CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, December 18, 2023

Hamas ignites the Bonfire of the Universities

The last time this writer taught at the university level was in the early 1980s. That was near the end of the Golden Era of free speech on college campuses. Much has changed. And, as we saw in the wake of the Hamas atrocities against innocent Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, not for the better.

Basically, the administrators of America’s most prestigious universities discovered they could use the Federal Student Loan Program to raise tuition rates into the stratosphere. Moreover, by lowering admissions standards, universities could increase the size of their student body from which they could extract sky-high tuition even from students who were so academically unprepared that they had no business being in any college.

The administrators also discovered they could get the wealthy Oligarch parents of Eastern European and Middle Eastern students to fork over tons of cash so the Oligarchs could say their sons were at the top Ivy League colleges or at Stanford out west.

But wait. What do you do when you discover your cash-grabbing admissions process brought you some students with IQs genetically ravaged by alcohol or by centuries of too-cloe inbreeding? Answer: You lower your standards by doing away with SAT scores. You downgrade your course offerings from the traditional, demanding disciplines to softer, easier fields such as political science or journalism, or even offering majors in Racial and DEI studies.

You purge your traditional high-standards faculty and replace them with professors and teaching assistants who do not worry much about such details as class attendance and who would rather not have to grade a bunch of term papers.

To make sure the sub-standard students could get into grad school and keep paying those sky-high tuitions, all students get As and Bs. Meanwhile, the grad schools do their part by no longer requiring the Graduate Records Exam (GRE) or the LSAT for admission to law school.

In short, the colleges that were once the envy of the world could not break their addiction to heaping student loan debt on their students and to accepting cash from Eastern European and Middle Eastern oligarch parents who, all too often, taught their offspring to hate Jews and other minorities.

Like Wonder Wife, this writer has more degrees than a thermometer, including a post-doctoral certificate from Harvard’s JFK School of Government. But those distinctions were earned back in the 60s and 70s, before the academic rot set in, leaving me with fond memories of professors whose political leanings I could not detect.

Hopefully, the big-ticket donors will sweep away the regents who hire presidents who think the genocide of Jews "depends on the context."

Although clearly afraid to fire Harvard’s first black, female president, Harvard’s board threw her under the bus by writing, "...So many people have suffered tremendous damage and pain because of Hamas’ brutal terrorist attack and the University’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation. Calls for genocide are despicable and contrary to fundamental human values. President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the University’s fight against anti-Semitism..."

Okay. But the duct tape remains over my Harvard bumper sticker..

Suggested reading: "How Were the Universities Lost?" by Victor Davis Hanson, in American Greatness, December 7, 2023. "The Treason of the Intellectuals," by Niall Ferguson, in the Free Press, December 11, 2023. The Rooster Ba,r by John Grisham, 2017.

©2023. William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com