[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 209 (Tuesday, December 19, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6032-S6034]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Anti-Semitism

  Mr. President, on another matter, on Sunday, Jewish residents of our 
Nation's Capital were subjected to a disturbing episode of anti-Semitic 
hate. As a Torah class at a Washington synagogue concluded and 
attendees began to leave, they were met on the sidewalk by a man who 
sprayed them with a foul-smelling substance and yelled ``Gas the 
Jews''--all while filming on his cell phone. This is just one example 
of the reality facing millions of American Jews.
  In the same weekend, hundreds of synagogues across the country 
received false bomb threats, and thousands of incidents of anti-Jewish 
hatred have cropped up on American soil in the months since October 7, 
a rise that leading watchdogs say is the worst in more than 40 years.
  The brazenness of this hateful deluge is horrifying by itself, but an 
even more alarming trend is just how dramatically the moral cancer of 
identity politics is laying the groundwork for a continued wave of 
anti-Semitism. According to one recent poll, a full two-thirds of 
Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed with the following 
statement:

       Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as 
     oppressors.

  That is the view of two-thirds of Americans between 18 and 24. This 
is

[[Page S6033]]

the scorched-earth Marxist nonsense that has quite publicly seized 
America's most elite universities.
  As our former colleague, the President of the University of Florida, 
put it in a recent column, ``In this upside down system, an oppressor's 
speech is violence. Sometimes an oppressor's silence is violence. But 
for the oppressed, even violence is just speech.''
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to print President Ben Sasse's 
full comments in the Record. This is the ideology that is poisoning the 
new generation. This is the world's oldest form of hatred, and we 
cannot ignore it.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   [From the Atlantic, Dec. 14, 2023]

                The Moral Decline of Elite Universities

                             (By Ben Sasse)

       In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven 
     largest tobacco companies testified under oath before 
     Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years 
     later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their 
     callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak 
     plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard 
     themselves as part of a shared American community. Those 
     pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, 
     put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.
       Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from 
     now, Americans will likely recall a witness table of 
     presidents--representing not top corporations in one single 
     sector, but the nation's most powerful educational 
     institutions--refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting 
     any sense that they are part of a ``we,'' and exhibiting smug 
     moralistic certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral 
     positions about anti-Semitism and genocide.
       Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they 
     had a substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents 
     sat atop sectors experiencing a collapse of public trust. 
     Higher education commanded the confidence of 57 percent of 
     Americans a mere eight years ago, but only 36 percent of 
     Americans by this summer, and a steeper decline is likely 
     coming as a consequence of the grotesqueries of the past two 
     months. And yes, both sets of testimonies--of the tobacco 
     executives, and the elite-education executives--revealed a 
     deep moral decline inside their respective cultures. But 
     here's a difference: The tobacco executives were lying, and 
     subsequent legal discovery showed how extensive their 
     understanding of nicotine was. The three university 
     presidents, however--with their moral confusion on naked 
     display--were likely not lying; instead, we saw a set of true 
     believers in a new kind of religion.
       It is important to note that the three presidents who 
     testified before Congress--Liz Magill, who subsequently 
     resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania; 
     Sally Kornbluth, of the Massachusetts Institute of 
     Technology; and Claudine Gay, of Harvard University--didn't 
     open themselves up to perjury charges. Instead, they revealed 
     themselves as having drunk the Kool-Aid of a new and cultlike 
     worldview. Along with so much of higher education, especially 
     outside the hardest of sciences, they have become acolytes of 
     a shallow new theology called ``intersectionality.'' This is 
     neither a passing fad nor something that normies can roll our 
     eyes at and ignore. As Andrew Sullivan presciently predicted 
     a mere six years ago, the tenets of this all-encompassing 
     ideology have quickly spilled beyond trendy humanities 
     departments at top-30 universities, and its self-appointed 
     priestly class tried tirelessly to enforce its ideology.
       At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim 
     status of various groups is the deepest truth, and this 
     framework must drive our interpretation of both natural and 
     built reality. Truth, moral claims, beauty, dignity, the 
     explanatory value of a research insight--all of these must be 
     subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power 
     or powerlessness of certain sociological categories. This 
     victimology decrees that the world, and every institution 
     therein, must be divided by the awakened into categories of 
     oppressors and oppressed. Immutable group identities, rather 
     than the qualities, hopes, and yearnings of individuals, are 
     the keys to unlocking the power structures behind any given 
     moment: All the sheep and goats must be sorted.
       The bullying certainty of this belief system is indeed 
     boring, but that is not to say that every move is 
     predictable. For instance, depending on their skin tone, 
     sexual orientation, or religious views, tenured Ivy Leaguers 
     earning five times the median American income may be 
     categorized as oppressed. Conversely, depending on their skin 
     tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, janitors at 
     Walmart may be considered, within the intersectionality 
     matrix, to be irredeemable oppressors.
       By way of disclosure: I am a university president turned 
     United States senator turned university president again. The 
     institution I now lead, the University of Florida, faces all 
     sorts of challenges, and Florida is the site of important 
     battles about the responsibilities of academia to our 
     society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and 
     dedicated faculty aim to provide an elite education that 
     promotes resilience and strength in our students so that they 
     are tough enough, smart enough, and compassionate enough to 
     engage big ideas in a world where people will always 
     disagree.
       Growing up, I idolized Martin Luther King Jr., who 
     championed universal human dignity with clear-cut moral 
     authority. From memory, writing in a jail cell in Birmingham, 
     he synthesized, refined, and applied the Western canon's 
     greatest philosophers, from Socrates to Abraham Lincoln, to 
     America's predicament. While damning the original sin of 
     white supremacy, he consistently offered hope that our 
     country could overcome injustice with love. It's gut-
     wrenching to think that America's greatest civil-rights 
     leader--one of the greatest Americans in the country's entire 
     history--would have his ``Letter From Birmingham Jail'' 
     criticized and dismissed for citing only dead white males if 
     it were written today. Too much of elite academia cares 
     little for universal human dignity, leaves no space for 
     forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.
       Today, free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal 
     improvement, and healthy cultural cross-pollination are all 
     obliterated by omnipotent determinisms. This is why academics 
     at the Smithsonian created a graphic for children that 
     portrayed America as an irredeemably racist society, 
     asserting that ``rugged individualism,'' ``the nuclear 
     family,'' and ``hard work'' are ``internalized . . . aspects 
     of white culture.'' The message is clear: Success is always a 
     privilege given, never the result of hard work; virtues such 
     as self-reliance are unattainable for minorities.
       These elites believe that the world must be remade. Since 
     the beginning of time, oppressors--the ``privileged''--ran 
     roughshod over the oppressed or marginalized. Now oppressors 
     must be brought low to atone for history's sins. It is a 
     faith without guardrails, without grace, and certainly 
     without reconciliation. It requires a life of moral struggle 
     against the devil and the world, but with no eschatology of 
     hope. There is no heaven coming here.
       This religiosity has colonized humanities departments 
     across supposedly secular higher education. Institutions 
     ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth, to the 
     exploration of ideas, and to the advancement of human 
     flourishing have, instead, devoted themselves to inquisitions 
     and struggle sessions.
       Students catalog microaggressions and conflate comfort with 
     safety. Faculty who dare to treat students like adults with a 
     bit of grit face professional consequences. Administrators 
     police language. Hiring committees compel DEI statements. 
     Academic conferences provide safe spaces instead of thought-
     provoking forums. Admissions officers devise formulas to rank 
     students based on race, class, and gender. Universities 
     respond  haplessly to mobs wielding the heckler's veto to 
     shut down thoughtful deliberation.
       The moral confusion on too many campuses after the October 
     7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis fits a familiar pattern. The 
     acceptability of the speech depends on the speaker. 
     Individuals from oppressed groups are given leeway to target 
     oppressor groups through disruptions and threats. This 
     victimology allows Palestinians and their supporters (the 
     oppressed) to target, intimidate, and harass Jews (the 
     oppressors).
       In the morally backward universe of American campuses: The 
     terrified Jewish students at Cooper Union, locked in the 
     library while a mob banged on doors and spat anti-Semitic 
     chants, are the bad guys. A group of Harvard students who 
     surrounded and harassed a Jewish student are the good guys. 
     It's not hard to see why the Harvard students who occupied 
     University Hall in a pro-Palestinian demonstration were 
     offered food instead of being arrested.
       Three fundamental tenets of a free society are that beliefs 
     are not necessarily true merely because they are held by a 
     majority, or wrong because only a minority agree; that while 
     we seek to eliminate violence, we do not seek to suppress 
     diversity of views; and that souls cannot be compelled. The 
     reigning orthodoxy on supposedly elite campuses is that the 
     first two theses are retrograde, and the third is naive 
     because souls don't even exist.
       In this upside-down system, an oppressor's speech is 
     violence. Sometimes an oppressor's silence is violence. But 
     for the oppressed, even violence is just speech.
       The university presidents who testified before Congress 
     were not wrong that the line beyond protected speech is 
     action--this is the well-established American tradition. But 
     having so selectively applied that standard in the 
     institutions they wield, they forfeited any claim to be 
     motivated by protecting speech; they are simply in the 
     business of choosing allies and outcasts based on a dogma of 
     victimology. Harvard's freshman orientation specifically 
     instructs students that failing to adhere to new dogmatic 
     linguistic constructions that didn't exist a few years ago is 
     abuse, and students anticipate consequences.
       These academic leaders did not arrive at this dogma of 
     victimology recently. They built their careers on it, funded 
     it, celebrated it openly. When the rape of Israeli women 
     cannot be unequivocally condemned because of their status as 
     Jews, when calls for genocide require additional ``context,'' 
     it is clear that many of country's putatively best minds are 
     unable to make basic moral judgments.

[[Page S6034]]

       A 2019 conversation with some highly degreed Ivy Leaguers 
     still rings in my ears. A number of white academic advocates 
     of the term Latinx told me, when I still represented Nebraska 
     in the Senate, that it would be ``racist'' not to teach newly 
     arrived El Salvadoran immigrants to rural Nebraska to refer 
     to themselves by this newly invented word. To recall the 
     aphorism attributed--probably apocryphally--to George Orwell: 
     ``Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe 
     them.''
       Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as 
     seminaries. They are seminaries once again. The doctrine they 
     embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition of 
     insiders and outsiders from pursuing free inquiry. Rather 
     than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity, 
     individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem 
     poised to double down on fanaticism.
       Cults tend to excuse their failures: The world is ending, 
     but our mystic math was a little off. As this crisis unfolds, 
     America's elite academics are tinkering with their doctrinal 
     formulas. Rather than abandon their theology, they're 
     attempting to rejigger the charts and reweight the 
     numerology.
       We cannot heal these declining institutions simply by 
     recalculating the grid so that Jewish people are moved from 
     the ``powerful'' square to a ``powerless'' slot. The problem 
     is the tyranny of the power grid itself, and its disinterest 
     in both ideas and universal human dignity.
       Changing one president here or there isn't enough. 
     Intersectionality is a religious cult that's dominated higher 
     education for nearly a decade with the shallow but certain 
     idea that power structures are everything, the Neanderthal 
     view that blunt force trumps human dignity.
       The nonsense we've seen seeping off campuses this fall is 
     jarring but not surprising, given that the absurdities inside 
     this worldview have not been pressure-tested. This is 
     because  its adherents, those who wield the power of some 
     of our society's most prominent institutions, have 
     prohibited anyone from asking questions, demanding that 
     their religion remain immune to challenge.
       Rebellion against this arrogant worldview was inevitable. 
     Many of us have long expected a correction against the 
     certainties of this campus creed, and I suspect that the 
     public's They can't say what? reaction to Kornbluth, Gay, and 
     Magill might prove to be a breaking point. While populists 
     have always found the bashing of elites fashionable, this 
     moment calls for something more constructive. It also calls 
     for something deeper than free speech for free speech's sake.
       We ought to dispense with the laughably absurd notion that 
     these university presidents are somehow steadfast champions 
     of free speech. Where was this commitment when MIT canceled a 
     speech from a climate scientist who voiced opposition to 
     affirmative action? Where was this obligation when a lecturer 
     said she felt pushed out of Harvard for suggesting that sex 
     is a biological fact? Where was this duty when Penn tried to 
     fire a law-school professor who made odious comments about 
     minority groups and immigration policy? These elite 
     institutions make the rules up as they go and stack the deck 
     against disfavored groups. Ask conservative students how many 
     loopholes they have to jump through to reserve spaces or 
     invite speakers. Ask the students who report holding back 
     their views in class or paper--topic selection for fear of 
     facing consequences. For that matter, ask anyone who has been 
     paying attention for the past 20 years. These universities 
     aren't doggedly committed to free speech; they're desperately 
     trying to find some cover. The expensive public-relations 
     firms they've hired for crisis management are grasping at 
     straws.
       This is not merely--or primarily--a free-speech issue. Yes, 
     of course, universities ought to be informed by speech. At 
     the University of Florida--where, despite the Ivy League's 
     hegemony of the national conversation, we award twice as many 
     bachelor's degrees each year to extraordinary students as 
     Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined--we are proud to uphold 
     the First Amendment rights of all our students. America's 
     First Amendment gives everyone the right to make an abject 
     idiot of themselves, and we will defend that right as we also 
     defend our students from violence, vandalism, and harassment. 
     But this is deeper than those speech issues. What's at stake 
     is nothing less than the mission of a university. Our 
     campuses are meant to be communities of scholars pursuing 
     truth together, in a community built to discover, teach, 
     share, and refine. A foundational commitment to human dignity 
     is essential to the very purpose of education.
       Unfortunately, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn 
     abandoned that commitment in front of Congress last week. At 
     a perilous moment, they failed the test.
       Higher education is facing a crisis of public trust. The 
     simple fact of the matter is, fewer and fewer Americans 
     believe that universities are committed to the pursuit of 
     truth. Understanding why isn't hard at a time when elite 
     institutions make excuses for illiberal mobs. The perception 
     that ideologues and fanatics are running the show on campus 
     is, sadly, based in reality. The public sees it. Donors see 
     it. Boards see it. Alumni see it. We recognize callousness 
     and indifference--we saw it from Big Tobacco in 1994 and 
     we're seeing it from the Ivy League now. The public is not 
     about to forget it.
       As administrators, donors, faculty, and trustees of 
     institutions around the country, this is our moment. It is up 
     to us to rebuild trust in higher education. It is our 
     responsibility to speak plainly, defend our students, defend 
     pluralism, and tend to the high calling of educating.
       The only way forward is for universities to embrace 
     classical liberalism--with its values of freedom, tolerance, 
     and pluralism, all grounded in human dignity. Recasting 
     oppressors and oppressed is a dead end. As the cult of 
     intersectionality implodes before our eyes, it is time for 
     higher education to commit itself to earnestly engaging new 
     ideas and respectfully participating in big debates on a 
     whole host of issues. Universities must reject victimology, 
     celebrate individual agency, and engage the truth with 
     epistemological modesty. Institutions ought to embrace open 
     inquiry. Education done rightly should be defined by big-
     hearted debates about important issues.
       More curiosity, less orthodoxy. Explore everything with 
     humility, including views of sex and gender that were 
     standard until the previous decade, classical traditions, 
     America's promise and progress, and the concept of universal 
     human dignity--the very thing that Hamas and its apologists 
     reject. Engage the ideas. Pull apart the best arguments with 
     the best questions. Do it again and again and again. Build 
     communities that take ideas seriously, so that scholars and 
     students can grow in both understanding and empathy.
       Self-government makes high demands of its citizens. Today's 
     students will be called to lead in a complicated world where 
     not everyone will agree, where trade-offs will be necessary, 
     where basic values inform the work of navigating complex 
     realities. The current illiberal climate on campuses is the 
     kind of tragedy that could doom a republic. We cannot let 
     that happen.
       To keep America's universities the envy of the world, we 
     need to make our institutions welcoming homes for those who 
     are passionate about the glorious mission of education and 
     the communities of free thought it requires. If you entered 
     academia because you share that joy, find institutions that 
     are serious about renewing higher education and are serious 
     about stewarding this incredible calling. Those of us--left, 
     right, or center--who value human dignity, pluralism, and 
     genuine progress and who want to make sure that we pass these 
     blessings to the next generation cannot abandon institutions 
     to post-liberals on the left who would destroy them from 
     within or post-liberals on the right who would tear them to 
     the ground. At our best, the academy promotes human 
     flourishing in ways that no other sector can. If we commit 
     ourselves to the work of creating, discovering, and serving--
     not enforcing impersonal hierarchies of power or stifling 
     inquiry--we'll rebuild public trust.
       Those of us called to higher education--members of boards, 
     presidents, administrators, professors, and donors--owe it to 
     future generations to build something better.
  Mr. McCONNELL. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ossoff). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  The majority whip.