Exposing Harvard’s ‘indoctrination factory’

Stanley Kurtz writes for National Review Online about problems at America’s oldest university.

What is it like to be politically indoctrinated at America’s most historic university? Let’s find out. To Harvard’s credit, its recent report on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias makes it possible to experience the way political indoctrination at a prestigious university looks and sounds. If you’re willing to sift through some footnotes, take in some videos, and, above all, momentarily dip your feet in a baffling sea of academic jargon, you, too, can experience the blinkered existence heretofore exclusively reserved for America’s brightest young people.

Harvard’s antisemitism report exposes the process of indoctrination at several university programs — Harvard Divinity School’s program on Religion in Public Life (RPL), in particular. Moreover, something important has happened since the report’s release. One of the alleged indoctrinators at RPL, Notre Dame Professor Atalia Omer, an Israeli Jew who served as a visiting professor and fellow in RPL’s most controversial program, the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, has struck back at Harvard by issuing rebuttals to the antisemitism report’s accusations. Last week, moreover, Omer and a number of Jewish scholars of Jewish studies, including the prominent postmodernist Judith Butler, weighed in publicly in defense of Omer, with an opinion piece as well as an amicus brief in Harvard’s case against the Trump administration. Omer and her fellow left-leaning, Israel-critical scholars of Judaism argue that Harvard’s antisemitism report unfairly defines scholarly criticism of Israel as antisemitic.

Thus, Harvard’s report on antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias has taken on new importance, although not in the way that its scholarly Jewish critics on the left claim. What the report actually does is to expose and document the workings of political bias within an academic program at a major university. I know of no other case in which a respected university has systematically criticized one of its own academic programs for political indoctrination, effectively dismantled that program — and then been publicly answered by one of the alleged malefactors and her academic allies.

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