Trying to quiet a donors\u2019 revolt triggered by what even\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0New York<\/em>\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0called her\u00a0tepid response<\/a>\u00a0to Hamas\u2019s Oct. 7 massacre, Harvard University President Claudine Gay visited Harvard Hillel two weeks ago.<\/p>\n \u201cAntisemitism,\u201d\u00a0she declared<\/a>, \u201chas no place at Harvard.\u201d Gay then announced an\u00a0advisory board<\/a>\u00a0to combat Jew-hatred on campus.<\/p>\n Combatting bigotry is always important. And the recent Jew-hating thuggery on campus is totally unacceptable. Still, defining this problem as a Jewish issue focused solely on antisemitism is a bureaucratic dodge rather than the bold leadership required. Gay is fighting an ugly symptom that most everyone opposes while ignoring the increasingly mainstreamed educational malpractice that is the underlying disease most administrators won\u2019t dare address.<\/p>\n The Palestinians\u2019 assault on civilizational norms exposed American higher education\u2019s broken compass. Until Gay and the Harvard community address the stunning moral failure revealed by their inability to condemn Hamas\u2019s ISIS-like attack with the clarity President Joe Biden displayed, the problem will metastasize.<\/p>\n I explain why in this open letter:<\/p>\n Dear President Gay,<\/p>\n I\u2019m still reeling from Hamas\u2019s savagery, as well as academics\u2019 moral confusion. It is incomprehensible that, on Oct. 7, so many Harvardians, so many intellectuals, failed to see the people targeted so brutally as people deserving of sympathy. An interlocking nexus of heartless, Manichean ideologies overrode these terror-cheerleaders\u2019 natural instincts to recoil at cruelty.<\/p>\n Antisemitism is only one of their dastardly dogmas. Others, the haters proudly admit, include anti-Zionism and anti-colonialism. The ideologies are all imposed, many worry, in too many Harvard classrooms. To echo your predecessor Lawrence Summers, anti-colonialism may not be antisemitic in intent, but we saw on October 7 that it is antisemitic\u2014as well as anti-American, illiberal and inhuman\u2014in effect.<\/p>\n This crisis isn\u2019t about Harvard\u2019s Jew-hatred in the 1920s, but Harvard\u2019s educational system today. While we should always denounce hatred, the more insidious problem involves the illiberal education many of us fear Harvard now provides and the doctrinaire campus culture it foments.<\/p>\n Many academics today see themselves as political activists,\u00a0proclaiming<\/a>, \u201cWe center global social justice in our intersectional teaching, scholarship and organizing.\u201d<\/p>\n Please clarify: Is that Harvard\u2019s new mission or does\u00a0veritas<\/em>\u2014truth\u2014remain its lodestone?<\/p>\n You cannot control student politics, but you must supervise the classroom. Students, parents and alumni want to know: Is Harvard educating or indoctrinating? Are students encountering liberal democratic values and an open culture of inquiry, or are too many professors pushing a totalitarian orthodoxy?<\/p>\n So, yes, I appreciate your denunciation of antisemitism at Harvard Hillel. But why didn\u2019t you do so at Memorial Church\u2014the traditional site at which Harvard presidents make moral statements to the entire Harvard community\u2014and address it to the world?<\/p>\n If you think the upheaval since the Hamas massacre only concerns Jew-hatred, you don\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n Moreover, your speech reeked of the classic Harvard bureaucratic sidestep. When I read, \u201cWe have confronted legacies of injustice in the past and emerged stronger,\u201d I winced. If you assemble some Harvard commission and tell us what we know\u2014that Jew-hatred is bad and Harvard had Jewish quotas a century ago\u2014please don\u2019t return to Hillel to use Jewish students as props as you congratulate yourself. It will be obvious that you failed to learn any lessons from Harvard\u2019s October failures.<\/p>\n Harvard needs a commission exploring what is being taught in classrooms and what tone professors set. Assess who gets hired and who gets promoted. Don\u2019t replace one political litmus test with another. Instead, address a growing fear that too many professors impose anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian doctrines on their students. Many of us fear there is not enough diversity of thought, not enough inclusivity for those who dare dissent, and not enough resistance to penalizing students and professors who don\u2019t sing from one particular illiberal hymnal.<\/p>\n Of course, the problem is not everywhere. But it\u2019s not nowhere. Find where it is, assess how widespread it is and start addressing it.<\/p>\n You enjoy celebrating the Harvard \u201ccommunity.\u201d What kind of community witnesses an orgy of unspeakable violence menacing thousands of innocents yet fails to support community members who might know someone even indirectly hurt or might simply be upset by the carnage? Shouldn\u2019t that have been every student\u2019s first instinct, instead of rushing to blame Israeli victims for allegedly causing the violence that shattered their lives?<\/p>\n Harvard\u2019s motto is \u201cVeritas.\u201d This refers to certain foundational, civilizational truths. Those truths demand an abhorrence of mass murder, mass rape, beheading babies, cutting fetuses out of wombs and all the other atrocities too many Palestinians perpetrated. It is a moral stain on our beloved \u201ccommunity\u201d and our search for truth that some Harvardians celebrated such monstrosities.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the scandal: More and more Harvard professors push a categorical fascism that defines people solely by their group identities. This anti-colonial ideology just demonstrated that some people believe that the \u201coppressed,\u201d the anti-colonialists, are ever-innocent of any crime, while some people, defined as the \u201coppressors,\u201d the supposed settler-colonialists, are forever guilty and deserve death. They believe even \u201csettler\u201d\u00a0babies<\/em>\u00a0are not innocents.<\/p>\n If some tenured crank spouted such amoral reductionist nonsense, we could roll our eyes, sighing that academic freedom occasionally indulges academic idiocy. But the fear you ignored at Hillel is that such academic malpractice is increasingly dominant at Harvard, that students keep finding themselves propagandized and bullied into parroting a party line that is a lie and often immoral.<\/p>\n There is much to debate regarding the Middle East. But are the evils of proudly filming a gang rape up for debate in your community? How come so many feminists were silent amid the largest, most-filmed explosion of gendered violence in history? What kind of liberal applauds such brutality? What kind of humanist celebrates baby-beheaders? Unless your commission addresses such questions, it\u2019s sidestepping the trauma so many Jewish and non-Jewish Harvardians are experiencing.<\/p>\n F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, despite being a Princeton guy: \u201cThe test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.\u201d It\u2019s to Harvard\u2019s everlasting shame that, on Oct. 7, Harvard Yard wasn\u2019t filled with students and professors who were anti-occupation, even anti-Israel, yet appalled by this violence. As a leading political scientist, that Harvard produces such bloodthirsty zealots should keep you up at night\u2014not worrying about Jewish feelings but about America\u2019s future.<\/p>\n And beware your Dean of Students\u2019 absurd Anti-Doxxing Task Force. Those who applaud rapists\u00a0should<\/em>\u00a0lose Wall Street jobs. Law firms\u00a0should<\/em>\u00a0reject sadists who rejoice when people are tortured. Why do you need a task force to explore why some Harvardians condemned the violence and its cheerleaders? And what kind of student protesters hide behind masks? They should learn: If you lack the integrity to stand publicly behind your statements, reevaluate your stance.<\/p>\n In your Oct. 9 message condemning the atrocities, you wrote, \u201cWe have no illusion that Harvard alone can readily bridge the widely different views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.\u201d<\/p>\n We Harvard alums recognized the Harvard presumption. While it\u2019s arrogant even to imagine Harvard could solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you as Harvard\u2019s leader must address this crisis in American higher education. Too many of us who flourished when Harvard was a center of critical thought fear that students today endure crimson-colored anti-colonialist reeducation camps. Too many of us who enjoyed an open-minded, thought-provoking liberal education fear the emergence of a close-minded, thought-controlling, illiberal poisoned-ivy education at Harvard and elsewhere.<\/p>\n If your commission doesn\u2019t address such concerns, you are wasting your time and insulting our intelligence. Please don\u2019t dodge this growing problem of educational malpractice that haunts the humanities and social sciences in particular. Please don\u2019t sidestep the moral challenge posed by many Harvardians\u2019 monstrous reaction to this savagery.<\/p>\n In short, I don\u2019t really need you to explore Jew-hatred at Harvard. It exists, it\u2019s bad, it\u2019s wrong, let\u2019s move on. But many of us wonder if what you said two weeks ago is true. The Harvard we knew was \u201ca place for inquiry and vigorous debate about our world\u2019s greatest challenges,\u201d a \u201cplace to reveal truth, not to deny facts.\u201d Please reassure us that fulfilling that ideal, rather than pushing a soul-crushing partisan orthodoxy, remains Harvard\u2019s primary mission.<\/p>\n Sincerely,<\/p>\n Gil Troy, Harvard A.B. \u201982, A.M. \u201985, Ph.D. \u201988.<\/p>\n Professor Gil Troy is an American presidential historian and, most recently, the editor of the three-volume set,\u00a0Theodor\u00a0Herzl: Zionist Writings,\u00a0the inaugural publication of\u00a0The\u00a0Library of the Jewish People<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n