Columbia's Milgram Experiment
I took a trip up to Columbia yesterday to see the protests with my own eyes. I couldn’t. The entire campus is hermetically sealed and only accessible with ID.
That means there are no “Outside Agitators” on campus. Every sign you see and every chant you hear inside that gate reflects the view of a Columbia student or faculty member. They are accountable, and their names are knowable.
This matters because many protesters have dropped the pretense that this is merely an expression of sympathy for beleaguered Gazans or a criticism of the Israeli government. They are now openly supporting Hamas itself, and implicitly its goal of murdering Jews for being Jewish.
I did get to eavesdrop on several student conversations. I had it in mind to engage with them politely (or maybe not). What I heard was so vapid, so thoughtless, and so lazy that I couldn’t even muster enough anger to confront them. These students have just discovered that war is bad.
So what explains this open race-hatred on an Ivy League campus? The Milgram Experiment. You probably know the story.
In 1961, a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram told his student volunteers that they were conducting an experiment involving electric shocks administered to test subjects. In reality, the volunteers themselves were the test subjects, and he was investigating their willingness to inflict pain (the shocks were fake; their counterparts actors). The results were frightening.
The Milgram Experiment was conducted contemporaneously with the trial of Adolf Eichmann and while the memory of the Holocaust was still fresh. Milgram’s findings were used to bolster the “just following orders” defense pioneered at the Nuremberg Trials. Milgram’s own conclusions invited this.
“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
This does not absolve the students of their behavior (Eichmann was executed), but it does clarify Columbia’s role. Columbia University has used its very authority to create a safe space for bigotry. Some number of students, like Milgram’s subjects, have embraced this consequence-free opportunity to abandon “fundamental standards of morality”.
Consider this all in light the Anti Defamation League’s release this month of its Campus Antisemitism Report Card ADL Campus Antisemitism Report Card.
I think the ADL missed the mark. Nowhere in their methodology did they address the heart of the matter: the unequal application of existing codes of conduct. This was evident in Columbia President Manouche Shafik’s testimony before Congress last week. She cleverly answered every question in the future tense (“we will not tolerate…”)
But they have tolerated, and are now tolerating. They tolerated Professor Joseph Massad, who described Hamas’ October 7 attack as “awesome”. They tolerated physical violence and intimidation against Jewish students. They tolerated their own students’ calls for race-murder.
Columbia University has spent decades encouraging the oppressor/oppressed binary and planting Jews squarely with the “Colonialist West”1. The inevitable result of this 50-year project is a university that now sanctions racism against an ethnic minority.
Don’t be fooled.
This was the gist of Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” and the wellspring of Columbia’s notorious Middle Eastern Studies Department.