How Did Academia Fail So Badly?

For at least two and a half thousand years, virtually all educated people believed that knowledge was the savior of humanity. Even Maimonides wrote in his “Guide for the Perplexed” that once all of humankind had knowledge, the world would be at peace.

Then came the 20th century. The most educated nation in world history—a land to which all other nations looked for science, psychology, culture, philosophy, reason, and ethics—applied its knowledge to commit crimes against humanity that no barbarian could have imagined.

Knowledge was put to the test. It blew up on the launching pad.

Now we are in late autumn of 2023. Academics of America and Europe and their students have been denying, excusing, justifying, and even celebrating a barbaric massacre and despicable mass rape of Jews by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program.

The House Committee on Education and the Workforce asked the presidents of three of America’s flagship universities a simple question: “Does calling for the genocide of the Jews violate your institution’s code of conduct concerning bullying and harassment?” Not one was able to answer an unqualified “yes.”

As I watched that interaction online, I shuddered, perhaps even more than when I first heard of the events of October 7th. I don’t know if my non-Jewish friends can understand how chilling this was. Jews share a common memory, and this awakened a very traumatic one.

I asked one academic if this was representative of the world in which he worked. He kindly explained that the presidents of universities are not the serious thinkers and researchers. He wasn’t certain, but he felt that most serious academics are not delivering in their classes vitriolic diatribes against the colonialists (an Orwellian doublethink term for Jews) or morally justifying massacring families, abducting children, and gang rape within the framework of insurgence.

But then, he agreed they were not protesting against those who are.

I reminded him of the Talmudic dictum, “Silence is consent.”1 When students are exposed to a climate of hatred and inverse morality on campus and see that their professors have not a word to say about it, that itself speaks loudly. He was forced to agree.

No, the academy has not gone mad; it has simply retained its status since Germany of 1933.

Shadows of 1933

Peter Drucker relates:

Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.

Above all, Frankfurt had a science faculty distinguished both by its scholarship and by its liberal convictions; and outstanding among the Frankfurt scientists was a biochemist-physiologist of Nobel-Prize caliber and impeccable liberal credentials. When the appointment of a Nazi commissar was announced … and every teacher and graduate assistant at the university was summoned to a faculty meeting to hear this new master, everybody knew that a trial of strength was at hand. I had never before attended a faculty meeting, but I did attend this one.

The new Nazi commissar wasted no time on the amenities. He immediately announced that Jews would be forbidden to enter university premises and would be dismissed without salary on March 15; this was something that no one had thought possible despite the Nazis’ loud antisemitism. Then he launched into a tirade of abuse, filth, and four-letter words such as had been heard rarely even in the barracks and never before in academia…

[He] pointed his finger at one department chairman after another and said, “You either do what I tell you or we’ll put you into a concentration camp.” There was silence when he finished; everybody waited for the distinguished biochemist-physiologist. The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said, “Very interesting, Mr. Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating: but one point I didn’t get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?"2

German academia didn’t settle for acquiescence and a passive role. Many of its most brilliant minds were active supporters of Hitler.

It’s important to understand how crucially enabling this was to the Nazi cause. Academics in pre-war Germany had the status of nobility. The princes of that nobility were the philosophers. A German would have told you that in all of history, philosophy had only truly spoken in two languages—the Greek of Athens and the German tongue of their days.

The most celebrated luminary of these neo-Athenians was Martin Heidegger. As soon as the Nazis came to power, Heidegger began to argue that freedom of inquiry and free expression were negative and selfish ideas. In May of 1933, he officially joined the Nazi Party. He told his students: “The Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law. Study to know; from now on, all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. Heil Hitler!”

After the war, Heidegger never recanted. He is still regarded by many as the 20th century’s most brilliant philosopher. And yes, it’s undeniable. He was head and shoulders above his colleagues in insight, originality, and sheer breadth of scope.

That same May, Carl Schmitt, a brilliant legal philosopher, also joined the National Socialist (Nazi) Party. He immediately went to work, helping to draw up a legal system for a totalitarian regime. He welcomed “the genuine battle of principles between the Jews’ cruelty and impudence and Germans’ ethnic honor,” while praising Nazi leaders’ calls for “healthy exorcism.”

Like Heidegger, Schmitt never recanted and is regarded as “possibly the most-discussed German jurist of the 20th century.”

Is There Hope Today?

As it turns out, all those very wise people of history, from Plato to Kant, were gravely mistaken. Knowledge could be a good thing; it can also be a horrid device of social collapse and ruin.

Plato himself not only justified but idealized the world of his Republic, which Karl Popper rightly characterized as cruel. In the first half of the 20th century, if you were a thinking person, you were most likely a Marxist. Marxism became Leninism, which became Stalinism, starving millions of Ukrainian farmers to death for the collective ideal, resettling some six million Tatars, Koreans, Chechens, and many others for the overt purpose of homogeneous ethnic cleansing and genocide, and exiling entire populations to the hardships of the Gulag—all for the sake of a Marxist utopian idea.3

In every society there have been wise men stroking their beards to rationalize and enable every form of perversion and cruelty, from misogyny to infanticide, from ruthless warfare to brutal slavery, from lobotomy to euthanasia.

Today, some 90 percent of the planet’s population has access to almost all the knowledge of humankind. In many ways, that has proven beneficial. In many other ways, it has proven destructive.

Knowledge has not been our savior. The question we need to answer: How could so many great minds have been so wrong? How could it be that the supreme faculty of humankind not only could fail us so badly, but can drive human beings to depravity such as no beast could commit?

The answer is vital because there is still hope. America of 2023 is not Germany of 1933. Neither are any of the countries of Western Europe. Most of the populace and their representatives continue to despise hatred and prejudice and value free speech without deluding themselves into accepting doublethink jargon as liberal values. Yes, it affects all of us in some way or other. Yet, in general, this madness has remained mostly quarantined to higher-tier campuses.

We can still get back on track. But we first need to understand where we made the wrong turn.

The Ongoing Battle of Chanukah

In Chabad literature, this is called the Battle of Chanukah. From this perspective, the Chanukah lights commemorate much more than an event many years ago in the Judean hills. They speak of an ongoing war that spans millennia without abate.

In every generation, learned Jews have struggled to align two forms of wisdom: the divine wisdom of our Torah and the human wisdom of foreign nations. Most prominent in this story are the philosophers of Ancient Greece, whose legacy continued to inform brilliant minds in Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, and yes, German and English as well. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the father of the Chabad school, was himself well-versed in mathematics, astronomy, and other facets of secular knowledge.

The pure oil of the Temple represents divine wisdom, which was contaminated by the human wisdom of the Hellenizers. The victory of the Hasmoneans culminated in the discovery of a hidden flask of untouched, pure oil. That oil was lit and shone miraculously for eight days. Divine wisdom not only prevailed but rose to new heights.4

It’s easy to pigeonhole this homily into the pedestrian storyline of “faith prevails over reason.” Then you can tell me that faith is the dogma of fools and reason is enlightenment, so it would have been better had the Hellenizers won. But no, the literature discusses not faith, but two planes of wisdom: an outer plane and an inner one. Because to think about anything requires that you work on two distinct planes at once.

On one plane, you digest information. You chew on it and assimilate it, seek how it relates to everything else you know, and, most importantly, determine what can be done with it. This is the outer plane of wisdom. In Hebrew, it is called binah, which is related to the word boneh, meaning “to build, structure.”

But truly original thought requires you to enter an entirely different plane. You must stare quietly into the face of reality without disturbing its waters, remain void of any bias, accept whatever is as though you were not there. To begin to truly think, you must first transcend yourself. This is the inner side of wisdom, called in Hebrew chochmah. Chochmah, R. Schneur Zalman writes, is koach mah—Hebrew for “the potential of what is.”5

When the outer wisdom is dominant, you deal with what is, what was, and what might come to be. When you pay attention to inner wisdom, you deal with what should be and what you should do to achieve that. On yet a deeper plane, inner wisdom speaks of the meaning of all things, why they are here, and what they are moving toward.

To realize that your existence must have some meaning or purpose, you must be able to perceive something that transcends it. But what if you can’t let go of your ego and personal agendas? Void of any notion of higher purpose to lift it upward, your reasoning begins to sink downward until it is no longer reasonable. There is nothing it can fail to justify. And whoever will challenge it will be taunted as ignorant, stupid, and insane.

That’s the story of Chanukah: It is a redemption of Athens as much as it is of Jerusalem. It is about restoring the inner light so that the outer light can function in full health once again.

This is an entirely different conflict than that of faith and reason. Those two traditional foes play a zero-sum game: If faith wins, reason must be compromised, even spayed. If reason wins, faith is, at best, banished from the sciences to its secluded magisterium of mystic experience and personal values.

But here the struggle is for wisdom to find its core—a sense of wonder before the unknowable. A knowledge that my mind cannot contain the universe, but the universe contains my mind—indeed, from it, my mind emerged like a child from its womb. And within that context, I must ask, “Why am I here? What is the meaning? How do I fit within the greater whole? What does this Mind from which I emerged want from me?”

Hellenistic Mud

Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the seventh rebbe of Chabad and known universally as simply “the Rebbe,” studied physics and mathematics at the University of Berlin from 1928-1932, completing a degree in engineering at the Sorbonne. His academic records reveal that he attended the lectures of some of the most prestigious minds of the time: Erwin Schrodinger, John von Neumann, Hans Reichenbach, Walter Nernst, Wolfgang Köhler, and Paul Hofmann, among others.

He also witnessed first-hand the almost total surrender of German academia to the Third Reich, which he discussed publicly on several occasions.6

In a note in his diary while in Paris, dated Chanukah, 1935, the Rebbe provides an answer to our question, an explanation of this paradoxical effect of reason.7

Reason, he wrote, provides your only hope as a human being to recognize your failures and guide you from their snare. But what if your power of reason itself has become depraved? Then there is nothing to pull you out of your mud. You can only sink deeper and deeper, like an explorer who has fallen into a slimy swamp of muck and mire, and the more he struggles, the deeper he sinks.

With this, the Rebbe provides a homiletic interpretation of the word for Greece in the Hebrew Bible: Yavan. The word also appears with a slightly different pronunciation as “yavain,” meaning slime, mire, mud. For example, “He saved me from the roaring pit, from the thick mire…”8

What is mud? Earth mixed with water. Water is a common metaphor in the Torah for wisdom. Water should be refreshing and beneficial. Earth should be fertile and nurturing. But when a large amount of water is mixed with the earth, the terrain can become treacherous.

Then the Rebbe demonstrates this peril in the form of the letters that spell Yavan in Hebrew: יון. Reading from right to left, you will see an elevated dot, followed by a short line, followed by a line so long it reaches down beneath all the other letters.

First, he explains, you begin with the letter yud, a dot representing the seed of reason and wisdom. Then that dot descends downward into human emotion and instinct. And finally, it drops beneath the line, stuck deep in the mud, far below where human instinct alone could lead.

Reason Enslaved

But why should reason become depraved? This, the Rebbe does not address. Probably because the explanation is quite obvious: Reason subverts itself when it is convenient to do so.

I’ll give an example. Aldous Huxley was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the man who coined the term “agnostic.” Aldous remained an agnostic until his last day despite his mystical and psychedelic experiences. Yet, in 1937, he wrote these brutally honest words:

I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; and consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.

The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do. For myself, as no doubt for most of my friends, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation from a certain system of morality.

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. The supporters of this system claimed that it embodied the meaning … of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever.9

Huxley was coddling a relatively benign need with his agnosticism. He simply desired pleasure.

Modern post-colonial theory provides a scholar’s cloak for nothing less than raw hatred of the “other,” no different than the beast that lurked beneath the cloaks of Hitler’s Nazi professors. The great irony of modernity is the survival of a crude tribal instinct under the embrace and nurture of the sophisticated scholar.

For some, the specter is moral failure, which supposed proofs against free will conveniently dismiss. The lecturing humanities professor has another motivation: Reality often makes for a dull lecture. Nothing stirs up a class of young people and ups your student ratings better than a tirade against the established order.

Jonathan Haidt received his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania and is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business. In at least two of his books, he provides a helpful metaphor to describe how the human mind subjugates itself to its base instincts while feigning morality.

The rational part of the human brain, he explains, is a little man sitting upon a massive elephant. The elephant is all the rest of your brain, those functions that deal with survival and the attainment of pleasure.

If you ask this little man what he’s doing up there, he will respond, “I am the master of this elephant. I tell it where to go and why.”

While you’re considering that response, the elephant smells some delicious peanuts, turns about, and stomps off to find them. The little man declares, “We decided to go this direction because…”

Can Reason Save Itself?

What Haidt’s analogy misses is that this little man is not impotent. Human rationale enables us to go far below human instinct. The crucial question is: Does reason have an equal capacity to empower good? If it can rush to the aid of its own defeat, can it do the same to transcend itself and reach beyond instinct?

From an evolutionary standpoint, the prospect seems absurd. Homo sapiens’ oversized brain in this paradigm is merely a useful adaptation for survival in hostile environments. It excels in uncovering patterns in nature because when you know what will be tomorrow, you’re more likely to be there to enjoy it.

In other words, there is really no distinction between mind and instinct other than the degree of neurological complexity. Why should a function of the instinct for biological survival provide a portal to transcend instinct?

But then, materialist evolutionary theory is hard put to explain why there should be any life at all. What was wrong with water, earth, air, and fire? And if life did emerge by some highly improbable accident, what was wrong with the primitive amoeba?

Life is teleological by definition. Every organism is always doing something now for what it will get in the future. So, too, life as a whole moves toward something higher, beyond itself.

That is the very definition of life, as Alfred North Whitehead declared—life is the universe transcending itself. Reason is human life’s means of self-transcendence.

The Genius of Knowing What You Do Not Know

Stuart Russell, one of the senior gurus of AI, proposed several years ago that for AI to be beneficial and not destructive, it must have humility built in.10

Humility is Russell’s way of describing an acknowledgment of a simple truth built into an algorithm: Everything there is to know to complete this task is not knowable. Even if every factor of the past and present could be provided, the future would remain an unknown.

Yet further—and most critical: The algorithm represents the instruction of a willful agent—a human being. But it says nothing of that agent’s intent. Yet the only way to make a decision under unforeseen circumstances is by referring back to that original intent.

Let’s say you send a robot to Starbucks with the instruction, “Get me a cup of coffee.” The robot has already learned that this implies entering the premises of the Starbucks across the street, waiting in line, making the request, and making payment upon receipt of the coffee.

Now, what if the salesperson informs the robot, “I’m sorry, we have a new policy in place. No orders from robots.” The robot knows one thing: It must get that coffee. It must overcome all resistance to do so. So it leaves the sales attendant neutralized on the floor, grabs the coffee, and exits.

What it doesn’t realize is that you don’t need the cup of coffee. Your real interest is simply giving some business to your brother-in-law, who just opened this Starbucks franchise.

The robot has failed—not so much because it did not know your intent, but because it had no information to indicate that you had one. It did not even know that it did not know.

And reason fails us, as well, when we fail to acknowledge that we have a reason for being here.

Perhaps that is a good way of understanding the Jewish term, emunah, generally mistranslated as “faith.” To have faith is to trust without reason. Emunah is related to the word emet, meaning truth. What is its truth? That we do not know. That the only thing we know for certain is that we did not make this universe, but we have purpose within it.

It’s an approach that has worked in the past. The luminaries of 17th-century Britain and Europe gave us the ideals and principles by which a stable modern society could spread over the globe. Today, we call that era the “Age of Reason.” But those great reasoners themselves gave their age a different moniker: “the Biblical Century.”

As Eric Nelson, who lectures on governance at Harvard, points out, there is hardly a page on any of the works of Grotius, Selden, Milton, Pufendorf, or Locke that does not contain several citations from the Hebrew Bible and often Talmudic references as well.11 Yet, it’s quite apparent from a reading of those pages that they did not follow a dogged slavery to the text. Rather, they were imbued with the spirit of the text, a sense that human life had divine meaning, and it was that spirit that enlightened and inspired their contributions.

Is There Hope for Academia?

There is hope for academic scholarship to reembrace morality, great hope. It will not be achieved through outside forces, whether financial or political. Neither will a simple change of the guard suffice. Real change comes only from within, and within academia there are quiet dissidents. They need to speak now. The future is in their hands.

They don’t need to be lecturers in Middle East Studies, or even the humanities. They could be teaching chemistry or accounting. Their students are exposed to lies and hatred, and anyone employed at such an institution who does not speak up is tacitly condoning its crimes against society.

We sneer at the sycophant hypocrisy of the dignified, liberal professor at the University of Frankfurt whose principles crumbled like dry mud before the Nazi commissar. If good men such as him had spoken up rather than doing nothing, we claim, evil could never have triumphed. And we are correct: The sages of the Talmud blamed the wanton hatred that destroyed Jerusalem on their own failure to protest.12

That professor had his life on the line. Today’s good men and women in academia have relatively little to risk. There will be taunts and harassment from their students. Many of their colleagues will distance themselves from them. Yes, in some cases, their tenure may be on shaky ground. They will be in good company. They will survive.

If you believe you are one of those morally sound academics, you only need to do one thing to ensure the academy gets back on track: Speak out and state clearly where you stand. If you are a Jew, put a mezuzah on the doorpost of your office—a large one that no student who enters can ignore.

Tell your lecture hall that a rose is a rose, a shark is a shark, free speech means dialogue and not heckling, intifada means what its proponents say it means, and genocide is what these people want to do to the Jews.

Declare in words and in actions that although we are tied tightly below to visceral human instinct, we can compensate by tying ourselves upward to a transcendent meaning and purpose.

That’s all we mean when we speak of a Creator or transcendent being. We are not asking for dogma, for blind faith. We are asking for human reason to know itself. To know that true wisdom is to stare into the face of the unknowable and say, “I belong to you.” And to carry that into unequivocal action in the face of adversity.

Teach that in our schools. Teach it to your children. Save humanity.