My truth? What about the truth? From halls of learning to an intellectual wasteland

Harvard University president Claudine Gay testifies before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Instead of Oxford University Press language experts choosing an annual (and often ridiculous) word of the year, they could do something that might help stem intellectual darkness. The editorial staff at OUP should draw up a shortlist each year of the worst, most distorted words and phrases that are enemies of clear thinking. The worst of the worst could be named the Brave New World Word or Phrase of the Year.

I have a list to get us started. First is “context” – a word used many times by the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology when they were asked a simple question last week during a US congressional hearing into the rise of anti-Semitism on US campuses.

Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn’s Liz Magill and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth whether advocating for the genocide of Jews violated their universities’ code of conduct regarding bullying and harassment.

None among the three intellectual thought leaders said yes. Instead, they waffled about it being nuanced and context-driven, as if they are stuck in an ivory tower minus the Socratic dialogue.

There is nothing nuanced about Jewish students being harassed and intimidated on campus by pro-Palestinian protesters chanting the chosen slogans of Hamas terrorists. What context makes this legitimate?

Context is an entirely sensible word when used properly to explain complex issues. During three minutes of excruciating testimony last Wednesday, since viewed by millions of people, these well-educated university leaders from some of the most esteemed universities in the US used “context” to let pro-Palestinian protesters off the hook for knowingly or unknowingly advocating on campus for the genocide of Jews.

Alas, free speech was not their north star. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal noted this week, Harvard was 248th out of 248, and Penn was 247th, in the annual college ranking by the free-speech Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

In September last year, during a mandatory online Title IX training session, Harvard students were told that not using a person’s preferred pronouns could violate the university’s sexual misconduct and harassment policies.

Racial microaggressions are policed on campus; academics are sacked for committing “progressive” speech crimes. But if you chant the genocidal slogans favoured by a terrorist group, it’s a matter of context.

It’s welcome news that Gay has walked back from her context drivel, and Magill was forced to resign. But when the first instinct of university elites is moral pusillanimity, why wouldn’t university students feel free to intimidate Jewish students?

University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill

To understand how we got into this mess, let’s move on to the next contender for worst word or phrase of 2023: “from the river to the sea”. Why on earth are university students running around campus chanting Hamas’s genocidal plan to claim the state of Israel “from the river to the sea”? Do the kids know what it means? They may not have learned about it at Harvard, Penn and MIT, but there is the internet.

The terrorists who murdered 1200 Israelis on October 7, raping and mutilating women, beheading babies, and kidnapping 240 others enshrined this genocidal slogan in their 2017 constitution: “Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.” The terrorist organisation doesn’t mention where seven million Jews and two million Arabs living between the Jordan River, bordering eastern Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea, to the west, should go.

Students are shouting this violent slogan on campus, disrupting classes and intimidating Jewish students because more than a decade ago liberal values lost out to a new political order on campus.

Liberalism is a progressive project that depends on a marketplace of ideas, on people listening, on genuine tolerance and treating people equally and civilly. Instead, we have become a marketplace of outrage where groups claiming to sit on the lower rung of the oppression ladder, along with their supporters, insist on different and higher rights to groups they imagine are higher up the oppression hierarchy.

The oppressed groups, with their special status, have succeeded in convincing university elites that words and ideas they disagree with amount to a form of violence.

The reverse is true for the so-called oppressor class: when Jewish students face real intimidation with genocidal chants, we’re told it’s just words.

Today, ideas are no longer contested. In these dark anti-intellectual times, people are.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology president Sally Kornbluth

For thousands of years, different groups have hated each other on the basis of race or religion or some other tribal identifier. We were meant to be better than our forebears, understanding that judging people according to their individual character, not by group membership, would better unify us. Yet, in 2023, group hatreds continue, though under the new name of identity politics.

As Andrew Sullivan wrote in 2018, we’re all on campus now, with this new oppression hierarchy seeping into our broader culture. Our streets are full of protesters chanting “from the river to the sea”. Hamas enjoys unwitting support from ill-informed Westerners, the latest a group of Australian artists whose collective letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza included Hamas’s genocidal jingle.

If you think it’s unkind to call them useful idiots, University of California, Berkeley political science professor Ron Hassner published the results of a small survey of students that found only 47 per cent of them could name the river and the sea. Some thought it was the Nile and the Euphrates, the Caribbean, the Dead Sea (which is a lake) and the Atlantic.

More than a quarter of the chant’s supporters claimed the Oslo peace agreements were never signed. Less than a quarter had heard of Yasser Arafat; 10 per cent thought he was an Israeli prime minister.

“There’s no shame in being ignorant, unless one is screaming for the extermination of millions,” wrote Hassner. Importantly, the survey of 250 students from across the US found that students switched from supporting “from the river to sea” to rejecting the motto when they learned some basic facts.

When it comes to genocide, facts should matter. Which brings me to another contender for bullshit word or phrase for 2023.

In her end of week mea culpa, the Harvard president told student newspaper The Harvard Crimson she was sorry for not conveying “my truth”.

My truth? What about the truth? Is Gay an Ivy League university president or an angsty teenage girl at a counselling session wanting to speak her truth? When a university leader describes a judgment about those who advocate genocide as her truth, she opens the door for others to claim they have a different truth. Which is exactly what is happening on university campuses right now.

Student protestors gather at Harvard University

Universities aren’t just coddling the minds of students. They are messing them up. When “my truth” is used to win an argument, why wouldn’t universities become breeding places for anti-Semitism?

The issue goes deeper still, instilling an aggressive form of anti-intellectualism. Students ill-equipped to distinguish between facts and feelings will rely on their subjective truth to make demands of university administrators, including protection from words and ideas that offend them. When someone speaks of their truth, they ring-fence it from debate.

Worst of all, the foundational virtues of a liberal democratic society are, more often than not, being turned on their head by people who dare to call themselves progressive.

My nomination then for the Brave New World Prize for most disfigured word or phrase for 2023 is “progressive”. Practitioners of illiberal identity politics have no claim to this word. Progress means improvement. It is one thing to critique the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza by suggesting a better way forward to stop terrorism. How many of the pro-Palestinian protesters, be they screaming students or letter-signing artists, are doing this? Most of them are taking the low road, echoing chants for the annihilation of Israel. That’s not progress.

But congrats all around to the prize-wining faux progressives.