During a recent congressional hearing, three Ivy League presidents did embarrassing impressions of free speech champions. Take Harvard’s Claudine Gay.
Her charade was as impressive as her university's free speech score of zero. Yes, our nation is filled with muzzle-mad universities, but according to an analysis by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Harvard is the worst of them all. When the issue turned to antisemitic speech, Gay’s attempt to channel John Stuart Mill flopped.
After all, hers is the same institution that polices a wide array of speech. It’s the same institution that recently revoked Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance over comments he made on social media as a 16-year-old, comments for which he has apologized.
It’s the same institution that showed president Lawrence Summers the door after he made some heavily qualified, though still forbidden, remarks about women in science—during an off-the-record speech no less!
According to Harvard alumnus and FIRE co-founder Harvey Silvergate, the administration decided that it was three strikes and you’re out for Summers. You see, he’d already dared to utter kind words about the ROTC and suggest that, just maybe, anti Israel rhetoric was a cover for antisemitism.
Of course, Harvard and other universities should be consistent. Of course, they should support a culture of free speech, but that requires serious and sustained commitment. There is no easy fix, no revamped DEI program or administrative directive, that can beat back antisemitism. What universities face stretches beyond antisemitism. What they face is a generation that might be flirting with barbarism.
A new poll, produced in part by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, illuminates the extent of the moral corrosion. According to the Harvard-Harris poll, 48% of Americans aged 18 to 24 sided with Hamas in the wake of the Oct 7 massacre in Israel.
As Robert Graboyes of
notes, they’re not siding with the Palestinians. They’re siding with Hamas. They’re siding with those who murdered 1,200 people, most of whom were civilians.They’re siding with those who mutilated children, raped, and dismembered women, and then video taped it for all the world to see. But don’t worry, it’s all justified they tell us, because the dead were “settler colonists.”
Said one journalist who viewed some footage deemed too gruesome to be released to the public, “The most difficult thing is, you see images of domestic life. Parents with children in pajamas, in their underwear. And all of a sudden, really, really violent things are happening to them.”
In one clip, two young boys watch as barbarians murder their father right in front of them. A nanny cam captures one of the boys screaming, “Why am I still alive?”
Rooting for Ignorance
We should do our best to see the world as it is. Overhyping threats can distract us from that goal and make us paranoid. But underhyping threats also clouds reality, and in some cases it could lead to catastrophe.
I really don’t want to believe that nearly half of America’s young are flirting with barbarism, but let’s see what an imperfect attempt at rational risk assessment reveals.
Maybe the poll reflects ignorance more than evil (and isn't that a dour sign of the times when “ignorance” is the more comforting reality?) Maybe many young people who hold signs and chant slogans just don’t know what they’re talking about.
That’s what a poll commissioned by UC Berkeley political scientist Ron Hassner found: 68% of college students supported the “from the river to the sea” chant, but a majority were ignorant of basic facts about the conflict.
From which river to which sea? Who’s Yasser Arafat? They couldn’t say.
One engineering student reported that he “definitely” supported “from the river to the sea” because “Palestinians and Israelis should live in two separate countries, side by side.”
Hassner continues:
Shown on a map of the region that a Palestinian state would stretch from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, leaving no room for Israel, he downgraded his enthusiasm for the mantra to “probably not.” … In all, after learning a handful of basic facts about the Middle East, 67.8% of students went from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the mantra.
Whew! Not evil, just ignorant!
Maybe the situation isn’t as dire as I’d feared. After all, if you return to the Harvard-Harris poll, you’ll see that support for barbarism plummets with age. Among respondents 65 and older, only 5% support Hamas.
Maybe young people will grow out of their support for the October 7 massacre, but is that realistic?
Victory for Groupthink
Gen Zers may head to campuses that look like campuses have looked for hundreds of years. But what’s going on inside of them today is quite different. College students have long been exposed to a fair amount of political diversity, and that meant undergrads could participate in and witness many clashes of ideas.
Intellectual fads have always been a part of campus life, but thoughtful dissidents could help reign in groupthink. And professors often modeled noble intellectual habits. Spitting out a trendy platitude might not cut it with your Marxist professor who valued intellectual rigor above ideological conformity.
But groupthink gained momentum in the mid 90s.
Colleges went from leaning left to surrendering to leftist uniformity. Administrators demonstrate even less political diversity than faculty and their ranks have swelled in recent decades. At Harvard, they outnumber undergrads. And administrators don’t just shuffle papers. They typically spearhead some of the most politicized events on campus.
Time to Panic?
Not only are students exposed to less political diversity than their predecessors, universities beat them over the head with simplistic good-vs-evil, oppressed-vs-oppressor binaries. With fewer dissidents around, today’s fads—like anger toward “settler colonists''— are more likely to spiral into mass madness.
Even young people who don’t attend college have been shaped by it. They’ve been instructed by graduates of heavily politicized schools of education. They’ve been told the modern fables of good vs evil. They watch the university's handiwork on screens.
Academia cooks up novel ideas, shields them from challengers, and funnels them to Netflix and the like. If young people were self-consciously ignorant at least they might exhibit more caution. But like a cocky-scrawny gym bro warming up for a 315-lb bench press, our culture teaches students to be intellectually weak but supremely confident.
Many aren’t embarrassed to flaunt their ignorance: “Come to think of it, maybe that Osama guy was right!” Countless TikTokers make that declaration, fold their arms, and expect a flood of likes. But unlike the gym bro who will be crushed by the weight of his naïveté, those TikTokers may very well receive the praise they seek.
Perhaps the greatest argument in favor of declaring a moral state of emergency comes from two other questions in the Harvard-Harris poll. A slight majority of 18 to 24 year olds says the October 7 massacre can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. And a larger majority agrees the attack was genocidal. That seems to go a long way toward obviating the ignorance defense.
Perhaps the greatest argument in favor of not declaring a moral state of emergency is a simple one. There just isn’t enough evidence yet. Let’s wait and see what other polls reveal.
You’ll find me standing on the “don’t panic” side. For now.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.
Ignorance of history in college students shouldn’t be a surprise when you understand how badly they have been served in America’s public schools. The teaching material, and many teachers, eschew any degree of depth in history. Does anyone remember a junior high school class called Civics? It is no longer found in most of our schools.