Anti-Semitism on college campuses today echoes the dark past of many elite American universities

As anti-Semitic rhetoric and attacks increase at some of America’s leading institutions, Jews on College Campuses People have been left scratching their heads, questioning how progressives can possibly project a veneer of tolerance and modern thinking while celebrating Hamas’s brutality and embracing hatred.

But in fact, “progressive” intolerance is nothing new on college campuses, and anti-Semitism and even Nazism are part of many universities’ dark pasts. Jay Richards of the Heritage Foundation points to eugenics as another example.

“It’s hard for us to imagine now, but it was an idea shared by almost all elite opinion makers and institutions in the early 20th century, especially as part of the broader progressive movement,” he said. “In many ways, it was developed in the United States in the 1920s and exported to Germany and [they]…really implemented it with astonishing efficiency. ”

Adolf Hitler was a great admirer The work of American scholars Eugenics is the study of how breeding is arranged in a population to increase the occurrence of traits considered desirable and to eliminate traits considered undesirable by scientists.

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Biologist Steven Farber believes that eugenicists such as Charles B. Davenport (who taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the Carnegie Institution) published ‘s academic articles were the “intellectual basis” of Nazi racial social policies.

According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, “eugenics theory provided the basis for the Nazis’ secret program that murdered an estimated 250,000 disabled Germans” before turning to Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and other marginalized people. A group regarded as an inferior group. Racial hygiene. ”

In addition to embracing hateful and pseudoscientific ideologies and embedding eugenics within biology textbookSome university administrators have been openly anti-Semitic while leading institutions to restrict admissions of qualified Jewish students.

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For example, the Yale University archives include a document from 1922 titled “The Jewish Question,” which promoted quotas for “foreign and unwashed elements.” According to a book written by a scholar, Jewish enrollment remained at 10 percent for the next forty years. Former Yale students call it “joining the club.”

Former Yale secretary John A. Wilkinson told the New York Times about the discovery in the 1980s: “Like society at large, vicious and ugly forms of discrimination exist at Yale. This is part of our history and we should face it.”

Other elite institutions, e.g. Columbia UniversityPrinceton University and Harvard University have similar policies. The Harvard Crimson reported, “In the 1920s, the Harvard administration passed a series of admissions policies that limited the proportion of Jewish students in each freshman class. These policies were the first attempt in Harvard’s history to limit admissions to qualified applicants. the behavior of.”

antisemitism During that time, especially for Harvard, it didn’t stop there.

Stephen Norwood, one of the late scholars who studied the subject of higher education and its complicity with Nazi German propaganda, documented how elite institutions invited Nazis to speak at their universities, participate in foreign exchange exchange programs, and Bringing in brainwashed students and Nazi professors and allowing Nazi ideology to spread more widely to peers and the West.

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In fact, “German exchange students were instructed to act as agents of the German government on U.S. … campuses,” New York Times Germany’s propaganda campaign against the United States, which included visits by Nazis to exchange students and professors, drew concern from members of Congress, who established the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate.

There are many examples of how Nazi ideology became an acceptable view on campus. A New York Times article said that in 1939, after the Nazis’ Kristallnacht massacre was widely publicized, first-year students at Princeton University selected Adolf Hitler from now on as “the greatest man alive.”

Norwood writes that a few years after Hitler came to power, “the Harvard administration allowed the Nazi German consul general in Boston to place wreaths with swastikas on campus.”

Much of Norwood’s anger is directed at former Harvard University president James Bryan Conant, whom he believes “neglected many opportunities to take a principled stand against Hitler’s regime and its anti-Semitic atrocities, and contributed to Got it Nazi Germany’s Efforts to improve its image in the West. ”

Norwood also believes that “Conant also showed impatience and often contempt for Jews and other activists determined to publicly expose Nazi brutality” although “Conant did express formal opposition to Nazism and never Has not acted as public advocate.”

Under Conant’s purview, Harvard “warmly welcomed” Nazi leaders to campus, “invited them to prestigious and high-profile social events, and worked to establish friendly relations with the thoroughly Naziized universities in Germany, While condemning those who protested against these acts,” he even went on to say that the Third Reich “intensified the persecution of the Jews.”

Other colleges, such as Columbia University, despite strong student opposition, accepted invitations to attend the festival at Heidelberg University, site of a notorious anti-Semitic book burning in 1933 and a center of Nazi indoctrination.

Norwood writes that Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler also “viciously lashed out at Columbia students who publicly protested Nazi crimes.”

“Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler was able to raise public awareness of the threat of fascism, and his views on international affairs were quoted in the media more than any other higher education leader in the 1930s. Sadly for some key figures, he failed over the years to use his influence against barbarism, choosing instead to work with the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini to improve their image in the West.”

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Fox News Digital reached out to Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and Yale universities for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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