The debate over antisemitism at elite universities has largely missed the point. The most important question isn’t how academic administrators respond to antisemitism but why the educations they provide seem to foster such hatred. For American Jews, the question cuts deeper: Given our traditional love of learning, do we care about the quality of education or only the prestige of the institutions providing it?
Former President Liz Magill can hardly be blamed for the failures of the University of Pennsylvania, an institution she led for barely a year. Neither can Claudine Gay of Harvard or Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, whose tenures began in July and January, respectively. That lawmakers had to ask about students’ genocidal sympathies at all reveals that some of our most prestigious universities are abjectly failing to cultivate virtue or wisdom.
Menacing mobs on campus suggest an absence of what has, since Socrates, been recognized as the essential prerequisite for learning: a readiness to acknowledge one’s ignorance. Students once aspired to learn what they didn’t know. At some institutions, it now appears the purpose of education is to express views of which the putative learners are already certain.