The current Joe McCarthy-style student protests on the Yale and University of Missouri campuses—protests that threaten to become a nationwide contagion—seek the heads of liberal administrators and professors for allegedly enabling or allowing real-and-imagined racist incidents. The University of Missouri student body president has belatedly admitted to fabricating a report about KKK activity on campus.
Such excesses are an easy target for conservative critics and now even liberal commentators like Jonathan Chait. I have avoided subject, partly for my disinclination to pile on, partly because I once taught at the University of Missouri, and didn’t like the place, though I did not see any evidence of racism or anti-Semitism, at least back then. The recently resigned Missouri President and Chancellor may have been case studies in poor communications and inept administration, but they were not racists and should not have been run out of office on a rail as if they were.
I feel compelled to write something at this critical juncture because this new student protest movement is more in the tradition of Joe McCarthy than Senator Eugene McCarthy, and more of potential danger to American Jewry than the nuclear contamination at Brandeis-Bardin currently receiving attention in the Jewish press. In my view, liberal-run colleges and universities have been absolutely critical to the twentieth century economic, political, cultural, and scientific successes of American Jews who, before World War II, had been subjected to anti-Jewish quotas by elite schools run as Protestant old boys’ clubs.
It is worth noting, as do the University of Missouri student protestors, that their university as recently as 1950 was run as a Jim Crow institution. Yet Jews and African Americans have both benefited, though in different ways and in different degrees, in the transformation of American higher education since “the Good War,” and not only in “the Show Me” state.
The earlier student protest movements peaked during the period 1968-1970. I saw first-hand as a UCLA undergraduate and graduate student, the protests that culminated in Spring 1970, shutting down the campus in a reaction to Nixon’s Cambodian “incursion.” Racial injustices, including the police shooting of African American students at Jackson State University in Mississippi (an event overshadowed in the national media by the killing of white students at Kent State), were also much on the minds of that generation of protestors. I was ambivalent then about whether a campus shutdown as a strategy to fight war and racism on and beyond the campus was the best means to achieve ends which I shared. I have no ambivalence now in condemning a new generation of protests that ostensibly are against racism, but really seem to want to transform campuses into controversy free zones where prevailing leftist orthodoxies are unchallenged.
If students want to address issues such as skyrocketing tuition and college loan debts, they ought to do so directly, not by manipulating racial and gender tensions to advance their agenda.
Combining elements of McCarthyism with the Maoist Red Guard, the new student protest movement revealed its ugly face in an Internet video when University of Missouri Assistant Professor of Communications Melissa Click called in student “muscle” to prevent an award-winning student journalist from putting a spotlight on a rally by protestors. Are African American football players, who distracted attention from the losing record of the Missouri Tigers by threatening to strike against racism, the foot soldiers cast by the new protest movement in the role of providing “muscle” against free speech? Some campus radicals have even called for ripping up the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights because free speech creates an “unsafe environment” on campus for people of color.
What does Professor Click teach, subsidized by research grants as well as an academic salary? Fifty Shades of Grey, Lady Gaga, and sexism in Thomas the Tank Engine children’s videos. Is this what “higher” liberal education has come down to?
Finally, I will draw three distinctions between the University of Missouri protests and the protests against anti-Israel, anti-Jewish bias on UC campuses which I have supported:
• Our criticisms of UC administrators at campuses like Irvine focused on inaction or inadequate action regarding systemic incidents of bias over periods of many years. The University of Missouri protests focus on sporadic incidents that are few in number and, in the case of the so-called “poop Swastika” scrawled on a dormitory wall, poorly documented.
• We never demanded that administrators be fired, only that they wise up and better administer anti-discrimination policies. We did want to change policy regarding, for example, the definition of anti-Semitism, but we never demanded a personnel purge with some sort of student politburo replacing regents or trustees in choosing university presidents, a demand at the University of Missouri.
• Unlike the University of Missouri protestors, we also never demanded that the University establish probably unconstitutional racial or ethnic hiring quotas to imbed members of our movement in the university administration.
A rabbi with a luxurious beard is said to have sat on the left side in the Frankfurt Assembly during the Revolution of 1848. Asked why, he replied: “Because Jews have no right.” There may be good practical and moral reasons for the bulk of American Jews to remain liberals, but good sense requires that they remember that historically they have had enemies on the left, not just Stalin but anti-Israel radicalism, and that another period when leftist movements threaten Jewish welfare may be taking shape on and off campuses.
The American Jewish community should recognize it has “skin in the game” when it comes to preventing campuses from being reconfigured as PC loony bins. The one goal I can wholeheartedly agree with advanced by the new protest movement is that universities do indeed need to invest more in mental health counseling and treatment for students. Those who require help include especially protest leaders, desperately in need of purgation of their own destructive political hatreds.
