Israel’s tragedy should spark rebellion in our woke sick unis

More than 30 Harvard University student organisations are holding Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ mass slaughter - sparking condemnation and calls for the Ivy League school to denounce the “abhorrent and heinous” support of “evil and terrorism.”

Has wokeism jumped the shark? In other words, have the radical leftists who for years have exercised increasing power in our universities finally gone too far?

I dare to hope so.

The recent disgraceful responses to the attacks on Israel that we have seen, from US university campuses to the streets of London – not forgetting the streets of Sydney – have dramatically increased awareness that something is rotten in the state of higher education in the English-speaking world.

Some of us have been battling against the ideological takeover of academia for close to a decade. Each year, we have been getting better organised. But we have struggled to convince people in the real world just how bad things are. The past three weeks may finally have changed that.

The expression “jump the shark” was coined in 1977 when the scriptwriters of long-running US comedy series Happy Days – now into their fifth season and running short of ideas – had the character of Fonzie jump over a shark while on waterskis. The campus left’s response to the attacks of October 7 was equally far-fetched but immeasurably more offensive.

Let’s remind ourselves just what happened three weeks ago. Two Gaza-based terrorist groups inspired by Islamist ideology, committed to the destruction of the state of Israel and backed by at least one government, staged a trailer for a second Holocaust. In their sadism and savagery, they exceeded even the horrors perpetrated by the Russian butchers of Bucha in Ukraine. The video evidence of their crimes, much of it recorded by the perpetrators, is almost unbearable even for seasoned reporters to watch. More than 1400 Israelis were killed, including children and even babies. More than 200 were kidnapped and are being held hostage. The idea that Israel should do nothing in response to this outrage – other than increase the flow of aid into Gaza – defies both human emotion and strategic sense. Only those wearing ideological blindfolds cannot see that.

Supporters of Palestine gather at Harvard University to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza at a rally in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14.

The president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, misread the room. After more than 30 Harvard student groups published a statement saying they held “the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”, she put out a bromide statement that “no student group … speaks for Harvard University or its leadership”. With its bland title, “War in the Middle East”, and its standard disclaimer that “such inhumanity is abhorrent, whatever one’s individual views of the origins of longstanding conflicts in the region”, this response was crafted to appeal to Harvard’s overwhelmingly liberal student body and faculty.

Gay had forgotten that Harvard’s true target market is the very small proportion of hugely successful alumni who give her university the largest donations. They soon reminded her.

Similar revolts by donors have been erupting at universities from Pennsylvania to Stanford.

At Stanford, the university where I work, there have been several pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent weeks, most recently one organised by Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine. Anti-Israel graffiti has been chalked on campus sidewalks.

Claudine Gay

But the most shocking episode occurred in a classroom just days after the attacks, when – according to student testimony in the San Francisco Chronicle – a lecturer blamed the conflict on Zionists, said that Hamas’s actions were “resistance”, asked Jewish students to raise their hands and then separated those students from their belongings, saying he was simulating what Jews were doing to Palestinians.

The lecturer, Ameer Hasan Loggins (who is in fact a graduate student in the African-American Studies department at UC Berkeley), then asked how many Jews died in the Holocaust. When students answered with six million, Loggins retorted: “Yes. Only six million”, arguing that the number of victims of colonialism was larger. He proceeded to ask every student to say where their ancestors were from, labelling each one a “coloniser” or “colonised” depending on their answers. When one student said they were from Israel, the lecturer responded: “Oh, definitely a coloniser.”

If that strikes you as outrageous, you have clearly missed the fact such thinking is rife throughout the Anglosphere academy. None of this should have come as a surprise, for it is the culmination of many years of infiltration of our universities by the radical leftist ideology sometimes known for short as “wokeism”. The reason such shorthand is necessary is that the academic left is a much more complex coalition nowadays than it was back in the 1930s, when Cambridge had its covert cadre of card-carrying Communists, or the 1980s, when Oxford snubbed Margaret Thatcher by refusing her an honorary degree.

Palestine supporters rally outside the Sydney Opera House after the October 7 attacks.

Although Marxist socialism is still part of the package, class warfare and anti-imperialism coexist (at times uneasily) with a variety of other ideologies based on alternative forms of identity, such as race and gender. “Woke” originated as African-American slang, but is now defined in the dictionaries as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”.

Like all cults and sects, the woke have their own idiosyncratic language and rituals. These include explicitly stating one’s “preferred pronouns” at every opportunity and acknowledging whenever possible that one is meeting on land expropriated from indigenous peoples. In marked contrast to conventional scientific understanding, race is an essential, unalterable attribute (you’re either Black, Indigenous and People of Colour or you’re incurably white), but gender is almost infinitely fluid. In each case, there is a hierarchy, determined mainly by the extent to which your assigned minority were “victimised” and “marginalised” by the white, cisgender colonisers.

This “intersectionality” produces some very strange bedfellows. “Free Palestine is a Feminist Issue,” according to a meme I saw last week, “it’s a Reprodutive [sic] Rights Issue, it’s an Indigenous Rights Issue, it’s a Climate Justice Issue, it’s a Queer Rights Issue, it’s an Abolitionist issue.” Quite how queer rights activists would fare if they travelled to Gaza to join in the fight for freedom is unclear, given Hamas’s implacable commitment to sharia law. But the woke have never worried much about the difficulty of aligning themselves with Islamists. After all, when words and silence can both be violence, but terrorism is just “what oppressed fighting the oppressor looks like,” then the constraints of logic must be just another manifestation of white supremacy.

There are four reasons this confused ideology has established itself in so many universities. First, an older generation of soggy liberal and social democratic professors could not resist appointing and promoting younger radicals, naively equating their illiberal outlook with their own youthful idealism. Second, various policies of affirmative action—designed to increase the proportion of female and non-white students and teachers in universities—had the unintended consequence of reducing intellectual diversity.

Third, as universities institutionalised policies such as the promotion of equity, diversity and inclusion and the decolonisation of this or that curriculum, bureaucracies sprang up that were swiftly staffed by woke believers. Finally, a coalition formed between woke students, professors and administrators, who discovered that there were almost no limits on the methods they could use to attack the surviving conservatives in their institutions. Anonymous letters of denunciation, cancellation campaigns on social media, the bearing of false witness, public mobbings, and extra-legal investigations – I have seen all of these techniques used against professors who dared to resist the woke cultural revolution.

For those of us determined not to surrender higher education in its entirety to wokeism, there has until now been little alternative but to organise for self-defence. My good friend, New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, established Heterodox Academy as a hub for research and collaboration on the issues of academic freedom. After I called for a “NATO for professors” in 2019, a group led by Robert George at Princeton established the Academic Freedom Alliance.

Jonathan Haidt

The latest British initiative kicks off on Monday with the inaugural meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which aims to bring together defenders of Western civilisation from the US, Britain and Australia. We are living through an exciting wave of institution-building that has the makings of anti-woke counter-revolution. The challenge remains to persuade potential supporters outside academia that our efforts are worthwhile.Up until this month, the response of many people who graduated from university in the 1980s or 90s has been something along these lines: “Well, universities are always left-leaning, aren’t they? And there’s always a minority of students who take ridiculous political positions. They’ll soon grow out of them, won’t they? After all, we did!”

This is the kind of complacency that has made it so easy for one university after another to be captured by the ideologues. The reality is that this isn’t the way universities were when I was an undergraduate. In those distant days, forty long years ago, academic freedom was at its zenith, as was intellectual diversity. More importantly, the people who ran universities did not regard themselves as political activists or social engineers.

More than 30 Harvard student organisations have blamed Israel for the conflict with Hamas.

Perhaps I am naive, but I think there is a chance the academic left’s deranged response to the October 7 attacks on Israel – their reckless jumping of the shark with overt celebrations of terrorism and anti-Semitism – may finally have roused the complacent from their torpor.

Ultimately, Western civilisation will be rescued from the mind virus of wokeism only if we are as organised as the left has been for years. The grim alternative is that every institution eventually succumbs to the motley pathologies of anti-racism, trans activism, and Islamism that travel in the Trojan horse marked “Equity, Diversity and Inclusion”.

Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is a founding trustee of the University of Austin and speaker at the inaugural ARC conference on Monday. The conference will also be attended by staff and contributors of The Australian.