Rachel Fish
Sapir Journal, Vol. Five Spring 2022
“As the university became ever more focused on identity issues as part of postmodern, post-colonial developments, Jewish faculty steered clear of conversations about Jewish identity or engagement.”
Elite universities are sites of seduction. Grassy quads, the vaulted architecture of stone and brick, the library with its oak tables and little desk lamps, all suggest that modern-day America has been left behind. So do the universities’ mottos: “Veritas,” “Lux et Veritas,” “Disciplina in Civitatem,” “Truth even unto its innermost parts.”
For many who spend time on elite American campuses, however, the cognitive dissonance between image and reality is profound. Far from being a haven for free inquiry and intellectual growth — the pursuit of truth and light, as well as an education for citizenship — the 21st-century American university is dominated by political agendas, litmus tests, and demands that students commit to a narrow set of worldviews and opinions. The institutions that promise parents they will equip their children with the intellectual tools to grapple with society’s most challenging questions have instead become toxic, politicized environments, indoctrinating more than they educate. And truth be told, non-elite universities are often no better.
Lamentably but predictably, Israel is central to this crisis, chiefly in the shape of attitudes to Zionism. The State of Israel is an obsession of today’s university, a linchpin around which an extraordinary volume of discourse, pedagogy, and politics revolves.
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