At Symposium on “The End of an Era? Jews and Elite Universities,” Talmudic Wisdom and Trump-Bashing

Ackman says Harvard talent will flow to Vanderbilt, Duke; Columbia’s Lemann touts Tulane

Martin Peretz, the former Harvard teacher and former editor and owner of The New Republic, chaired the event.

Partisan political differences spilling over into economic expectations have been a recent theme around here. Yesterday’s daylong symposium at New York’s Center for Jewish History on “The End of an Era? Jews and Elite Universities” offered evidence that President Trump looms as large over higher education and campus antisemitism as he does over nearly every other issue these days.

The event began with the president of the Center for Jewish History, Gavriel Rosenfeld, making a quick reference to how the center itself had been “adversely affected by capricious budget cuts.”

Paul Berman, a veteran of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter that took over the campus in April 1968, claimed that America has never seen a crisis on the scale of what Trump is doing other than “perhaps” the early 1860s Civil War. He said he was worried about an end to what began in 1776.

Susie Linfield, a professor of journalism at NYU, spoke of what she described as a “crisis…launched by Trump,” an “unprecedented assault on the universities” as well as against “the Constitution itself.” Trump, she said, “dreams of a world in which Donald Trump will have unfettered power.” Linfield said it was “nefarious and grotesque” to “vet foreign students for their politics,” describing it as “a very, very terrible road for us to go down.”

Rachel Gordan, an assistant professor at the University of Florida, spoke of what she called an “era of repression and fear on campus that many people have compared to the McCarthy era.” She spoke of what she called a “crisis of democracy.” She said it doesn’t seem like the Trump administration favors democratic pluralism.

Stephen Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said he’s “never experienced antisemitism” in 22 years of teaching, and rued what he said was “the fact that the Trump administration is using it as a pretext to defund science.”

Deborah Lipstadt, an Emory professor who served during the Biden administration as the U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, said that while she appreciated some of the Trump administration’s early moves, “what we’re seeing now is an attack on elite universities in the name of antisemitism.”

So it might have been possible for someone to come away from the day with the idea that the big issue of the day is Trump’s attack on America, and that the “Jews on campus” story is noteworthy at the moment primarily for its role in that larger narrative.

Some of the program was devoted to topics other than how terrible Trump is. Those, to my mind, were the most valuable contributions.