2023-12-13 11:26:03
Time.news – The future of president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, is in the balance. After the disastrous hearing before the House committee of the American Congress, in which she and the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sally Kornbluth, have failed to clearly condemn the anti-Semitic slogans evoked during the student protests, the Harvard board is under pressure.
There were numerous requests to fire the president. Donors have frozen rich donations to America’s elite university programs, while seventy-four congressional representatives on Friday called for the removal of the three women. Magill left his post on Saturday evening. Now all attention is on Gay, indicated as the next one who could skip.
Immediately after the hearing a week ago, when he responded with “it depends on the context” to the question of the members of the commission whether calling for the genocide of the Jews violated the code of conductthe president of Harvard had made a clear U-turn: first she had defined invoking genocide as “cowardly”, then in an interview she had publicly apologized to Jewish students and professors who had felt offended by her evasive answers.
In the last few hours, Harvard’s board met behind closed doors to discuss Gay’s future. The university spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment from several American media outlets. A decision is expected any moment. In the meantime, more than seven hundred faculty members have expressed support for the president, including Jason Furman, economist and former advisor to Barack Obama.
The question everyone is asking is whether anti-Semitism is spreading in American universities. Looking at the latest YouGov/The Economist survey it seems so: according to a survey conducted on around 1500 people, for one in five young Americans between 18 and 29 years old the Holocaust is a myth. The destruction of two-thirds of the Jews in Europe implemented by the Nazi Third Reich from ’33 to ’45, and which also saw the elimination of political opponents, Christians, Roma, Sinti, disabled people, homosexuals, did not exist.
The percentage of one in five young people is almost three times more than Americans who are between 30 and 44 years old, while another 30 percent of young people confess that they do not know whether or not it is a myth. But many believe the cliché that Jews “have too much power” in America. Almost one in three African Americans, one in five Hispanics and just over one in ten white Americans think this way.
But overall, young people say that Jews have too much power are almost five times more likely than people over 65: 28 percent versus 6 percent. The numbers are linked to a social and demographic aspect: the lower the age, the more anti-Semitism grows. And here we enter the school generation. Congress and the White House have taken the challenge of combating the phenomenon seriously, and have launched a series of investigations into American schools.
The hearing of the three presidents of the elite universities was just one moment in this wave of checks on the state of anti-Semitism among students. The question remains how this result was achieved. The Economist has no doubts: social media plays a key role. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans under the age of thirty are more likely to believe information spread on social media than that found in traditional media.
32 percent of those aged between 18 and 29 get informed about TikTok, one of the most followed platforms where conspiracy theories go viral. Generation Lab, which analyzes social media trends, believes that young TikTok users are more likely to become anti-Semitic and consider the Holocaust reduced to mythology. While one in three Americans considers anti-Semitism to be a “very serious problem”, among young people the percentage drops to one in four.
Added to these data is another no less disturbing data, provided by the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that combats the phenomena of anti-Semitism: 73 percent of more than five hundred Jewish students enrolled in American colleges declared having suffered or witnessed of an episode of religious hatred. One date seems to be a watershed: October 7th, when Palestinian Hamas militiamen killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since that day, the discomfort of Jewish students has doubled: the people who confessed that they did not feel safe on university campuses went from 38.6 to 63.7 percent.
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