If the West is to survive, the radicalism in our universities must be expunged

Telegraph

22-04-2025

It was the American novelist Saul Bellow who observed that 'a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep'. In his day, the federal government had clamped down on those educated fools of the academy to force them to drop their discrimination against black students.
Today, the world's wealthiest university is doing all it can to resist measures designed to protect the Jews.
Harvard is reportedly suing the Trump administration after it froze $2.2 billion of the school's funding in the wake of the hounding of Jewish students during Gaza protests. The administration accused the university of being 'more committed to activism than scholarship'.
Quite reasonably, Trump demanded that Harvard 'cease all preferences based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin'; take steps to ensure 'viewpoint diversity'; and conduct an audit of the programmes that 'most fuel antisemitic harassment'. Funding was frozen after the university refused.
The brewing legal punch-up between the commissars at Harvard, who sit upon an endowment fund of over $50 billion and an operating budget of $6.4 billion, and the gigantic crude instrument of Donald Trump speaks volumes about the moral squalor of universities and the struggle for the soul of the West.
Ironic, isn't it, that the university that restricted admission to Jews in the 1920s, leading other American and Canadian universities to follow suit, should be galvanised to such fierce resistance when required to protect them? Some education.
But then, such are the self-referential comforts of academia that many emperors strut around with no clothes. The repulsively smug former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, who memorably told a congressional committee that calling for the genocide of Jews only qualifies as harassment 'depending on the context', was forced to resign after she was accused of plagiarism and failed to properly handle anti-Semitism on campus.
Enter the Donald. The power and glory of the Trump approach, which cares little for comfortable niceties, may be toe-curling to certain sensibilities. But this is precisely what is required to break the status quo. And on this,Trump has morality on his side.
For decades, Ivy League colleges incubated the kind of abstruse, anti-Western ideology that seemed laughably fringe at the time but ended up taking us all for fools. The father of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, spent many years at Harvard.
The shameful protests in London over the weekend, which saw grown adults in ridiculous clothing waving placards bearing such charming slogans as 'the only good Terf is a dead Terf', is a direct inheritance of American queer theorists of the late 20th century, to whom I was enthusiastically introduced while studying English at Oxford.
The Israelophobia that now infects the bien-pensant is also the shameful legacy of ideas first incubated in American and French universities. People like the Palestinian-American author Edward Said and the revolutionary anti-colonialist Franz Fanon laid the ground for the anti-democratic radicalism that is now pumped out in various forms by any mouthpiece of the Left.
The corrosive concept of 'intersectionality', coined by the UCLA professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, instructs all radical movements to make common cause with each other. Which returns us to the protests in London last weekend, at which activists chanted 'one struggle, one fight, Palestine, Trans rights' without seeing the internal contradictions of this statement.
Education is society's lifeblood; this makes it all the more shameful when we turn a blind eye to the poison of anti-Semitism encouraged by institutions that should be spreading knowledge instead of hate.
If the soul of the West is to survive the century, the ingrained radicalism found in many universities must be expunged. The cretins at Harvard have stooped so low that it falls to a man like Trump to school them, and I for one am here for it.