What? Me an anti-semite?

How the ideology of "oppressionism" betrays the deep intellectual rot in our institutions of higher learning

The much-discussed testimony, including its acrimonious aftermath, of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania before Congress on the issue of anti-semitism on campus was an unqualified Scheissschau, as they say in German. 

No doubt about it.

But while conservative punditry continues to rail obsessively about how the sad spectacle decisively exposed what conservative author Douglas Murray – among many others – branded the “moral rot” in American higher education, I think Dr. Phil, who is not usually considered a guru on that particular topic, hit the nail on the head.

He called it “intellectual rot”.

Now as one of those long-tenured academics with not only a Harvard Ph.D., but also a lengthy and controversial Wikipedia profile, one of a breed whom right-wing media outlets routinely single out as the transcendent source of such rot, I think I am entitled – perhaps counterintuitively - to side with Dr. Phil.

One disclaimer, however.

I probably would never cite Dr. Phil’s YouTube video in a footnote to one of my ridiculously recondite published journal articles in post-structuralist semiotics. 

The fallout from last week’s ivy-striated version of a super stock diesel truck pull was all too predictable. 

Despite the C-Span extravaganza in which the extremely complex and “context-sensitive” ethical question of whether it’s okay to call for the genocide of Jews was parsed by the crème de la crème among university presidents in the iconically scholastic idiom of how many fallen angels can do the Cannibal – that’s a popular TikTok dance BTW – on the head of a pin, the proud champions among my peers of academic freedom finally rose to the occasion and rendered judgment.

Their verdict?  Higher education is under siege, and we must circle the wagons to maintain the inalienable right to defend genocide, all the while remaining hypervigilant, for instance, in censuring “fatphobia”.

Sol Gittleman, former provost at Boston’s Tuft University, blamed the entire kerfuffle on the congenital “anti-intellectualism” of the American public.

“Beating up on our own higher education system”, he writes, “has been a favorite American sport since long before the Israel-Hamas war.”

The barbarians need to be walled off, and the sword of contextualization wielded mercilessly against them, he argued.  Referring to Harvard president Claudine Gray, whose board resisted over the weekend a popular hue and cry to oust her, and MIT chief Sally Kornbluth, Gittleman mused:

No matter what they say or do now, the two remaining presidents will continue to be pilloried. But they ought to remain in their positions and defy this unjust witch hunt: caving now would be worse than falling on their free-speech swords.

Some Harvard faculty, even prior to the hearings in Washington, went so far as to chastise Gray for even calling out anti-semitism.  In a Nov. 13 letter that begin “Dear President Gray”, the faculty group declared: 

We were…profoundly dismayed by your November 9 entitled ‘Combating Anti-Semitism”.  The University's commitment to intellectual freedom and open dialogue seems to be giving way to something else entirely: a model of education in which the meaning of terms once eligible for interpretation is prescribed from above…

What does not demand “interpretation” is a report published in 2022 that showed Harvard ranked number one among all institutions of higher learning in each of three categories of anti-semitism.

Nor does the concept of “intellectual rot” require similar exegetical intervention.

Not only does the aforementioned faculty letter illustrate perfectly what the expression connotes, but the statement back in October pronouncing Israel “entirely responsible” for the Oct. 7 slaughter by Hamas of 1500 Jews and originally signed by 33 Harvard student groups also suffices.

If Harvard – my own alma mater - is truly the global paragon of the life of mind, as it has persisted for generations in the Western imaginary, then the rot at the very top must reach all the way down below to the myriad institutions that reflexively seek to emulate it.

Therein lies the scandal.

Or the “rot”.

Or the “ideology”.

The particular ideology on display was characterized by Harvard Divinity School rabbi David Wolpe, who stepped down from the university’s anti-semitism advisory board after President Gray’s remarks in Washington DC. 

Wolpe spoke approvingly and respectfully of Gray’s service at Harvard, but denounced in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, what he termed the “evil” ideology “that grips far too many of the students and faculty.”

It is an ideology, Wolpe explained, that

…works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil.  Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe.

The “ideology” to which Wolpe alluded is not in any way unique to Harvard.  Like Covid in its early stages, it can be described as a devastating virus that gestated for quite some time in the wilds of esoteric academic theorizing, first in the social sciences and then in the humanities. 

Or it may be compared to a “lab leak”, depending on your preferred paranoid perspective, that somehow found its way into the cognitive mainstream, then both proliferated and mutated with unprecedented velocity.  The popular term is “woke”, but that is like calling Spanish flu the “grip”.

We can now find strong evidence of this “ideology” at the forefront of official statements from such august professional bodies as the American Psychological Association (APA) in its “inclusive language guide”.

For example, the guide encourages “all people to adhere to the basic principles of inclusive language” which implies that one “choose appropriately specific terms and to show respect by calling people what they call themselves”. 

Such terminology, the guide adds, should comport with every group’s “identity”.  However, identity itself must be understood as “intersectional, meaning that people have multiple identities that are affected by interlocking systems of oppression and privilege.”

This kind of verbiage is not in any way distinctive, but has become boilerplate in various speech codes and statements of purpose for virtually every inflection point within the vast Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy that has become a rock-ribbed fixture of most American corporations, universities, government agencies, and professional groups over the past decade.

So what’s wrong with it?  On the face of it, absolutely nothing. 

Anyone who holds the secular democratic as well as conventional religious values of care and respect for others could hardly disavow the precept of promoting “inclusivity”, especially when it comes to how we talk about other people. 

The guide rightly singles out “stereotyping”, which fosters prejudice and hostility, and which most experts would concur is the inevitable outcome of careless and derogatory speech.

The problem arises with the section of the code that frames identity, whether single or multiple, in terms of “systems of oppression and privilege”. 

There are no clear criteria in the vast body of academic literature that reaches back to the nineteenth century as to the specific context in which words such as “oppression” and “privilege” have been used.  

Even Karl Marx, who was the first to give currency to the former term as a sociological and economic descriptor apart from its familiar role in political rhetoric, stipulated it as part of a highly sophisticated analysis of class exploitation and what he dubbed “the forces of production”. 

“Oppression” always must evoke a concrete historical set of referents and a range of plausible connotations, which are subject to scrutiny and debate.  In its generic usage the word proves to be quite meaningless and is prone to subjective flights of fancy as well as manipulation for the sake of raw propaganda.

The APA document itself maintains that oppression can be defined as “unequal group access to power and privilege”.

The Germans in the 1930s insisted they were “oppressed” by the victorious allies of the Great War and the Versailles Treaty.  They clearly were denied “access” to what others had.

Are convicted criminals, debtors, losers in the lottery, and students who fail a course because they didn’t turn in assignments also “oppressed”?  According to such a definition, they are.

Within the “ideology” such a word is further collocated as a matter of pure habit with the adjective “marginalized”.   Within the grammar of what the APA calls “social justice” the marginalized turn out to be merely those “who do not share equal power in society”, and thus are somehow “oppressed”. 

In effect, therefore, almost everyone fits into the category of “marginalized”, because power by design is distributed proportionately according to function, ability, appointment, preparation, or the simple choice of others.

I do not have “equal power” to a district judge who imposes a traffic fine on me because he is authorized to do so by laws which are crafted by elected representatives of the people.

Oppression – both past and present – is very real (e.g., African slavery, Jewish pogroms, the harassment and incarceration of LGBTQ people, Chinese treatment of its Uyghur population).  But the term itself is shot through with infinite shades of implication.

Moreover, its very etymology entails the wrongful exercise of the means of coercion which violate certain juridical or moral norms.  It has little or nothing to do with differential status, or structural components, among groups and subgroups within any standard social matrix. 

Some of these groups treat each other “oppressively” and unjustly.  Others don’t. 

Status differentials, or “privileges”, are merely part of the economy of collective life, whether we are talking about highly developed cultures and societies or preliterate tribal forms of organization.

The “ideology”, in fact, questions the very justice of normativity itself, which ironically is what social justice is all about.  The fact that “normies” has become a phrase of derision in contemporary streetspeak etches in bold letters the crisis we are facing.

Contrary to the staple right-wing narrative, this nameless and vacuous ideology – perhaps we should simply name it “oppressionism” - has not been primarily force fed to students through a program of classroom indoctrination, though some intellectual grifters in certain subject areas have admittedly evangelized for it with abandon.

It has largely been policed from the top down by college administrators, who in turn have been genuflecting before accreditation agencies and federal regulators who have mandated it, especially since the George Floyd protests of 2020, in spades.

If you are told your job, your annual review, or your hiring depends on learning to speak the jargon and internalize it in your very thought processes, you will of course salute whenever the sergeant steps into the room.

And your students will goosestep to the same drumbeat.

DEI prima facie is a good thing, insofar as it prompts us to be both sensitive to, and respective of, the immense spectrum of personal struggles, advantages, disabilities, and life experiences.

But to couch identity solely in the language of “oppression” not only trivializes the legacies and experiences of those individuals who have suffered genuine injustice, it discounts the positive personal resources previously “marginalized” peoples can offer in the process of overcoming prejudice and misunderstanding.

In political theory the very concept of equity is inseparable from the idea of “restorative justice”, which focuses on reconciliation rather than retribution.  And many cultural heritages have been formed not through a sense of shared oppression, but through affirmation of a profound sense of shared values as well as a common destiny.

Think Judaism. 

The fact that Jews amidst their most challenging “existential” threats of this new millennium have been brutally excluded from the company of those hypocritically reciting the catechism of “diversity” and “inclusion” should make us smell the “rot” that is everywhere among our vaunted cultural elites.

The fact that a recent poll by the prestigious international magazine The Economist disclosed that one in five young Americans are proud Holocaust deniers is even more frightening, especially if it means spreading the gospel of “inclusion” is having the diametrically opposite effect on their attitudes toward the “other”.

As the ancient Jewish sage Ben Sira wrote, “the wicked will be ensnared by their own lips”. 

And that is what we can now adduce from last week’s Congressional hearings.