After the new Republican president signed an executive order last week that vows to punish college campuses for condoning anti-Jewish hate, Gary Bauer recalled fighting left-wing academia in the U.S. Department of Education when Ronald Reagan was president.
Bauer, now 78, served as Under Secretary of Education under Bill Bennett who was Reagan’s appointee for Secretary of Education.
“We were fighting left-wing nonsense and extremism on university campuses, so all the way back then in the 1980s,” Bauer recalls. "It's gotten worse in the years since."
Just how worse has been demonstrated on numerous campuses, in countless demonstrations, over the last 1 1/2 years after the Israeli Defense Forces went to war with Hamas in Gaza. What was supposedly a call for peace, or defense of Palestinian civilians, often celebrated the "Intifada" against the Jews in Israel.
AFN has reported a Jewish student reporter was pushed and harassed by a graduate student at Princeton and a counter-protesting Jewish professor was barred from entering the campus at Columbia Business School.
Trump’s executive order, which addresses anti-Semitism, accuses the Biden administration of turning a “blind eye” to harassment and physical assault of Jewish Americans after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack in northern Israel.
Citing that surprise attack, which caught Israel off guard and killed approximately 1,000 Israelis, the executive order describes “an unprecedented wave of vile antisemitic discrimination, vandalism, and violence against our citizens, especially in our schools and on our campuses.”
In a stark change from the previous administration, the executive order directs federal agencies to review and report on their plans to fight anti-Semitism. It also vows to revoke visas for foreign students who are found to be "Hamas sympathizers.”
After the executive order came out last week, the U.S. Justice Department announced Monday a task force to address anti-Semitism on college and university campuses. The effort is being overseen by the Civil Rights Division within the DOJ with representatives from the U.S. Dept. of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.
In a related announcement, which also came out Monday, the U.S. Department of Education said it is investigating anti-Semitism at five campuses: Columbia; Northwestern; Portland State; University of California, Berkeley; University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
Even with their liberal professors and deans, Bauer says universities were once known for being a place of free inquiry where students and faculty were allowed to debate and disagree without punishment.
“Now, in all too many cases,” he warns, “universities are controlled by left-wing professors and radicals in the student body that intimidate other students into silence."
