Brandeis

I'm a graduate of Brandeis University. Class of 1960. I met my wife there and one of our sons also attended and met his wife there. I got a fine education and, overall, had a very good experience there. When I started the school was less than a decade old. It had been founded after the Shoah and one of its important purposes was to take in Jews, who had long faced quotas and additional barriers to admission at other academic institutions. Face it, no one wanted Jews. Some places accepted them without putting obstacles in their way, but that was not because they were enamored of Jews or objected to the practice of other schools. They just wanted the best students they could get, and that often led to a disproportionate number of Jews. More than would be anticipated based on numbers alone. Quality was the deciding criterion, not quantity.

Not Brandeis though. It was founded with the recognition of a mission. It was a setting where Jews were not only welcome, but which specifically made conditions comfortable for them. It was a school which, in addition to being among the best in the country, provided for the gustatorial and spiritual needs of Jewish students – not by exclusivity: its three chapels attested to its openness to non-Jews. It was a superior school that recognized both the historic bias against its people, an a historic future for that people – a future in which it would play a part.

I went because it was Jewish, favoring it over MIT, Johns Hopkins, and Cornell, having been admitted to all of them. I wasn't among the most religious there, but I wanted to be part of a principled effort to bring my people into the world community. I was proud, and I encouraged and welcomed others to a principled and defiant place, where all people and all ideas were appreciated.

But times have changed.

I am no longer proud of my alma mater. I no longer encourage others to send their children there. The school had fostered liberalism, but in recent years liberalism has metamorphosed into fad, fashion, protest, and anti-semitism. It has become the mouthpiece for dissenting minority groups, and has taken the position of providing support for them irrespective of the justification for that support. And it espouses the position that any ideas which don't echo its ideology are wrong.

In the academic world this leads to the substitution of subjectivity for objectivity in classes and discussions, and the indoctrination of students into a political philosophy. Even if the school does not itself promote this behavior, acquiescence to the spreading of such a gospel – the cowardice of a wish to be like the institutions it emulates – is an encouragement to faculty and students who loudly advocate these actions. And the more virulent the protests by individuals and groups, the more likely that the next cohort of impressionable youth will uncritically accept the most popular philosophy.

Brandeis has assimilated. It has assimilated much like the less religious Jews of the last century, and now this one. The school seems to have a wish to emulate the Ivy League schools that it was founded to make up for. It has adopted the fashions and practices of those institutions in an effort to be seen as one of them and earn their reflected prestige. Along the way it has flirted with, and frequently adopted, such practices as (among many others) the silencing of unpopular opinion, support of popular causes even when they contradict the principles on which the school is based, "diversity" and affirmative action – intended to have a student population more reflective of America (or overrepresented by minorities) whatever the academic cost, non-kosher food so that new students can enjoy the foods they are used to, and advocacy for causes like BDS and Palestinian "rights" despite the fact that they and their students have no knowledge of the facts related to these issues, only the propaganda.

It is current practice to demean those with whom you disagree: to rename sites named in their honor or in gratitude for their contributions and to destroy anything favorable to them, like what is written and what is displayed. Monuments are defaced, destroyed, covered, or removed if they affect the "sensitivity" of some viewing the lives they represent out of the context of their times. Most recently that has resulted in demands to remove statues of Christopher Columbus among others from public view. And many of our major academic centers – including some admired by Brandeis – have taken such steps. Louis Brandeis was Zionistic, but there are many, especially liberals, who view Zionism unfavorably. They are sensitive to the plight of those who, even if they arrived and squatted in "Palestine" after Jews resettled the land in which they have lived for thousands of years, claim the land for their own.

But Brandeis was a Zionist. If sensitivity is adequate justification for protests and a denial of history, it would be logical to change the name of the university and remove his statue from the campus. At the current time the students might even celebrate its renaming as Linda Mansour University in view of her courageous denunciation of Zionists.

There is no denying the excellence of much of the education provided by Brandeis, but much of the education they receive is tainted by the political stances of some of the faculty and students, and the administration's failure to require the honoring of the principles for which the school was founded. And the failure to reassert their own authority over those on the campus – students, faculty, and visitors. Right now Brandeis is disappearing into the fashionable mass of expensive academic centers that cater to the whims of those who pay the bills, and those who instigate them.

It's not the school it used to be. It's not the school I went to.