Academic Freedom, DEI, and the Crisis of Higher Education

I presented a faculty workshop on this topic; the Hungarian professors were shocked at the latest developments and hoped these trends wouldn't come to their country.

Continuing my series of lectures as part of the Ludovika Fellowship in Budapest, I presented personal, theoretical, and policy observations regarding what’s going on in higher ed. Longtime readers of Shapiro’s Gavel—and those who follow my work generally—will recognize much of this presentation, but it was certainly new, fresh, and shocking, to my audience here. —IS

The October 7 massacre revealed big problems with our institutions of higher education, particularly the so-called elite ones. It’s amazing that the heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country. And yet that’s where calls for the annihilation of Israel began even before the IDF went into Gaza—which has exposed the deep rot in academia.

As Bill Ackman put it in a revelatory essay the day Harvard president Claudine Gay resigned, antisemitism is the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning about larger issues. This “oldest hatred” is always a leading indicator of assorted underlying pathologies, and in this case that means everything from cancel culture to ideological indoctrination, intellectual corruption to moral decay. We’ve seen a subversion of the core mission of universities to seek truth and develop human knowledge, and of classical liberal values like free speech, due process, and equality under the law. It’s been a shift from education to activism.