“If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market”
Public perception of American higher education is at an inflection point. Bill Maher’s views on religion and a host of other subjects are anathema to Torah Jews, but he has nailed the decline of American higher education as well as anyone. He recently warned young people not to go to college, and if they absolutely must go, to avoid elite colleges that “just make you stupid.” Later in his opening monologue shortly after October 7, he opined, “If ignorance is a disease, Harvard Yard is the Wuhan wet market.”
In response to the explosion of support for Hamas on college campuses, Maher took dead aim at one of the fundamental premises of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) ideology. “Few, if any, positives will come out of what happened in Israel, but one of them is the opening of America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas, among them the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either oppressed or an oppressor. Israelis are oppressors, including babies and bubbes.
“The same students who will tell you that words are violence and silence is violence were very supportive when Hamas went on a murder rampage worthy of the Vikings. They knew where to point their fingers — at the murdered. And then it was off to ethics class.”
Not only are college students ignorant, they are insufferably self-righteous and opinionated, said Maher: “They don’t know much of anything. But that doesn’t stop them from having opinions. They have convinced themselves that Israel is the most repressive regime in history because they have no knowledge of history or even a desire to know anything of history. Actual history does not come up in their intersection of politics and queer gender identities class.”
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