And the toxic waste it emits isn’t chemical but intellectual sludge, in the form of racial bigotry, antisemitism and crude Marxism.
“It’s amazing,” constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro said a few days ago in testimony to a committee of the US Commission for Civil Rights: “The heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country.”
This isn’t the workplace bias and schoolyard name-calling that once marked antisemitism in this country — it’s now reached the performance stage.
Like the recent incident in which antisemitic Cornell student Austin Franco rejected a job offer from a Jewish-owned startup with the hateful message “Not interested in working for a Jew” — then raised more than $20,000 from equally antisemitic goons on a crowdfunding site.
Franco attends the same campus where antisemitic students this semester trapped the university’s president in his car, holding him hostage after he hosted a civil debate over Israel.
Violence, threats and taunts have hit Jewish students on campuses across the country, from Columbia and Yale on the East Coast to UCLA on the West.
Why have universities been so limp-wristed in addressing this unvarnished hatred?
One reason is money: Arab sheikdom Qatar has pumped tens of billions of dollars into US universities in recent years — and in the academy, money talks.
But another reason is that our universities have been the Petri dish in which this nasty ideology is cultured.
Law schools and humanities departments have embraced Critical Race Theory, which views everything through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed.