When Cancer Infects Colleges

On Israel, Academia, and Groupthink

If you falter in a time of trouble,

how small is your strength!

Rescue those being led away to death;

hold back those staggering toward slaughter.

If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”

does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

Does not he who guards your life know it?

Will he not repay everyone according to what they have done?

—Proverbs 24:10-12

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. —Edmund Burke

Above: Cancer blemishing Stanford’s nominally beautiful campus.

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As native New Yorker, I like to think I am inoculated against chaos, crazy, and conflict.

I have seen things on the city’s subways and streets that would make the hardest of men blanch and recoil.

From corner store clerks celebrating as the Twin Towers fell to homeless men and women in the throes of fentanyl’s deadly grip, I have looked enmity, suffering, and squalor squarely in the face.

The horror and havoc that Hamas has wreaked over the last few days has me questioning my emotional immunity.

Much ink has been spilt by those more qualified and proximate to the crisis than I, however, I want to home in on the reprehensible responses from the sheeple that make up academia.

They are to be read closely to be believed.

At best, these responses are to be cynically expected in light of the morbid state of higher education.

At worst, they are a staggering wake up call and show how deep the rot goes.

Put simply, the Academic Industrial Complex is in dire shape. If, as Erasmus wrote, the main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth, we are rapidly hurtling towards hopelessness.

Much like cancer demands a decisive, exacting procedure to halt its metastasis, universities large and small must identify, root out, and destroy the tumor that has consumed its corridors. They must now put on their metaphorical gloves and wade directly into the filth and carnage of their own creation.

University leadership ought to act as the interlocutors of faith and reason that they purport to be by unequivocally identifying the contagious malady, disinfecting the wounds it has produced, removing the cancer in its entirety, and monitoring for any and all signs of its return.

That such drivel and idiocy can be written and signed by the purported leaders of today and tomorrow speaks volumes. Namely, common sense and reality have exited the building campus, the call is coming from inside the house dorm, et al.

Jonathan Haidt touched upon this in an article entitled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid:

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past…

We have unwittingly dissolved the mortar of trust, belief in institutions, and shared stories that had held a large and diverse secular democracy together.

The noisy few must not drown out the decent majority.

When people say up is down and the sky is green, those that believe in what is good and true must say something. David Foster Wallace offers the beginning of a long, hard solution:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’ ‘This is water.’

Such “simple awareness” is lacking far and wide. The Washington Post ironically and hypocritically trumpets the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” while publishing headlines like the below.

Democracy isn’t the only institution that dies in darkness. So too does does morality.

As it stands, the sun is fast setting on college campuses the nation over. We all ought light beacons that illuminate capital-T Truth.

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I don’t know much, but I do know a few things.

Water is wet.

Gravity is a law.

Barbarism is barbarism and enough is enough.

Let’s start by calling a spade a spade.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.

To wit, what Hamas has done is pure, unbridled evil.

Let’s call it such to ensure society does not share the same fate as academia.

🇮🇱 Am Yisrael Chai 🇮🇱

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom