The Moral Rot of Higher Education

                   The genocidal attack of Hamas on Israel on October 7 revealed what a lot of us already knew. America’s campuses are a moral disaster and the preeminent threat to Western, Christian civilization.

Ostensibly, the Left’s anger was aimed at Israel and the Jews, but it was oh so much more than that. Yes, the Progressive, Marxist Left hates Israel and by extension is anti-Semitic. Do they hate Israel just because they are Jewish? That is part of the reason. But a bigger reason for Israel hatred is that the Jewish state represents the blessings of Western civilization. And there is nothing the Left hates more than Western, Christian civilization.

The Moral Rot

On October 7 the Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas, invaded Israel and murdered 1400 innocent civilians. Hamas terrorists burned people alive, raped victims, shot babies in the head. One baby was put in an oven and baked alive. The final death toll was over 1,400 dead Israelis—many of them women and children. It was the worst day for Jews since the Holocaust.

And how did many in the academic community and America’s college students respond? With rejoicing. A professor at Cornell told students at a rally for Hamas that they should be exhilarated by the terrorist attack. Students rallied at universities around the United States to denounce Zionist “genocide,” they held vigils for the Palestinian “martyrs,” and applauded Hamas’s efforts at “decolonization.”

Some Jewish students put up posters of Israeli kidnap victims being held hostage. They were torn down by Left-wing college students.

31 student organizations at Harvard issued a joint statement saying that they held the Israeli government completely responsible for all the violence.

The Ethnic Studies Department at CU, Boulder, where I taught for nearly 25 years, issued a statement: “[We stand] in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to self-determination….We loudly condemn the horrific on-going settler violence of the Israeli state occupation and the brutal bombing of innocent Palestinian people in the Gaza strip by its military.” That’s right. CU’s Ethnic Studies Department blames the Jews for their own destruction.

Julia Steinberg is a junior at Stanford. Her essay in the Free Press is a must read. It begins: “I am 21 years old and Jewish. Apparently, 48 percent of my peers want people like me dead. 

As of October 23, 64 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds think what happened on October 7 was a terrorist attack. Seventy-seven percent of us think “it’s true that Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israeli civilians by shooting them, raping and beheading people including whole families, kids and babies.” But when asked, “in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?” 

Forty-eight percent said Hamas.”

A college student can be arrested for praying near an abortion clinic, expelled or at least condemned for misgendering a fellow student. A politician can be hauled into court for arguing that gay marriage is not biblical and quoting Bible verses to that effect. But it is perfectly alright to call for the mass murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel.

If you do not unequivocally condemn Hamas, you are morally degenerate.

The cause of the moral rot

How have today’s universities and her students arrived at a position of complete moral bankruptcy? The Left’s anti-Israel hate I described in a recent video linked below. For them it is part of their religious catechism. The Left divides the world up into oppressor/oppressed or evil/good. Two generations ago they decided Israel is evil. Because Israel, ironically, represents Western Christian culture. So, for more than 50 years Leftist college professors have been teaching students to hate Israel. It is how they derive religious meaning for their lives.

Rich Lowry: “The cataract of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses has been shocking, but it shouldn’t be surprising. It is the poisoned fruit of teaching a generation of college students to despise their own civilization.”

Madeline Kearns: “Western elites promote the hatred of our cultural inheritance as a mark of moral and intellectual sophistication.”

Surely Jacob Howland is right: “The events of recent weeks have brought home an ugly truth: far from equipping students to preserve and extend civilization, American universities—especially elite ones—have been teaching them how to destroy it….I can only hope that many Harvard faculty are appalled at the little monsters they’ve helped to create.”

But they won’t be. They agree with the little monsters they have created. They are doing what they created them for.

Craig Carter in World: “Marxists have colonized (I use that word deliberately) our universities. They flourish in the grievance studies pseudo-disciplines and the departments of what used to be English literature. Their malign influence has now spread into the professional schools and has created a gigantic, expensive, wasteful bureaucracy called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” the goal of which is to stamp out diversity of thought, prevent open debate, and impose a stifling Marxist ideology on the institution by going so far as to control thought by controlling language itself.”

So clearly, Higher Education is a moral trainwreck. Why? For the simple reason given in Romans 1:21: They abandoned belief in the true God of the Bible, they did not thank Him or honor Him. They have tried to replace Him with a cultic alternative religion of their own making. As a result, their foolish hearts are darkened. They think they are wise but they are really, really stupid.

The solution to the moral rot

So what is to be done about all this? The writers I quoted above have a number of suggestions. They call for defunding higher education. But this will be hard. Universities are entrenched and many of them are very, very rich. Harvard’s endowment is 51 billion dollars. They could offer every undergraduate free tuition for 140 years and not run out of money. Instead they charge them 55,000 a year.

Madeline Kearns in NR: “The only political solution is to elect representatives who take preserving Western civilization seriously.”   Then she adds, “Good luck with that.” No, our elected politicians are not going to solve this problem.

A few are starting new universities that they hope will someday compete with the enemies of our civilization. But they are small and tiny in number. Still, it’s worth a try and I wish them well.

My own view is that the restoration of Western civilization will only be accomplished through the force that created it in the first place: the triumph of Christianity and the recrudescence of Jesus Christ and His followers. Will that happen? No one can know with certainty, but I am very hopeful for the revival and triumph of our faith and, hence, Christian culture. See my video below on the reasons for my optimism.

I can remember for much of my life thinking that Soviet communism would never die. Then one day, in William Buckley’s phrase, God cleared His throat and it was dead. God will do the same with all His enemies. He will give them time to repent, then He will clear His throat and destroy them. 

We need to be diligent about doing His will in our daily lives, trusting Him with the big picture. He seems to have handled it well in the past. I think we can trust Him for the future.

Thanks for listening. May the Lord bless you this day in a mighty way.

More: See my video: The Greatest Enemy of Mankind is the Academic Community

And: Why Does the Left Hate Israel?

And: Why I Love the Jewish People

And: Why I am Hopeful About the Future of Western Civilization

See also:

American Universities' Suicide Wish

The Problem with Harvard is Moral Rot

Harvard is a National Disgrace

Universities Have Never Been More Dangerous or Destructive

The Leading Problem in the World is the Academic Community

A Wakeup Call for the West

The Left Doesn't Just Hate Israel: They Hate Western (Christian) Culture

Julie Steinberg: Why Do Young Americans Hate the Jews?

Statement by CU's Ethnic Studies Department