In his new book, “Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites,” Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Ilya Shapiro shows how US higher education has been transformed away from a place where students learn how to think critically, make cogent arguments and respect viewpoints that are different from their own.
Today, however, those schools are more like indoctrination factories where students are taught to see themselves as victims in need of “safe spaces” and entitled to respond violently if they are forced to confront people who dissent from progressive orthodoxy.
Recently, we’ve witnessed disturbing scenes where Jewish students are terrorized by Hamas backers at Columbia University and hundreds of other colleges across the United States, At Stanford U., a mob of students – egged on by the school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion – blocked US Appeals Court Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan from speaking. At Yale, the war against free speech became so disruptive that more than a dozen federal judges announced they would no longer hire law clerks from that school.
Most university administrators are “spineless cowards,” Shapiro told a Jewish Policy Center webinar on Thursday. He added that these administrators opt to “capitulate to the mob” rather than lose opportunities to move up the career ladder in academia.
Shapiro emphasized that while hate speech is protected by the First Amendment, terroristic threats and physical violence are not. He noted in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis was able to show that Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that has been linked to much of the virulent pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic activity on US campuses in recent years, has provided “material support” to a terrorist organization, Hamas in violation of the Florida and US codes.. As a result, SJP has been disestablished on Florida public university campuses.
