Ten years from now, American universities may once again become bastions of active and provocative intellectual pursuit, genuine tolerance, and robust but respectable freedom of expression (which is equally enforced by both parties).
You know, all they’ve stopped doing for the last 20 years or so, or at least certainly since Donald Trump became president.
Maybe this is wishful thinking. But if that happens, we could look to last week’s congressional hearings as the turning point.
And it’s not because the entire country got a glimpse into how “leading” institutions like MIT, Harvard, and Penn are run. Not because conservative parents and students finally made everyone care about what they’d been complaining about for years. This is certainly not due to some deep epiphany after profound introspection on the part of great thinkers holed up in their ivory towers.
No, if that happens, it will be for one reason: that the activist progressive liberals who dominate higher education have finally upset the donors who have unwittingly enabled their twisted educational experiments on this nation’s youth.
If you stop to think about it, the left has successfully manipulated the system for a long time. They have managed to marginalize – and demonize – all the “right” people. The “right” people are the people who don’t write seven-, eight-, and nine-figure checks to university endowments.
And no one managed this duality better than my teacher, who avoided questioning in Congress last week. The Georgetown administration could, in fact, write a textbook on how to transform a respected institution of higher learning into something akin to a fringe business school for Marxist community organizing.
A few years ago, the laity at this formerly Catholic school almost ran an off-campus club that espoused the traditional definition of marriage. The claim was that praising the benefits of marriage between a man and a woman was “hate speech.” The administration hesitated in its response—Georgetown is ostensibly a Catholic school, and the charge against the club was largely an assertion that the church’s core teachings were hate—and instead offered to support everyone’s right to “freedom of expression.”
But a few years later, the administration belied that defense when it fired a prominent professor who dared to question the merits of pre-selecting and pre-announcing the race and gender of a Supreme Court nominee without respect for merit.
But that was fine, you see, because people who believed in traditional marriage and colorless meritocracy at court stopped giving money to Georgetown long ago. In fact, the people writing the big checks sat idly by while speech that should have been “free” was distorted into “hate.”
Clearly, Georgetown is not alone. A recent poll showed that at least one in five Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 believed the Holocaust was a myth. You will not get this result without widespread attempts by activists to thwart free debate.
But the raw anti-Semitism that has been exposed on college campuses since the October 7 Hamas massacre may change that.
When someone calls the alumni office at the University of Pennsylvania and tells them a check for $100 million isn’t coming, things change. Indeed, things will change at Penn, and at Harvard and MIT. And it may change at Georgetown, Duke, and your local community college, too.
There is also the opportunity for more changes than just attitudes toward Jews. Our young people may begin to learn what they should have learned from the beginning: that deeply held religious beliefs about marriage, or racial quotas, or any of dozens of other topics dividing our country right now, are many things. Many people may disagree about that, and we can To disagree on such matters in an agreed manner.
But they will also learn that genocidal slogans like “from the river to the sea” are actual hatred.
It is truly sad that exposing such blatant and widespread hatred of Jews is necessary to draw attention to what is happening on American college campuses.
Personally, as a conservative, Republican, and Southerner, I will be the first to admit what many in a similar situation do not acknowledge: that racism is very real in this country, and that we need to do more at every level of society in order to combat racism. Uproot it. But I honestly could not have imagined, in my worst nightmares, until the last few weeks, that anti-Semitism was as prevalent as it turned out to be.
It is better for it, in all its brutal ugliness, to be exposed and corrected, than to be allowed to fester in silence. That is what last week’s hearings, and the actions of some brave, wealthy, liberal-leaning education sponsors, achieved.
Never let anyone tell you that congressional hearings are just political farce. Sometimes they are, but not always.
And don’t ever let anyone tell you that people donate money to their colleges just to stroke their egos by seeing their names on the sides of buildings. Sometimes they do, but not always.
Sometimes, these things can be the catalyst for tremendous good. Let us hope that last week was such an occasion.
Thank you, Elise Stefanik. Thank you, Mark Rowan. I thank everyone who used this troubling opportunity to try to get this country back in the right direction.
mick Mulvaney, A former congressman from South Carolina, he is a NewsNation contributor. He served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Acting White House Chief of Staff under President Donald Trump.
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In a recent speech, Mick Mulvaney, the former acting chief of staff for President Trump, expressed his concern about the growing lack of tolerance and respectful freedom of expression on college campuses. Mulvaney emphasized the need to return campuses to their role as bastions of open debate and varied perspectives. He argued that the suppression of dissenting viewpoints and the stifling of free speech threaten the fundamental purpose of higher education. Mulvaney’s call to action highlights the importance of fostering an environment where all voices are heard and respected, regardless of their ideological leanings.