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Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is also the James R. Schlesinger Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, columnist for RealClearPolitics, and director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship.
CAM recently spoke with Berkowtiz recently about his new book Reclaiming Liberal Education in America to discuss how campus antisemitism threatens liberal education.
You argue for recovering liberal education as an education in the great questions of Western civilization. What does the explosion of campus antisemitism tell us about what universities stopped teaching — not simply about Jews and Israel, but about history, civilization, and moral judgment?Â
“The proliferation of campus antisemitism reflects more than hatred of Jews. The upsurge of antisemitism at the nation’s colleges and universities also betrays students’ and professors’ ignorance of Israel’s struggle against jihadists who aim to destroy the world’s only Jewish state and who are also bent on waging war against the United States; our colleges’ and universities’ failure to teach the dedication to basic rights and fundamental freedoms at the core of the American experiment; and higher education’s inability or unwillingness to cultivate the toleration, civility, and determination to understand the other side of the argument that are crucial to fulfilling the obligations of American citizenship.”
Classical liberal education was meant to teach students how to distinguish argument from passion, evidence from ideology, and justice from tribal loyalty. When students celebrate or excuse violence against Jews while claiming the language of social justice, is that evidence that universities have failed at precisely those disciplines of judgment?
“Yes, colleges and universities these days are more likely to indoctrinate students in the idea that Israel is a settler colonialist villain than to expose them to the complex realities of Middle East politics, starting with the Islamic Republic of Iran’s quest for regional hegemony. All indoctrination inflames the passions, entrenches ideology, and sanctifies tribal loyalty.”Â
How much of today’s campus antisemitism can be traced to the replacement of the classical curriculum — history, philosophy, literature, religion — with ideological frameworks that divide the world primarily into oppressors and oppressed? What intellectual resources have students lost as a result?
“The rampant promulgation of ideological frameworks on campus has deprived students of genuine knowledge and cheated them of the training in thinking for themselves that are hallmarks of liberal education. The popular ideological framework according to which the United States is among the world’s chief oppressors and Israel is an outpost of American-style oppression in the Middle East inculcates scorn for the world’s freest, most prosperous, and most tolerant rights-protecting democracy, and for the only rights-protecting democracy in the Middle East.
If antisemitism is a kind of diagnostic test for the health of a liberal society, what would a genuinely liberal education have taught students that might have equipped them to recognize and resist it? And what would universities have to restore to their curricula now?
“Beneficiaries of a genuinely liberal education would have learned that antisemitism is the world’s oldest prejudice and that its emergence signals a decline in democratic norms and an erosion of the virtues of freedom. To restore curricula consistent with the imperatives of liberal education, colleges and universities must place at the center of study the ideas and institutions that constitute the American experiment, the leading thinking and seminal events of Western civilization, and series study of other peoples, nations, and civilizations.”
Read more:
The Kremlin’s Antisemitism Machine and Its War Against the West: A Q&A With Author David Reaboi
