Harvard is in trouble, but I’m finding it hard to have any sympathy. In the aftermath of October 7th, Jewish students at what is supposedly the United States’s most prestigious university were intimidated, vilified and silenced. It was an intolerable double punch after the trauma of Hamas’s brutal massacre in Israel. The ugly scenes at Harvard became a blueprint for campus protests throughout the US, especially at Columbia, UCLA and the University of Michigan. These all-campus jamborees of Israel-loathing were looked on benignly, and sometimes even joined, by faculty that are otherwise easily angered by crimes such as using the wrong gender pronoun.
Now, as threatened, Donald Trump is taking revenge. There is much that is grotesque about the president’s moral and political universe, and that of his cabinet, but on the matter of the anti-Israel ‘protest’ cultures fostered at America’s most elite universities, I couldn’t agree more with his tough approach.
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