During an interview with PBS’s “Firing Line” released on Friday, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt stated that campus antisemitism originated from a belief that “we need to understand the felt experience of the others and not necessarily the facts that made something happen,” and tenure systems that put professors into untested ideological cloisters.
Host Margaret Hoover asked, [relevant remarks begin around 15:20] “Where did this antisemitism on college campuses originate?”
Greenblatt responded, “Well, that’s a good question, and I’m sure many people will write literally books and treat[ises] about it. I would say there are a few things going on: So, I think, number one, there has been this pushback on universities for decades, since Edward Said at Columbia University wrote a book called ‘Orientalism’, trying to re-frame the way we think about history and trying to suggest that the West is somehow at fault for not understanding the East — meaning everyone else — projecting our views on them. So, stated differently, we need to understand the felt experience of the others and not necessarily the facts that made something happen, that’s number one.”
He continued, “I think, number two, there is just a sort of ideological bent among many people in the faculty and in academia more generally, and the tenure track doesn’t subject them to the same kind of market pressures that we face in the private sector…the pressures to see things in a fact-based way, to be responsive to what’s happening in the world.”
Hoover then cut in to ask, “So, are they not just in protected cloisters of their own ideology that aren’t stress tested?”
Greenblatt answered, “That’s a better way of saying what I did.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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