GOP cynics use antisemitism to push racist school agenda

Right-wing seizure of academia won't protect Jews

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The battle over the future of higher education has taken a dark and cynical turn.

Last week, near the end of a contentious Congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT all fell into a trap set by Rep. Elise Stefanik. Citing campus rules around free speech, they each were hesitant to make any declarations about whether calls for the genocide of Jewish people violated their schools’ code of conduct.

A clip of the ugly moment went viral, propelled by a tweet by Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager.

National outrage ensued, expressed publicly by bipartisan members of Congress, advocacy groups, and billionaires like Ackman who donate millions of dollars to the schools in question. Donations were rescinded, letters written, resignations demanded. The president of Penn has already stepped down, an inevitability given the reaction of the ultra-wealthy donors who have so much sway over Wharton School of Business, Penn’s most prestigious college.

Ackman celebrated the resignation on Twitter, where he has been incessantly posting about the Israeli war in Gaza (he’s very, very for it) and campus antisemitism (not a fan). Some of the clips he has posted are disturbing, with physical threats that deserve to be punished. Many others indicate young students’ lack of understanding and historical context, which should be remedied with discourse and instruction. There are fixes to these problems, but that’s not really what he’s seeking.

Unfortunately, there is far more to Ackman’s posts than college kids gone wild. In fact, whether he realizes it or not, Ackman is being used as the tip of the spear for a conservative movement that doesn’t want to create more civil and accepting spaces, but instead to decimate the entirety of modern academia and remake universities into factories of right-wing ideology.

At this very moment, Republicans are trying to foist right-wing education policies on two states where students and university leaders are desperately resisting.

An Ugly Alliance

For starters, Ackman’s cut of the Congressional testimony omitted crucial context: Stefanik, now a leading MAGA extremist, had just asserted that reciting pro-Palestinian freedom chants is the equivalent of calling for Jewish genocide.

What Stefanik was really asking was whether chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” was grounds for expulsion. Both the origin of the phrase and its ubiquity, including in protests led by Jewish activists, have created a debate over its true meaning. Expelling any student who has chanted the rhyme would mean a sizable reduction in the enrollments at many colleges and universities across the country.

Either Ackman didn’t care about misleading people, or he simply believes in the broadest and most diluting definition of antisemitism. It would seem hard to square his stance on antisemitism with his frequent defenses of Elon Musk, who likes to spread Nazi-era conspiracy theories, but pull back a minute, and it actually makes perfect sense.

The Same, Tired Racism

Over the past few months, Ackman has also repeatedly taken shots at Harvard’s efforts around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The rhetoric has steadily escalated, from Ackman blaming DEI for antisemitism to saying Gay would not have gotten the job as Harvard president “were it not for a fat finger on the scale.”

Ackman’s furious attacks on Gay reached new heights today, when he linked to a paper-thin, conspiracy-addled “investigation” that puts the academic at the center of the scandals surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and other infamous sex offenders. I don’t want to provide it any traffic, so feel free to Google it if you’d like.

The billionaire hedge fund manager also recently reposted a tweet demeaning to Gay that tagged far-right maniacs such as Chris Rufo, who rose to infamy by very purposely inventing the paranoias around Critical Race Theory and trans students. Rufo now serves as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s top goon in charge of dismantling of the Florida state college system.

(Tonight, Rufo published an “investigation” that alleged that Gay plagiarized throughout her doctoral thesis, even though she directly cited every source. At most, she could have used more quotation marks, but the intent was clear. That doesn’t matter to Rufo, though, because one of his expertises is pushing false narratives that cast doubt on Black intellectuals.)

Rufo’s deliberate culture war has lit a spark underneath long-held conservative disdain for college campuses, which the right sees as central source of left-wing heathenism. For years, conservatives sought to create its own parallel system of higher education, largely through schools with religious affiliations and “classical liberal” institutions, like Hillsdale College, that reject modernity for a white supremacy cloaked in the language of elite academia.

Blaming DEI for antisemitism, an unabashedly absurd notion, has become the standard Republican position. It is the kind of lizard-brain logic offered by shameless cynics, but recent events have advanced it far beyond the sewer where it belongs.

Affirmative Action for Conservatives

The far-right celebrated when the Supreme Court ended affirmative action based on race in college admissions, then got to work reimagining the system to provide conservatives a leg up on campus.

In May, DeSantis signed a bill that makes it illegal for Florida’s public colleges to fund DEI initiatives and introduced periodic crackdowns on classroom curriculum.

Upheld in November, the law empowers the state university system’s Board of Governors to check that professors are not teaching “identity politics” in core subjects. It also gives the board purview to ensure that no class materials include “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

In essence, professors cannot provide even the most obvious context for slavery, class warfare, or anti-feminist movements, a limitation that serves to prevent any questioning of the conservative movement’s preferred power structure.

In Texas, a similar law signed by Greg Abbott in August isn’t due to take effect until January 1st, but it’s already causing a multitude of issues. Public universities have been forced to close down their LGBTQ+ centers, job candidates have rejected overtures from universities, and the board of regents at one school, intent on promoting conservative causes, actively worked to kill the hiring of a new journalism professor because they suspected they’d be too liberal.

Resistance is Not Futile

Several live fights over campus diversity initiatives and hiring are coming down to the wire. In Wisconsin, the gerrymandered GOP legislature is trying to impose a number of far-right changes on the University of Wisconsin system through hostage-taking.

Speaker Robin Vos is blocking more than 30,000 UW system employees from receiving pay raises and withholding the money for a new engineering school. He’s made the release of both contingent on the system agreeing to end campus DEI programs, eliminating a program to foster more diverse staff, and freezing diversity positions for three years.

In a shameless bit of hypocrisy, he also wants to force the university system to woo conservative donors to fund a “professor who would focus on conservative thought, classic economic theory or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest.”

On Friday, it seemed as if the university system had acquiesced to Vos’s demands, but a day later, the UW Board of Regents voted to reject the deal. Minority students and staffers, along with some Democratic legislators, had urged the board to vote no, and at the moment, it seems as if they’ve staved off the GOP machine, even if it means no previously-approved raises.

In Ohio, a House committee just passed a higher education overhaul bill that would go even further than what’s been signed in other states. Its provisions include a broad list of excuses to fire tenured faculty and the elimination of mandatory DEI training.

Even worse, the bill would also place a ban on any effort to “indoctrinate” students with instruction on a “belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”

Students and faculty have spoken out against the bill, which has already been approved by the state Senate, for months and months. At the moment, the Speaker of the House says that it does not have the votes to pass the entire chamber. Then again, it wasn’t supposed to pass through committee, either.

Oklahoma legislators spent the fall “investigating” the legality of DEI programs, while the University of Missouri dropped diversity statements from hiring practices under fire from Republican lawmakers.

It’s not just conservative states, either. On Sunday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statement warning SUNY leaders of “aggressive enforcement action” should they not rein in any on-campus antisemitism and calls for genocide. She provided no definition of the phrase, and it’s likely, given her politics, that she shares Ackman’s broad application. No SUNY school has been cited for antisemitic incidents.

With Friends Like These…

As a Jew myself, it is odd to be placed in a position in which it seems as if I am forgiving or even defending antisemitism. But that perception is a significant part of the problem that we face. Calling everything antisemitic dilutes the meaning of the term, fosters resentment, and actually puts Jewish people in danger.

In an astonishingly short-sighted op-ed in the Washington Post today, a professor at Penn suggested that it was time to limit free speech to prevent antisemitism on campus. Professor Claire O. Finkelstein’s definition was as broad as Ackman’s, citing “from the river to the sea” as an incitement of violence and call for genocide, and thus grounds for punishment. Again, it’s a phrase used by Jewish groups all the time, and a sudden decision to deem it hate speech carries a deeply dangerous precedent.

Jewish Americans have a long history of supporting civil rights, social justice, and free speech. This has often led to mistreatment and even legal persecution; Jews were the primary targets of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his Red Scare. Reform synagogues have long been welcoming of LGBTQ+ people and sued over Florida’s abortion ban, citing the religious freedom protected in the First Amendment, so what happens when conservatives condemn those beliefs and shut down the opportunity to protest?

The danger isn’t just to freedom of expression: DEI opponents like Ron DeSantis are beloved by neo-Nazis and refuse to condemn them. Tucker Carlson, who has said DEI “promotes race-hatred” and has blamed it for many of the country’s perceived ills, openly traffics in “replacement theory” and antisemitic conspiracies. The white nationalists who attacked the University of Virginia in Charlottesville certainly were no fans of DEI programs.

In short, these people are not our friends. They do not care about Jews or antisemitism, and only support Israel for either geopolitical expedience or simply to hasten the rapture. When they get control of college campuses, they will institute full-on reactionary Christian agendas that make Jewish students feel very, very unwelcome, and there will be no opportunity to protest against these policies.

There are ways to handle the more serious incidents of antisemitism on campus without creating a right-wing police state that invites and emboldens actual antisemites, racists, and every other flavor of bigot.

History has taught us that it rarely end well for people who seek protection in alliances of convenience. In fact, Jewish history has been a cycle of being welcomed by despots and then being violently evicted when it became politically expedient. So much of the fear around antisemitism is derived from these violent expulsions and persecutions, which makes providing conservatives with the excuse they need to shut down freedom and multiculturalism less a solution than a downpayment on future subjugation.

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