Geography, History, and Antisemitism: Woke Culture or Civic Illiteracy on Campus?
The resignation of Penn’s president over antisemitism on campus isn’t only about threatening protests. It shows how little American students know about the world.
University presidents get the big bucks because they have complicated jobs. From schmoozing deep pocketed donors to herding their campuses’ professorial cats, they operate in multiple worlds. In each, choosing the right vocabulary, whether to cajole big checkwriters or tame the tenured crowd, matters.
That’s what makes the answers from the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to a simple question last week on Capitol Hill noteworthy. Like a baseball slugger who swings and misses a soft floater across the numbers, all three whiffed big time. The trio of strikeouts by now are news coast to coast.
The presidents were centerstage at the House Education Committee’s hearing on antisemitism on campus. Republican Representative Elise Stefanik provided their made-for-TV moment. She asked them whether student demonstrators who had called for the genocide of Jewish people during campus protests over Israel’s invasion of Gaza violated their universities’ codes of conduct. Their answers would have made the late Professor Irwin Corey, the comedic genius who played the world’s expert on everything and set the standard for hilarious mumbo jumbo, proud.
The presidents’ babbling went everywhere but the right answer: yes. Not surprisingly, with criticism mounting from the White House, big donor alumni, and their universities’ boards, all three issued “what I meant to say” clarifications. The resignation over the weekend of Penn’s Liz Magill following her mea culpa suggests the pressures are unlikely to abate. Indeed, given the House Education Committee’s announcement of coming investigations into policies on antisemitism on the three campuses, only time will tell whether one university’s head rolling will be enough.
Magill’s defenestration, the embarrassment for the Cambridge crowd, and the congressional inquiries, however, aren’t the issue. For universities across the country, the missed opportunity is. If the trio had provided the obvious ethical as well as political response when asked, they could have done some good. As calls for book bans, politically correct curricula, and faculty purges roil education at every level, they missed the chance to drive home why colleges and universities must be open forums for debate for their sake and the country’s.
The muddled monologues evidenced a cringeworthy insensitivity to the antisemitism not only rising on campus but also from coast to coast as well as abroad. Their ideologically generic “we oppose bullying of all minorities” answer to the threatening atmosphere confronting Jewish students was beyond obtuse. But the three also appeared blind to something else: the fact that antisemitism at their universities is unambiguously intertwining with the pro-Palestinian cause and in the process, undermining their institutions’ crucial role as platforms for free speech.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) tracks free speech violations on campus. Writing in the Atlantic last month, FIRE President Greg Lukianoff noted that the data “shows pro-Palestinian speech has generally been more likely to trigger campaigns to get professors fired, investigated, or sanctioned than has pro-Israel speech.” But, Lukianoff continued, “campaigns targeting pro-Israel speech…have been more likely to succeed. More attempts have been made to de-platform pro-Palestinian speeches on campus, but attempts against pro-Israel speakers have been more successful.”
Lukianoff speculated about what’s behind the fate of pro-Israel speakers. “All substantial and successful disruptions of campus speeches (since the Hamas October 7th massacre and subsequent war),” he reported, “have targeted pro-Israel advocacy.” Drawing on the Anti-Defamation League’s 2021 study of anti-Israeli activism at colleges and universities and an October Harvard-Harris poll, Lukianoff suggested an answer. The pattern, he opined, might be “explained by the fact that pro-Palestinian—and even pro-Hamas—sentiments are relatively more common on campus and among college-age Americans.”
University of California Professor Ron Hassner dug deeper into that apparent sentiment last week asking, why? Hassner, who studies religion and international conflict at Berkeley, commissioned a survey of 250 college and university students across the country. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he provided his answer: the majority of students who voiced pro-Palestinian sentiments haven’t a clue about the relevant geography, history, or issues in the Middle East, much less the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Hassner’s survey results: while 86 percent of those polled sympathized with the Palestinian chant, “from the river to the sea,” 47 percent couldn’t name either the river or the sea; less than a quarter recognized Yasser Arafat’s name; and a little over 25 percent knew the decade when the Oslo peace accords were signed. More to the point, when presented with a few basic facts about the Middle East, Hassner wrote, “67.8 percent of the students surveyed went from supporting ‘from the river to the sea’ to rejecting the mantra.”
The students’ impassioned ignorance is neither a surprise, nor when it comes to their knowledge of the world, an outlier. The National Geographic Society and the Council on Foreign Relations have periodically examined what Americans know about geography and world affairs. “Given our increasingly interconnected world, geographic literacy and geopolitical understanding are more important than ever to US education,” Council President Richard Haas explained in 2019, when the Society and Council announced their last joint survey’s results.
Their four-year-old findings sampled some 2000 Americans. The questions weren’t esoteric, focusing on places and issues where the United States was deeply involved. Even so, the responses were striking. Less than half of those queried in 2019, for example, could identify Afghanistan as al-Qaeda’s haven before the 9/11 attack. Just over 50 percent could find Iraq on a map. The two countries were hardly obscure. For nearly two decades, US military forces had been deeply engaged in both, with countless stories on the conflicts topping the nightly news.
As for students’ knowledge of geography and politics, the 2016 survey by National Geographic and the Council targeted what they knew, with equally head-shaking results. Its participants, 1200 students from 18-26 years-old, all were educated at US colleges and universities. A few examples of the findings tell their story. Slightly more than half could identify Mandarin Chinese as the world’s most widely spoken language; only 67 percent put Sudan on the African continent; and 70 percent didn’t know the Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war.
As for the Israel-Palestinian issue? Only 31 percent of the 1200 collegians surveyed in 2016 could identify Israel on the map. The question and its certain answer are obvious. Seven years later, are today’s college and university students better informed?How would they fare if faced with a pop quiz on the geography and history of the Middle East?
“It is time for good teachers to join the fray and combat bias with education,” Berkeley Professor Hassner wrote last week. He might have added that the time is long overdue.
Excellent article. I think you are spot on. The only quibble I have is no mention that some of the support for the Palestinians, not of course the Hamas terrorists, is the decades long oppression of the the people of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel.
Good piece. Also absent from class: critical thinking 101