With that in mind, I would like to leave the final word here to Rabbi David Wolpe, who resigned yesterday from Harvard’s antisemitism advisory committee — itself an act of notable pessimism. In a somber thread on Twitter, he explained his reasoning carefully: No one administrative change or tweak can cure a systemic problem, and the system at Harvard (as well as other elite institutions) is one “that works only along axes of oppression,” coding Jews as white and thus automatic hate objects in the context of Israel and Palestine. “Battling that combination of ideologies is the work of more than a committee or a single university. It is not going to be changed by hiring or firing a single person . . . This is the task of educating a generation, and also a vast unlearning.” The old aphorism that “a fish rots from the head down” gets it exactly backwards in this case: When it comes to America’s elite educational institutions, the fish has long been rotting from the bottom up, and that is where the rot is deeply, tenaciously entrenched.
To note this is, I fear, to give a counsel of despair. Regardless of whether Liz Magill or Claudine Gay are cashiered within the…
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