winning columnist.