“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

―G.K. Chesterton

There is a YouTube video (begin at 56 sec.) making the rounds that brings together six people from various walks of life and education.  They range from a young high school graduate who is a Marine to a Ph.D.  They are interviewed briefly and asked to guess the I.Q. of the others and to guess where they themselves would fall on the I.Q. spectrum.  The woman with the Ph.D., of course, assumes she is the brightest.  They all assume that the Marine has the lowest I.Q.

This is not how it turns out.  The Ph.D. actually scores the lowest on the I.Q. test.

The point is that people with advanced degrees and prestigious positions in academia are not necessarily the smartest people in the room.  This was proven with some needed satisfaction on Tuesday, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified at a hearing to address the massive pro-Hamas/anti-Israel protests on each of those campuses.  The protesters called for the extermination of Israel and the genocide of Jews.

Each of those three women has a very high opinion of herself; they assume that by virtue of their academic achievements, they are superior, thus smarter, than the rest of us.  Oh, and then there are the billions of dollars these schools receive from foreign entities of the Middle East variety. 

“Highly educated = Highly indoctrinated”

―Mishelle Boniface

But, as their carefully uttered talking points revealed, not one of them is very smart.  So confident in the rightness of their own opinions and perspectives on all things, they all shamefully but casually declared their own antisemitism.  Each of them proclaimed that free speech must take precedence over the “abhorrent” behavior of the protesters who called for the genocide of the Jewish people and the elimination of the state of Israel.  (Elise Stefanik pointed out that Harvard scores the lowest for freedom of speech on campus.)

Harvard president Claudine Gay refused to say that calling for the extinction of Israel and its population violates Harvard’s code of conduct!  When Stefanik, herself a Harvard grad, asked Gay, if campus thugs demanded the genocide of African-Americans, would that be equally acceptable, she refused to answer.

We all know that if any group that called for the extermination of blacks, gays, or Muslims, its members would immediately be expelled and probably arrested for hate crimes.  But calling for the death of Jews was just fine with each of these women.

Not one of them seemed to grasp the horror of their almost offhand comments, their refusal to answer to the question posed: “Will any action be taken against those students?”  I think we can guess the answer.  Like the BLM rioters who did billions of dollars of damage in 2020, they will not be charged with any crime.  They will suffer no consequences for their blatant support of what is essentially Nazism. 

The presidents of these three universities, and probably Columbia, Brown, and NYU as well, do not think they did anything wrong.  As Andrea Widburg wrote here on Tuesday, their “obvious [personal] antisemitism” exposed the rot at the heart of academia.  “The three women are very clear that merely calling for Jews to be exterminated really isn’t harassment unless they’re actually getting killed in real time.”  Yeah, that’ll work!

In the campus culture that prevails at nearly all colleges in the U.S., where skin color, sexual orientation, and minority status — identity politics — rule the day, it is almost easy to see why these women saw absolutely nothing wrong in their answers to the questions asked of them.  Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who reacted first to the outrageous testimonies of the three women, noted that “the answers they gave reflect the profound moral bankruptcy of presidents Gay, Magil and Kornbluth.”  Indeed, they did.  Even Kornbluth, Jewish herself, was equally willing to excuse the protesters’ vicious hatred of Israel and Jewish people on the grounds of “context.” 

An article in the Daily Mail addresses Gay’s feeble attempt to walk back, to clarify, her statements and refusal to answer certain questions:

There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. [They have.] Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard [but they do], and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.

Far too little, too late.  Not one of the three did anything to protect their Jewish students who were being harassed and physically threatened.  A few of them testified as well.  Not only do they not feel safe; they are not safe.

Who could have predicted that this kind of monstrous behavior would be sullying the most elite campuses in the country in response to the worst and most barbaric attack on Jews since the Holocaust?  Something is very, very rotten in academia.  Is it perhaps that, like little Palestinian children, who are taught practically from birth that their mission in life will be to kill Jews, our current crop of university presidents have likewise been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the prevailing notion that there are only two kinds of people, the oppressed (victims) and their oppressors?  This perverted and catastrophic ideology has destroyed education in the U.S.  Any and all persons deemed oppressors are legitimate targets of discrimination, hate, and even murder.

We have all been reduced to one or the other of those two categories.  Misgender a trans person?  You’re an oppressor.  Black conservative?  They are coming for you.  Anti-transgenderism for all the obvious reasons?  You are a target.  The left’s social credit score is the order of the day on college campuses and in the media.

As in the YouTube video linked above, professional academics are very often not the smartest people in the room.  For those three women to expose the binary reductionism of their own dumbed down thinking so arrogantly, with no apparent clue that their words were a shock to most Americans, has been yet another wake-up call for us all.  The Democrat party as currently constituted is Marxist, the Biden administration verging on tyrannical.  It has caved to all the most basic Marxist tenets, bent slightly from purely socio-economic classes to include racial and sexual groups.

The individual is a non-entity to the left.  Only oppressed groups matter.  Those university presidents, not a critical thinker among them, are proof that calculated indoctrination works, and it is seriously dangerous, for it ends with the worst regimes in history. 

“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.”

—Thomas Sowell

Image: Joseph Williams via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.