Time to Say Arrivederci to the Ivy League

(L–R) Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University; Liz Magill, president of University of Pennsylvania; Pamela Nadell, professor of history and Jewish studies at American University; and Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on Dec. 5, 2023. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Commentary

As a graduate of two Ivy League schools, I should normally be at least ambivalent about saying goodbye to the Ivy League.

But I’m not.

It’s more like good riddance—and not just because I can now toss that annual class dues solicitation in the circular file unopened without guilt.

And I’m not, I hasten to add, a graduate of Columbia—once home to such brilliant minds as Isidor Rabi, Milton Friedman, and Lionel Trilling—which has become such a sewer of anti-Semitism, it has become literally unrecognizable. That would have made it even easier.

An ironic benefit of the shameful display in front of Congress by the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania (now resigned), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is that they have revealed their institutions for what they have become—monolithic institutes of propaganda only somewhat less extreme than the communist Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Here in the United States, “woke”—an obsession with such reactionary nonsense as “safe spaces,” “cultural appropriation,” and “intersectionality,” just to name a few—has become the lynchpin of this brainless propaganda that during the Cultural Revolution was filled by espousing Mao Zedong Thought while waving the “Little Red Book.”

What are the results? The American IQ has been going down for years, but that may be the least of it.

Basic knowledge that comes from a real education seems to have vanished as well.

A new poll from The Economist reveals that roughly 20 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust didn’t happen.

A professor who did his own polling of the pro-Hamas demonstrators found that less than 25 percent had never heard of former Palestine Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, and 10 percent thought Arafat was an Israeli prime minister!

I would wager the percentage who know the basic history of Gaza is even lower.

Does the LGBT crowd demonstrating know the attitude of Hamas toward gay people or of their Iranian sponsors who reportedly hang homosexuals from telephone poles?

To say we have a generation of bigoted quasi-illiterates streaming through our streets might not be an exaggeration.

Now, you would think the Ivy League would be better, but it’s really not. In fact, it’s more like the root of all evil when it comes to disinformation.

In areas such as gender studies, graduates, who don’t have huge career prospects from those majors, end up teaching in lesser institutions across the country, spewing back the same stale ideological bilge they learned in their “elite” college.

It’s a self-replicating process.

A similar pattern emerges in the humanities and social sciences in general, even, to a growing extent, the hard sciences, making for a national epidemic of unchallenged thought so far from real diversity that it makes the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) obsession dominating most of our schools at all levels the exact opposite of its proclaimed intention.

I personally know several professors—who have views barely to the right of center, if at all—who still shut up about their opinions to keep their jobs.

If you believe the fish rots from the top, it is time to break up, or somehow seriously diminish, the importance of the Ivy League.

That may already be happening. Some students and their families are already heading elsewhere. More will do so.

Moreover, because of these august institutions’ weak-kneed response to anti-Semitism—it’s about the “context,” don’t you know?—rich alumni such as billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman are starting to rebel.

But this emphasis on anti-Semitism is only one part of the story. And if and when the current war in the Middle East dies down, that will fade, at least somewhat.

The problem of elite schools dictating thought will remain, however.

This is the time to attack the cancer at its root, to take apart the system, not just, to use a psychiatrist’s phrase, “the presenting complaint” (in this case, anti-Semitism).

That’s bad, of course, but our overall educational system, with some notable exceptions, has become as rigid as the most extreme of orthodox religions.

Some years ago, I started writing that one of the great problems of our media was that The New York Times still dominated as a kind of final authority for many outlets. The networks and other mainstream media looked for what The New York Times was saying on the issues of the day before finally staking out a position.

I wrote this was a terrible situation for our society, a form of thought control in and of itself, and, with tongue somewhat in cheek, referenced Chairman Mao on the subject when he said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and let a hundred schools of thought contend.”

Now, I say the same thing about Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, etc., not to mention all aspects of our educational system high and low, at all ages.

We should end their hegemony and “let a hundred flowers bloom and let a hundred [undoubtedly a lot more] schools contend.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.