Social-justice dogma has been a disaster for universities. When will they wake up?

If ever there was a buzzword that gained traction on the American college campus, it is “sustainability.”

Harvard and MIT both feature offices of sustainability. The University of Pennsylvania has devoted a good part of its online real estate to its “Sustainability Action Plan.”

In these ways, they are typical of virtually every university in the country.

So, it is remarkable that the American academy, so obsessed with sustainability, has embraced an all-encompassing ideology that is not only unsustainable, but imploding before our eyes.

Harvard, MIT and UPenn damn themselves

Last week, the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the UPenn wilted under the heat-seeking question of New York U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik:

“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s rules or code of conduct? Yes or no?”

That none of the three presidents could answer without qualification was not merely revealing, but damning.

Already UPenn President Liz Magill has resigned. On the clock are Harvard President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.

They feel the heat, because they tried to prop up an ideal that virtually all American universities had placed at the core of their institutions.

An ideal that has many names — “critical social justice,” “wokeness,” “the successor ideology” — and many spokes — “intersectionality,” “de-colonization,” “white fragility.”

On Tuesday, the music stopped on critical social justice.

Universities are awash in antisemitism

It wasn’t Stefanik, a Harvard grad, who finally exposed the universities. It was the Oct. 7 terror attack on the State of Israel.

Following that atrocity, a toxic cloud rose on virtually every major campus in America — an odorous biproduct of critical social justice:

Antisemitism.

And it happened quickly.

College students indoctrinated to believe you can divide the world among oppressors and oppressed and that skin color can sort the two, had watched the invasion of Israel and reflexively decided the Jews were the bad guys — which is to say, the white guys — in the war.

This was noteworthy, because it was Palestinian Hamas that had reignited the Arab-Israeli conflict with three waves of terror attacks on the morning of Oct. 7.

Their attacks were merciless.

They included torture, rape, murder, mutilation and hostage-taking of the most defenseless in Israeli-Jewish society — women, children and the elderly.

Campuses aren't liberal. They're Orwellian

That the “little monsters” on U.S. campuses couldn’t sympathize for even two minutes with the real victims of Oct. 7 — the innocent civilians of Israel — told you we had crossed some terrible threshold for self-delusion.

The Israelis had not even counted their dead before the university activists were threatening and assaulting Jewish students and renewing age-old calls to exterminate the Jewish people.

Where was this poison coming from?

From the academy.

But not just the academy, where it broke containment years ago.

It has pushed out into the professional world where it infects journalism, the arts, entertainment, philanthropy, Big Tech, corporate boardrooms, sports, the federal bureaucracy, the military.

We will spend years cleaning up this mess because the universities have hired Diversity, Equity and Inclusion officers who watch for thought-crimes by students and faculty who don’t play along.

It almost defies belief, but campus liberals have constructed an illiberal, even Orwellian, environment in which American citizens are afraid to speak their minds. These liberals who ceased to be liberal are destroying our universities.

Liberals are challenging this 'wokeness'

The three university presidents told Congress last week that they are committed to free speech on their campuses. But the critical social justice they embrace abhors free speech.

It demands conformity and punishes dissent. It insists that speech is violence.

That the universities will brook no challenge to wokeness, while tolerating calls for Jewish genocide becomes the clarifying moment when the lie is no longer sustainable.

Interestingly, the most articulate voices attacking woke ideology are not MAGA conservatives, but social liberals, many of them LGBTQ, who understood that the great threat to our society has been a culture war that began as university postmodernism or the abandonment of objective truth.

ASU protesters: Have bought a poisonous ideology

American and British thinkers such as Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, Douglas Murray, Jonathan Rauch, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Doyle, Dave Rubin, and early on, Camille Paglia have pointed their swords at critical social justice.

They’re not the only ones, but they’re all gay, which led Sullivan to ask the question — why have so many gay thinkers recognized and challenged this contagion?

“It may be because being gay helps you think through unthinking orthodoxies, and stand up against the mob,” he wrote.

Free speech is now selective speech

You did not need the war on Israel to prove critical social justice has corrupted the university. There are a thousand examples from just the last decade, including:

• Nicholas and Erika Christakis resigning as master and associate master of Yale’s Silliman College in 2015 after they came under activist fire for Erika gently suggesting the university was over-policing Halloween costumes.

• Professors Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Haying ultimately leaving Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in 2017 because Bret would not participate in a day of protest in which white people voluntarily stayed away from campus.

• Professor Greg Patton being removed in 2020 from a class he was teaching at the University of Southern California because some students were offended he had taught a Chinese filler word, akin to “um” in English. Some students thought it sounded too much like a racial epithet.

The universities abandoned truth-seeking for political ideology. They abandoned free speech for selective speech.

When you preach sustainability, there is no private hell like waking up and realizing the future you’re building has no legs.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Harvard, MIT and UPenn prove what a disaster social-justice dogma is