How sick has American higher education become? Since Hamas’s October 7 massacre of Israelis, universities nationwide have surged with anti-Semitic, anti-Israel rhetoric and acts. Why?

We got a clue on December 5, when the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania testified on Capitol Hill about what they were doing to protect students from anti-Semitism on campus. None of these three women would say that students explicitly calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ code of conduct or rules on bullying or harassment. They all insisted that it depends on “context.”

Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth of mit essentially told the world that they support the genocide of the Jews in Israel.

Their testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce is part of a deluge of examples showing how toxic higher education has grown. The effects of this catastrophe are graver than most people realize. These universities are educating our leaders in politics, media, business, law, science, medicine and the rest of society, and filling their minds with ideological and moral poison.

When these women were pressed, they said things like this: “We embrace a commitment to free expression, even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful. It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment and intimidation.” Those were Gay’s words, and the others made nearly identical comments.

America’s First Amendment prohibits the federal government from enacting policies that abridge free speech. It does not prohibit universities from expelling students who call for exterminating particular races. Citing freedom of expression is a flimsy excuse for endorsing and encouraging the anti-Semitism on these campuses.

Beyond this, these same schools routinely censor free expression when it is politically conservative, pro-Bible or insufficiently enthusiastic about homosexuality or transgenderism. They silence speech that doesn’t embrace radical-leftist views on race. But when students openly call for the genocide of Jews, these school officials are suddenly “committed to free expression.” In reality, they are committed to a specific strain of leftist radicalism, committed to polluting people’s minds with it, and committed to authoritarianism when it enforces their agenda.

Gay, Kornbluth and Magill are beneficiaries of and participants in neo-Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion practices that attribute virtually all group differences—from arrest rates to income levels—to systemic discrimination. They view Israelis, Americans and Britons as colonial oppressors who, a lifetime after colonialism ended, still must be defeated by tearing down the Western world’s political system. To some degree, they recognize the connection of this system to the Jewish people. And they hate the Jewish state and want to see it destroyed.

Many Americans were aghast at these women’s congressional testimony. After one donor threatened to pull a $100 million contribution from Penn, the university removed Liz Magill as president—then gave her a cushy tenured post at Penn Carey Law School. mit defended Magill outright, not backing down at all. Harvard reportedly lost more than $1 billion in donations from angry benefactors, but the university’s highest governing body announced its unanimous support for president Gay. Gay was subsequently exposed for having plagiarized portions of at least four of her papers, including her 1997 Ph.D. dissertation. This offered Harvard additional opportunity to fire this pro-Hamas, Jew-hating, faux academic. Instead, Harvard doubled down.

These schools are not merely morally perverse—they are intellectually and academically bankrupt. Having banished absolute truth and God from their reasoning, these academics and intellectuals have become untethered from reality. All society must understand this and stop entrusting these people with educating our children.

How much damage can misguided and arrogant intellectuals do? As historian Niall Ferguson reminded us in his December 10 article, intellectuals in Germany and throughout the Western world embraced a certain ideology in the 1930s. German universities were the best in the world, far better than Harvard and Yale, and when this ideology began spreading through the nation, the presidents, department chairs and professors guiding the arts, languages, history, law, religion, anthropology, economics, government, sociology, science, mathematics and engineering found much to praise. Many university-educated lawyers and doctors devoted themselves to this way of thinking to the point of joining the party.

Later, this ideology would become infamous: Nazism.

“German academics acted as Hitler’s think tank, putting policy flesh on the bones of his racist ideology,” Ferguson wrote. Some of them, for example, produced “historical justifications for German territorial claims in Eastern Europe that implied massive population displacement, if not genocide.” These people weren’t merely following Hitler—they were helping him lead the world into a violent racist dystopia.

“Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill ethical values has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich,” Ferguson wrote. “A university degree, far from inoculating Germans against Nazism, made them more likely to embrace it.”

Similar indoctrination is happening in our universities today. These students are far likelier than the average person to embrace Marxist, Communist, racist, authoritarian, illiberal, radical and even genocidal ideals. They are also likelier to fill influential roles in society, spreading the contagion.

The man who coined the term anti-Semitic was a German intellectual named Wilhelm Marr who expanded medieval attacks on Jewish traders and bankers into a full-scale economic theory. German anti-Semitism soon morphed into a much more biologically racist ideology, but German academics originally hated the Jews for the same reasons Marxist academics do: They were socialist ideologues envious of the types of financial blessings produced by obeying God’s moral and economic laws.

Today, leftist academics, media pundits and politicians refer to Gaza as an open-air prison and blame the Jews for Palestinian poverty. They cannot accept the fact that destitution in Gaza could be a natural consequence of Palestinian economic policies. So they blame and excoriate Israel, from the dorm room all the way up to the United Nations General Assembly.

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, wrote in his insightful article “Higher Ed Support for Hamas Exposes Disdain for America”:

American higher education at least since the late 1960s has been disenchanted with Western civilization. … The slow elimination of honor, respect and admiration for those who founded our nation and who in later generations built on those foundations gave way to a new aspiration of liberating ourselves from every stricture of traditional culture and inventing something uninhibited and new—and almost always filled with anger towards what came before and what continued to stand in the way. … This is fertile soil for anti-Semitism, an ideology that is always ready to turn vague dissatisfaction into directed anger, even to the point of murderous rage.

This analysis hints at the heart of the matter. The radical left hates biblical precepts that produce the rule of law; individual freedom and accountability; limited government; stable families; freedom of religion, speech and property; and other principles that trace back to the law given to the Jews and the other Israelites at Mount Sinai.

When the left abandons God and God’s truth, they have no authority in their lives but their own reasoning. All history testifies to how pestilential that can be. And the Bible itself warns against vain intellectualism and unbridled human reason.

The Apostle Paul cautioned, “See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8; Revised Standard Version). Those “elemental spirits” are demons, attacking through philosophy and higher education. Satan deceives the whole world (Revelation 12:9), and he is especially skilled at exploiting the vanity of intellectuals and academics.

Paul warned of the danger in will worship (Colossians 2:23). The human will is naturally led by Satan. Under his influence, people form opinions and make decisions based on uncontrolled emotion and unsound thinking, often polluted by groupthink and manipulated or enforced by intimidation, coercion and tyranny. Will worship has come to dominate public thinking, politics and education today.

The moral and spiritual poisoning of higher education is the consequence of devastating defeat in a broader spiritual war in America and in our world. Take a hard look at it. It has never been easier to see.

To learn about an alternative education system, read Education With Vision.