Giving it the new college try: An academic rescue plan for American Jews

Who knows, they might even succeed in knocking some sense into the Ivy League schools.

By DOUGLAS ALTABEF DECEMBER 1, 2024 02:03

STUDENTS AT Columbia University, an Ivy League school in New York City, attend a news conference calling on the university’s administration to support students facing antisemitism, last year. The American Jewish love affair with the Ivy League should end and can end, the writer maintains. (photo credit: JEENAH MOON/REUTERS)

The American Jewish love affair with the Ivy League should end and can end. With imagination, innovation, and determination, we could be seeing the beginning of an exciting new era in American academia.

The current scenario featuring confrontation, humiliation, and degradation, carrying a $90,000 per year price tag all for the sake of a credential, would make Kafka blush. Jewish high school students are facing the decidedly unpleasant trade-off of having to disparage their Jewishness in the name of being part of a campus gestalt that really does not want them.

If this sounds uncomfortably like the post-Enlightenment decisions that many European Jews made – assimilation and even conversion – to be accepted, the analogy is becoming less and less far-fetched.

Jewish students are being forced to renounce Israel so as not to be personally canceled or harassed. They cannot be seen to be too Jewish and certainly cannot be viewed as being sympathetic to Zionism.

What self-respecting Jew would stand for this, not to mention paying a small fortune to willingly accept it?

Protesters demonstrate outside Columbia University, April 30, 2024. (credit: LUKE TRESS)

So what's the answer?

The answer is, as it has been for so long for so many Jews, that dropping old associations is very difficult. Look at the trauma induced by the rational prospect of voting for an Israel-embracing Republican party instead of the party that increasingly marginalizes Jews and loathes Israel.

Just as German Jews wore their World War I medals while being rounded up for incarceration in concentration camps, American Jewish teenagers have cherished their Ivy pedigrees, even when their most enduring memories of their experience on campus have been ones of confrontation and demonization.

The biggest objection to swearing off the Ivy League is undoubtedly the sense that one is sacrificing his or her future prospects by walking away from a widely accepted accomplishment and capability seal of approval.

An Ivy degree has been seen as a door-opening affirmation of a young person’s intellectual bona fides. It has been society’s way of conferring the presumption of excellence and worthiness on an individual.

However, here’s a little secret that might enable the entire structure to be reconfigured: That presumption of quality, excellence, and exceptionalism is breaking down before our eyes. Students who crave a safe space, who spurn critical inquiry and their own pursuit of truth and wisdom in favor of mindless sloganeering, have lost the respect and solicitude of their future employers.

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Just as wealthy Jewish donors have severed their ties with their Ivy alma maters, discerning business owners have gone out of their way to express disinterest, even aversion, to hiring Ivy graduates. There is a revulsion for their undeserving entitledness and the absence of those very qualities that had warranted the generations’ long stamp of approval.

This awakening by employers might be the impetus that enables a tectonic shift in American academia. When the supposed big payoff, the pot of professional gold at the end of the academic rainbow, is shown to be illusory, then the rationale for pauperizing humiliation becomes much less palatable.

American Jewish teens can not only end the expensive pain but also show their innovative resolve in ways that will undoubtedly impress those who can help further their careers. They can seek out alternatives from strength, not duress.

Enterprising and mindful young men and women can testify to their own coming of awareness and their willingness to blaze a new and potentially transformative trail for themselves and for society as a whole. The determination to walk away from the timeworn path of earning plaudits to fresh and new ways to do so speaks volumes about the character of the searchers.

There are private schools and public universities that see the opportunity to attract pools of talented students. They tout the absence of toxic antisemitic wokeism on their campuses, they boast of their affordability, and they paint the picture of their rising levels of excellence, which, of course, would be enhanced by a solid migration of excellent Jewish students.

This could be the academic self-fulfilling prophecy of our time. Private schools such as Purdue and Hillsdale, the newly sought-after Yeshiva University, and public universities such as the Universities of Florida and Alabama have all seen the bootstrapping opportunity and are wooing Jewish kids.

I see this as a self-selecting validation. Those Jewish teens who see and seize this opportunity have definitionally demonstrated their seal of approval-deserving bona fides. They have looked down the road and have seen opportunities arising from the willingness to throw off old assumptions and norms. In doing so, they are showing their own innovative astuteness and are blazing a trail for future Jewish students to follow.

Who knows, but they might even succeed in knocking some sense into the Ivy League schools themselves.

The author is the chairman of the board of Im Tirtzu and a member of the Board of Directors of the Israel Independence Fund.