Professor William Jacobson teaches law at Cornell and also publishes the Legal Insurrection blog. He recently appeared on FOX News to offer his thoughts about the ongoing battle between Harvard and the Trump administration.
Jacobson addresses the issue of antisemitic protests on campuses and suggests that Trump is justified in threatening Harvard’s tax-exempt status, but then goes further.
Jacobson suggests that what people are seeing at Harvard is just a symptom of a much larger problem in all of education. He notes that the radical left has taken over education at multiple levels and that schools have an anti-American problem and an anti-capitalism problem.
Partial transcript via Legal Insurrection:
Rich Edson: The Universities have promised to address antisemitism, in particular, all the highlights that we saw from the Ivy League schools like Harvard. Do you think that they have done that in good faith? Do you think that they’ve made progress?
William Jacobson: The antisemitism problem on campuses, which is also an anti-Americanism problem, anti-westernism problem, anti-capitalism problem, the antisemitism is a symptom of a much deeper problem in higher education. And that cultural clash is really what I think is driving a lot of this.
Americans are looking at these campuses, like Harvard, and saying, why are we paying for this? Why are we funding this? And so that’s a deeper problem.
A lot of what the campuses have done, I think, is window dressing because there’s a core cultural problem on the campuses, which is that for a generation, conservatives have been purged. pro-Israel professors have been purged. At Harvard, for example, 3% of the faculty identify as conservative versus 37% of the American population, 80% identify as liberal versus 25%.
Places like Harvard always love to say, we need to look like America, but Harvard and other Ivy League schools don’t look like America because they’re liberal bubbles. And I think that’s the tension that’s underlying all this.
Rich Edson: When and how did this all start? I mean, this is a sample of one, but 25 years ago on a college campus, there were liberals, there were conservatives, professors almost invited you to disagree with them, and it was an exchange of ideas. When did that change?
William Jacobson: Well, the far left in the United States identified the education system, not just higher education, but also K-12, as a means by which they could change society. And so they put their efforts into it. You’re right. If you look at polling about 20, 25 years ago, the split between liberal and conservative professors with 60 liberal, 40 conservative. So a balance, we always knew academia was a little to the left. Right now it’s almost 30 to one. So what has happened is these activists, such as Bill Ayers and other people who were in the Obama orbit, went into academia and they took over the hiring committees and they only hired their own for 10, 20, 30 years.
Watch the segment below:
The left now owns education, especially higher education. They do not want to give up any of that power, and that’s why you will see Harvard and other schools fight Trump. They do not want to give up the massive amount of control currently in their grasp.
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