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I translated into English some excerpts from an interview that Alejandro Zaera-Polo, architect and former dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Princeton, gave to the Spanish newspaper La Razón. The analysis Zaera-Polo makes about the so-called “anti-Semitism crisis” in American university campuses is quite clever, and clarify what is at stake in the recent debate that involved the presidents of Harvard, Penn (now resigned), and MIT. You can read the original article in Spanish by clicking here.
Talking about the long and tough interrogation of the three university presidents in the US Congress, he said: “I think they were in an impossible situation. What they were asked to do was to censure protesters for making public anti-Semitic statements. That is against freedom of expression, and universities have to defend it at all costs. What this is going to produce is a worsening of the progressive limitation of freedom of expression, of the obligation to never offend anyone. The solution to these problems is not to further limit freedom of expression, expand microaggressions or safe spaces, but quite the opposite.” (In principle, I agree with Zaera-Polo)
He pointed to the hypocrisy of the three presidents: “The problem of these ladies is not what they could not have said yesterday, but what they have been doing for decades, which is limiting freedom of expression, expelling anyone who did not agree with the woke ideology… There is the case of Amy Wax at Penn, or Carole Hooven at Harvard, Katz at Princeton and many others canceled at MIT, Yale and all the others. Who really benefits from these policies? Themselves and others like them. Gay (note: from Harvard), for example, is a pure and simple bureaucrat who has practically not worked in academia, because she has been benefiting from all the competitions in which black women have double priority…White men are canceled in the upper echelons of the American university based on positive discrimination policies. And of course, one of them is black.”
“What these ladies are guilty of is eliminating diversity of opinion within universities (at Harvard, only 1% of the faculty declare themselves ‘conservative’) to benefit themselves, against all odds, competition and meritocracy. They have eliminated freedom of thought and infested the university with substandard activists who take courses on decolonization, LGTBI culture, black history, etc... They are pure woke ideology, which turns everyone into oppressors and oppressed based on their sexual or racial identity. White and Jewish men are the oppressors, (heteropatriarchal, racist and colonizers), black women and LGTBI (and now Palestinians and Muslims) are the oppressed. Right now, there is no freedom of expression and all this because of the pressure to maintain the systematic reverse racism/sexism that has been imposed on everyone through DEI policies at these universities: a true internal Gestapo of the left illiberal that threatens to throw out anyone who refuses to sign declarations committing to obey all woke dogmas in the selection and hiring processes, and even re-education…It is a kind of new Cultural Revolution, a reverse McCarthyism."
Zaera-Polo does not believe that from their statements the conclusion can be drawn that Harvard, MIT or Penn are anti-Semitic: "nor do I believe the accusations of systemic racism or sexism in universities. There may be individual cases, of course, but generalizing to justify the installation of DEI is the strategy of that class that has taken power in the university by denying the truth and eliminating competition, excellence and merit as factors of selection. The hysterical promotion of race, gender, nation, and religious identities, and their ‘intersectionalities’ to sustain DEI bureaucracies and privileges, is what has caused the collapse of academia. And the right thing to do is exploiting those fissures to dismantle the system, rightly so. Yesterday, Republicans gave them a small taste of their own canceling medicine.”
"The interesting thing about this moment is that those intersectional movements generated by the university woke culture have allied themselves with the Palestinian terrorists, and that they have broken all the seams between groups: that perfect state of 'intersectionality' between oppressors and oppressed. Now Black Live Matter appears celebrating terrorist attacks, and LGTBI and feminists are defending groups that practice systematic rape and the prohibition of homosexuality. That is to say, now oppressed identities are the worst oppressors, blacks are the worst sexists, so-called LGTBQ abuse women in sports competitions and in prisons, Islamists are the worst rapists and blacks accuse everyone of supremacism, targeting to eliminate competition in admissions and hiring processes. As in universities the cancellation system works based on virtuous posturing, guilt and peer pressure, the frictions in the system of intersectionality and identity have exploded where they least expected it and where it will do the most damage: in the anti-Semitic problem. They have come in contradiction with one of the greatest taboos of the 20th century: anti-Semitism. It's the perfect storm because this puts the woke where the Nazis were before. Which is, in reality, where they have always been.”
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