This is a stark reminder that what is taught (or not taught) in the universities today is played out on the streets tomorrow.
How does one explain the pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas campus protests against Israel sprouting up around the country? After Oct. 7, attention was fixed on Harvard. On Dec. 5, when the three college presidents testified before congress, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and MIT became the focus. Recently Columbia has become an epicenter. And now, encampments and protests have spread to more than 50 college and university campuses.
If you’re like me, you’re deeply disturbed, though not entirely surprised, watching demonstrators display support for terrorist organizations, calling for divestment from Israel, and chanting “free Palestine,” “globalize the intifada,” “resistance by any means necessary,” and sometimes, “October 7th will happen 10,000 more times,” “kill the Jews,” and “death to America.” It hasn’t just ended with chants and taunts; in some cases, it has become harassment and physical violence, i.e., stopping Jewish students from entering buildings, including an altercation at Yale.
It is worth asking again, how did we get here? I contend this is happening because of what we stopped doing, and what we started doing.
What we’ve stopped doing is the basics of a traditional college education. We’ve not just abandoned the Judeo-Christian tradition (which happened so long ago that many cannot even remember that fatal step), we’ve also deconstructed the humanities and largely forsaken the liberal arts. It left us with a secular vacuum that would eventually be filled by a disastrous ideology.
More recently, we stopped requiring students to learn our history. We don’t teach about Western Civilization or require American history. Nationwide, only 17 percent of colleges and universities require a course in Western Civilization. Only 18 percent require a course in American history of government. This means the majority of students graduate knowing little about World War II or the Holocaust or, for that matter, the reason why the United Nations moved to establish a Jewish state after the war, let alone the massive contributions the Jews have made to our civilization.
