A long-time professor at Harvard and Oxford, Niall Ferguson is one of the great historians of our time.
On the website The Free Press, he wrote a fundamental article.
Hazard
In 1927, he says, Julien Benda published The betrayal of the clerics, a denunciation of the disastrous role of many intellectuals in the rise of fascism.
Mussolini is already in power and Hitler is getting closer.
Instead of espousing serene and dispassionate reason, Benda accused, intellectuals were constructing the theoretical justification for racial hatred and authoritarianism.
Others let it happen, looked away, minimized, changed the subject, managed their careers prudently.
A century later, Ferguson says, academia is seeing a return of the phenomenon.
The dominant rhetoric is now left-wing, but the methods are the same: we harass those who think differently, we advocate virtuous racism and, new in our time, Islamo-fascism.
Students, professors and bureaucrats get involved, banking on the complicity, unconsciousness or cowardice of colleagues, management, donors and boards of directors.
You’re exaggerating, Ferguson was told, before being served up with the usual justifications.
Who can be against equity, diversity and inclusion? Intellectuals have almost always leaned to the left! Maybe it’s you who becomes a reactionary as you get older!
All this, says Ferguson, was shattered on October 7 after the Hamas attack.
The reaction of many students and professors revealed the uncomfortable reality that prevails on campus.
It became impossible to deny, he said, that criticism of Israel often veered into outright anti-Semitism, very close to that of the 1930s in Europe.
Rightly, there was much indignation, he says, at the morally confused remarks of the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania in the face of calls for the genocide of the Jews on their campuses.
However, after the death of George Floyd, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was only interested in listening to the “pain” and the “institutional responsibility” of universities.
Some even attacked the Republican elected official who questioned her, because she was a Republican, illustrating exactly what Ferguson denounces.
We might be surprised, he says, that the best universities in the world are so infected by this double virus of hatred and complicit blindness.
In the 1930s, German universities were the best in the world: Heidelberg, Tübingen, Berlin, etc. However, they became places where Nazi ideology was manufactured.
Late
Today, in the name of “diversity” and “social justice”, we justify silencing or seeking to dismiss deviants.
In the past, we did it in the name of regaining national greatness.
In the past, many were astonished at the speed with which the German university fortress, reputed to be impregnable, but corrupted from the inside, collapsed morally and wallowed in turpitude.
Today, Ferguson tells us, it is already late, very late.
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