When the NYPD moved in on the New York University pro-Hamas occupiers Monday night, professors formed a human chain to block the cops — neatly revealing a huge part of the problem in US academia.
Remember: The issue was the protesters’ decision to seize a central part of the campus in a bid to blackmail the school into divesting from Israel over the Hamas war — and their hateful intimidation of those who disagree.
This wasn’t free speech (nor even orderly civil disobedience), but the reverse: using force to impose their beliefs.
And these faculty fully endorsed that radical, deeply liberal action.
Plenty of their colleagues surely agree, even if unwilling to get arrested for it.
The simple fact is that tenured radicals now dominate American higher education, especially at elite institutions.
A 2022 Harvard Crimson survey found that 45% of faculty self-identified as “very liberal” (the leftmost option); 37% as “liberal,” 16% as “moderate” and just 1.46% as “conservative” — and none as “very conservative.”
Similarly, a 2017 survey of 7,243 tenure-track faculty at 40 top schools found a total of just 314 Republicans, outnumbered 11.5 to one by registered Democrats.
This is the result of the left’s decades-long “march through the institutions”: You only by being voted in by already-tenured profs get tenure — and right-of-center views are increasingly enough to get you blackballed.
So the whole field has increasing become a “monoculture,” to the point where dissent makes it hard to even get hired for even low-paying, no-job-security “adjunct” post.
Heck, tenured faculty get purged for challenging the left, as Princeton ex-prof Joshua Katz discovered, and even for research that shows the “wrong” answers, a la Harvard exile Roland Fryer.
Georgetown Law School forced out new hire Ilya Shapiro simply for a tweet criticizing President Biden’s open race- and gender-discrimination in picking a Supreme Court nominee.
Actual liberals have basically ducked as the left rose to power; today, most non-radicals just keep their heads down, knowing they could be next.
And most university presidents these days don’t care unless the mask slips enough to interfere with fundraising — which is most of what they do, and why so many of them are utterly flummoxed now when faced with the need to govern their campuses amid the explosion of rank antisemitism.
Antisemitism thinly disguised as anti-Zionism or “just criticism of Israel,” of course — including the faculty-taught lie that Israel is a “settler colonialist” project.
Bottom line: NYU could (and should) fire every prof who blocked the cops on Monday, and it’d be just a taste of the rot that needs expunging — and that’s just one school out of dozens that need deep redemption.
Now-on-strike donors like Columbia alum Robert Kraft, Harvard’s Bill Ackman and so on should expect to stay on strike for a very long time until the boards of their alma maters not only commit to righting the ships, but show major progress in getting back on course.