At this point, it seems like nearly every single elite college and university is under investigation by the Department of Education and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce due to rampant antisemitism.
In New York City, protests have led to the arrest of scores of students at New York University and Columbia University, as anti-Israel protests have turned unruly and raised concerns about the safety of Jewish students on campus.
These concerns over the safety of students are the primary reason the federal government and the House of Representatives have launched investigations into universities, marking a harsh fall from grace for a collection of institutions that have historically set higher education in the United States apart from the rest of the world.
On the campuses of these institutions, calls have grown for the arrest and prosecution of these protesters, and universities are facing growing pressure to expel these disruptors.
But these government investigations, arrests, and prosecutions, while certainly useful to some extent, will not address the foundational problem in higher education that has not only allowed but actively encouraged an entire generation of students to believe that this kind of behavior is acceptable, and in fact their moral duty.
For decades, the secular educational establishment, from kindergarten through post-graduate studies, has preached a gospel of value-neutral education. The prevailing orthodoxy among the public has been that education simply provides information, while the individual is free to choose how to interpret that information and thus reach their own opinions and conclusions, free from the influence of the educator.
Yet, at the same time, so many secular educational institutions have repeatedly invoked their “values” when faced with a public relations crisis of some sort or a question over which material should be taught in the classroom. This appeal to “institutional values” is a tacit admission that the education each institution is providing is fundamentally biased toward one set of values or another.
In recent years, the education industry at large, particularly higher education, has cast off the cloak of neutrality and publicly declared that it is imparting an education grounded in the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion while rooting out any dissent among its employees and students. Teachers who defend the distinctions of the sexes are fired, professors who publish dissident research are fired and publicly scorned, and students who profess beliefs that are contrary to the institutional orthodoxy are disciplined.
This is the dirty secret of teaching: Value-neutral education has never existed in schools because value-neutral education does not and cannot exist. Regardless of what a teacher, a superintendent, a professor, or a principal may say, a set of values is being transmitted through education regardless of who is teaching. Which values are being taught is entirely up to the institution and the teacher.
In Ancient Greece, Plato, and Aristotle created an intellectual tradition that provided moral instruction through the Platonic Academy and the Lyceum. At the foundation of their educational model was the formation of the citizen in virtue or arate, thus directing the student to pursue excellence. Their model has been reproduced and adapted millions of times over in Ancient Rome, medieval Christianity, Colonial America, and even today in many private schools.
Which brings us back to higher education’s antisemitism problem. The proliferation of the belief that Israel should not exist is a natural consequence of an educational philosophy that values resistance to perceived oppressors as the highest moral calling. To these institutions, excellence is not found in the ancient virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, or prudence. Instead, it is found in disruption, anger, and licentiousness.
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As well-intentioned as these government investigations and law enforcement efforts may be, they do not address the root of the problem in education, which is the inculcation of a moral worldview that demands the sort of behavior that is currently seen on the campuses of Columbia and other schools.
No matter what steps Columbia, Harvard, Yale, or UPenn take to address antisemitic behavior on their campus quad today, without a substantial overhaul of each institution’s moral pedagogy, it will always return tomorrow.