Religion is a Mental Illness

Opinion | Should American Jews Abandon Elite Universities?

An incident at Columbia suggests that schools beset with antisemitism are beyond salvation.

nytimes.com

The notable fact about the anti-Israel campus demonstrations is that they are predominantly an elite phenomenon. Yes, there have been protests at big state schools like the University of Nebraska, but they have generally been small, tame and — thanks to administrators prepared to enforce the rules — short-lived. It’s Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Penn, Harvard, Columbia and many of their peers that have descended to open bigotry, institutional paralysis and mayhem.

Two questions: Why the top universities? And what should those on the other side of the demonstrations — Jewish students and alumni most of all — do about it?

Regarding the first question, some argue that the furor over the campus protests is much ado about not much. The demonstrators, they say, represent only a small fraction of students. The ugliest antisemitic expressions occasionally seen at these events are mainly the work of outside provocateurs. And the student protesters (some of whom are Jewish) are acting out of youthful idealism, not age-old antisemitism. As they see it, they aim only to save Palestinian lives and oppose the involvement of their universities in the abuses of a racist Israeli state.

There’s something to these points. With notable exceptions, campus life at these schools is somewhat less roiled by protest than the media makes it seem. Outside groups, as more than one university president has told me, have played an outsize role in setting up encampments and radicalizing students. And few student demonstrators, I’d wager, consciously think they harbor an anti-Jewish prejudice.

But this lets the kids off the hook too easily.

Students who police words like “blacklist” or “whitewash” and see “microaggressions” in everyday life ignore the entreaties of their Jewish peers to avoid chants like “globalize the intifada” or “from the river to the sea.” Students who claim they’re horribly pained by scenes of Palestinian suffering were largely silent on Oct. 7 — when they weren’t openly cheering the attacks. And students who team up with outside groups that are in overt sympathy with Islamist terrorists aren’t innocents. They’re collaborators.

How did the protesters at elite universities get their ideas of what to think and how to behave?

They got them, I suspect, from the incessant valorization of victimhood that has been a theme of their upbringing, and which many of the most privileged kids feel they lack — hence the zeal to prove themselves as allies of the perceived oppressed. They got them from the crude schematics of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training seminars, which divide the world into “white” and “of color,” powerful and “marginalized,” with no regard for real-world complexities — including the complexity of Jewish identity. They got them from professors who think academic freedom amounts to a license for political posturing, sometimes of a nakedly antisemitic sort. They got them from a cheap and easy revision of history that imagines Zionism is a form of colonialism (it’s decidedly the opposite), that colonialism is something only white people do, and that as students at American universities, they can cheaply atone for their sins as guilty beneficiaries of the settler-colonialism they claim to despise.

They also got them from university administrators whose private sympathies often lie with the demonstrators, who imagine the anti-Israel protests as the moral heirs to the anti-apartheid protests and who struggle to grasp (if they even care) why so many Jewish students feel betrayed and besieged by the campus culture.

That’s the significance of the leaked images of four Columbia University deans exchanging dismissive and sophomoric text messages during a panel discussion in May on Jewish life on campus, including the suggestion that a panelist was “taking full advantage of this moment” for the sake of the “fundraising potential.”

Columbia placed three of the deans on leave. Other universities, like Penn, have belatedly moved to ban encampments. But those steps have a grudging and reactive feel — more a response to Title VI investigations of discrimination and congressional hearings than a genuine acknowledgment that something is deeply amiss with the values of a university. At Harvard, two successive members of the task force on antisemitism resigned in frustration. “We are at a moment when the toxicity of intellectual slovenliness has been laid bare for all to see,” wrote Rabbi David Wolpe in his resignation announcement.

That’s the key point. More dismaying than the fact that student protesters are fellow traveling with Hamas is that with their rhyming chants and identical talking points, they sound more like Maoist cadres than critical thinkers. As the sociologist Ilana Redstone, author of the smart and timely book “The Certainty Trap,” told me on Monday, “higher education traded humility and curiosity for conviction and advocacy — all in the name of being inclusive. Certainty yields students who are contemptuous of disagreement.”

And so the second question: What are Jewish students and alumni to do?

It’s telling that the Columbia deans were caught chortling during exactly the kind of earnest panel discussion that the university convened presumably to show alumni they are tackling campus antisemitism. They were paying more lip service than attention. My guess is that they, along with many of their colleagues, struggle to see the problem because they think it lies with a handful of extremist professors and obnoxious students.

But the real problem lies with some of the main convictions and currents of today’s academia: intersectionality, critical theory, post-colonialism, ethnic studies and other concepts that may not seem antisemitic on their face but tend to politicize classrooms and cast Jews as privileged and oppressive. If, as critical theorists argue, the world’s injustices stem from the shadowy agendas of the powerful and manipulative few against the virtuous masses, just which group is most likely to find itself villainized?

Not even the most determined university president is going to clean out the rot — at least not without getting rid of the entrenched academic departments and tenured faculty members who support it. That could take decades. In the meantime, Jews have a history of parting company with institutions that mistreated them, like white-shoe law firms and commercial banks. In so many cases, they went on to create better institutions that operated on principles of intellectual merit and fair play — including many of the universities that have since stumbled.

If you are an Ivy League megadonor wondering how to better spend the money you no longer want to give a Penn or a Columbia — or just a rising high school senior wondering where to apply — maybe it’s time to forgo the fading prestige of the old elite for the sake of something else, something new. That’s a subject for a future column.

Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. – Rob Henderson

How “Indigenous Ways of Knowing” Works In Venezuela

The concept of “indigenous ways of knowing” is increasingly popular in North American universities.

newdiscourses.com

The concept of “indigenous ways of knowing” is increasingly popular in North American universities.

However, this enthusiasm is largely abstract, for educational institutions have not yet processed the implications. In Venezuela, my experience as an educator has been different.

Members of the Bari tribe believe that the semen of multiple men can contribute to the formation of the embryo. Should this be respected as an “indigenous way of knowing”? I posit that it should not, and I urge North American institutions to take note.

In 2005, Richard Dawkins proposed to teach the stork theory of conception in public schools. When I first learned about this, I was baffled. How on Earth could Dawkins, the brilliant scientist, make such an outrageous proposal?  I soon came to realize that this was typical Dawkins sarcasm. At the time, those pushing the Intelligent Design agenda were requesting educational reforms, so as to introduce new creationist theories in school curricula. According to the argument advanced by the Discovery Institute, to live in a truly democratic society, schools would have to “teach the controversy” and so, Darwinism would have to be taught alongside Intelligent Design. Dawkins then weighed in on this issue, arguing that, if we are to teach such “controversies,” then we ought to teach an alternative to the conventional theory of human reproduction; schools should include the stork theory.

Dawkins won the day. With his stingy yet effective reductio ad absurdum, he made a point: not every topic is open to “teaching the controversy.” For his illustrative purposes, Dawkins chose a cartoonish example. Nobody actually believes storks deliver babies. In fact, although the image of the stork carrying the baby wrapped in diapers has powerful appeal in a variety of cultures, it is rather doubtful that anybody ever held such a belief. For that very reason, this colorful theory served as a perfect example for Dawkins’ affront against the new versions of creationism.

Yet, as an educator in Venezuela, I have encountered students who do have strange theories about human reproduction. The Bari Natives of Zulia State in Western Venezuela are a case in point. Members of this tribe believe that semen from multiple men can contribute to the formation of the embryo. In fact, it is common for Bari women to have multiple partners, and all of them play the role of father to the child the woman may conceive. This works to the advantage of such a child, to the extent that he or she may be nourished and protected by many men. This particular custom can only take place if, indeed, the whole community accepts that all those men have equally contributed their semen to the biological formation of that child.

The Bari are amongst a few other tribes (mostly in South America) who adhere to the concept of “partible paternity”. Anthropologists have long been fascinated by this concept, because they see great functionality in this particular belief. For the case of the Bari, anthropologist Stephen Beckerman has closely studied this phenomenon. Over the years, Beckerman discovered that the belief in multiple paternity is very useful for the Bari, and it is an optimate cultural adaptation that serves the purpose of protecting children in a very hostile environment, such as the Perija mountains of Venezuela.

As an educator, I perfectly understand that. But my role is to teach science and to train students in the quest for truth. The Bari belief in partible paternity may be functional, but it is not any closer to truth than the stork theory of conception. Some philosophers with pragmatist inclinations might believe that truths ought to be defined in terms of utility. By that standard, if a particular belief is useful for the Bari, then it is true. But, that is sloppy thinking. A statement is true if and only if it corresponds with facts.

Over the years, I have had Bari students argue with me whenever I lay the basic facts about human reproduction. I listen to what they have to say, and I give them every opportunity to explain why their belief in partible paternity serves a purpose in particular tribal settings. But, I do not give in. I present facts, and that is that. In exams, if such students answer that more than one man can contribute semen to the formation of an embryo, they get zero marks. Just as we all agree that to “teach the controversy” regarding the stork theory of reproduction is ridiculous, it seems to me that it would be equally risible to “teach the controversy” about partible paternity.

Until recently, I never had problems with this uncompromising stance. But now, things are beginning to change throughout educational institutions in Latin America. For years, governments in the region have promoted multicultural education, on account of Latin America’s traumatic colonial history. The argument is straight forward: colonialism has inflicted massive damage on the psyche of indigenous peoples, and that needs to change. Justice must be done, and this needs to be reflected in education. This implies decolonizing the curriculum, by focusing less on the Western canon, and giving more educational space to indigenous oral literature, arts, and so on.

This is all great. But, the push to decolonize the curriculum goes much further than that. Just as Canada, Australia, and other Western nations are now doing, this decolonizing of the curriculum also implies the acceptance and recognition of so-called “indigenous ways of knowing.” Such efforts would serve the purpose of doing what postcolonialist scholar Vish Visvanathan calls “cognitive justice”, i.e., the recognition of the right for different forms of knowledge to co-exist.

As far as I can see, in countries such as Canada, this movement in favor of “indigenous ways of knowing” still remains on a more abstract level. As Josh Dehaas describes it, there may be some veneer of magical thinking and new spirituality in Canadian universities as a result of this push to decolonize the curriculum. But so far, in the North American educational scene, there has been no real clash on the ground between science and “indigenous ways of knowing.”

In Venezuela, I have encountered this clash on a far more concrete level. A few Bari students have protested my “stubborn” adherence to the conventional theory of human reproduction, and school administrators are now feeling the heat of bureaucrats who want educators to accommodate indigenous religious beliefs, even if they directly clash with science. This implies giving marks to Bari students who answer in exams that two or more men can contribute semen to the formation of an embryo. It is one thing to enact religious rituals in class so as to make indigenous students feel welcome in seminars (as some Canadian universities now do); it is quite another to accept that folk theories of reproduction are as valid as scientific theories.

The concept of “cognitive justice” flies in the face of a fundamental principle of logic: Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time. And yet, this is what “cognitive justice” amounts to. The Bari and the scientific theories of reproduction contradict each other; therefore, it is logically impossible to accept both of them as true. On an epistemological level, they cannot coexist, but somehow, school administrators want them to coexist.

The Bari belief is clearly false, and for that very reason, it cannot be called “knowledge.” This also applies to the wide array of beliefs that in North American academia, are beginning to be honored as “indigenous ways of knowing.” The word “knowledge” has a very specific philosophical definition, as laid out by Plato in the Theaetetus: justified true belief. Many of the alleged “indigenous ways of knowing” are either not true beliefs (they are demonstrably false, such as the Bari belief in partible paternity), or they are not justified (such beliefs are arrived at, not by way of empirical finding or reasoning, but by way of mysticism).

Now, of course anthropologists such as Beckerman have a point when they argue that concepts of partible paternity have an inner logic, and have been a useful adaptation for many indigenous tribes. But, I am afraid that education is about the quest for truth wherever it leads. Anything short of that would be a hypocritical disservice to students themselves. Indeed, I have had brilliant Bari students who are eager to continue on to medical school. Would I be helping their cause by telling them that their traditional theory of reproduction is as true as the scientific one? How is that going to help them when, as doctors, they investigate genetic diseases in their own communities? To erroneously believe that multiple men contribute genetic material for the formation of embryos, will certainly not help in treating disorders such as Huntington’s, which at some point was rampant in Western Venezuela.

So far, my colleagues and I have been able to resist, but I do not know if educators in Venezuela (and Latin America at large) will be able to do so for much longer. Ever more, populist politicians in the region appeal to indigenismo, and we have to come to feel the heat of this in classrooms. The same politicians who once laughed at the gringos for having even considered allowing religious fanatics teach that the Earth is 6,000 years old and humans coexisted with dinosaurs, now toy with the idea that, all in the name of postcolonialism, educators ought to accept indigenous beliefs as epistemologically on par with scientific theories.

This should be a cautionary tale for North American educators. Few school administrators have actually given enough thought to what the push for “indigenous ways of knowing” really implies. So far, North American educators pay lip service more than anything else. But, inevitably, if the current trend continues, the time will come when administrators will have to put to test all that lip service, and consider whether or not they are willing to accept the teaching of flat out wrong theories in classrooms. I hope they make the right decision on time.