The Collapse of University Oversight

Earlier this year, the AMCHA Initiative issued a 158-page report on anti-Semitism at the University of California. It documented hundreds of instances of abuse of Jewish students: physical assault; blocked access to classes and the library; chants of “Death to Jews” or “From the River to the Sea”; rejoicing at Hamas’s October 7, 2023, mass murder of Israelis; and disruption of Jewish events. Just as numerous were abuses of university platforms on which the university itself expressed anti-Semitic hatred: departmental notice-boards and websites, coursework, ceremonies, and conferences. Of course, AMCHA could have found much the same on any number of other major university campuses nationwide.

But while illustrating the vehemence of campus anti-Semitism, these reports unwittingly document something else: the collapse of administrative oversight. Every case of a Jewish student assaulted or barred from a classroom represents the failure of a dean to stop such disgraceful conduct. Every case of a university-funded conference in which speakers advocated the abolition of Israel suggests a dean who didn’t prevent university funds being used for such political rallies. And every case of a department issuing a manifesto on the Middle East conflict implicates a department chair who disregarded university policies that forbid the institution or its constituent parts from taking political positions.

Some 40 years ago—when I served as a dean at the University of California, Santa Cruz—middle-level administrators understood that their job was to enforce professional standards, university policies, and ensure appropriate treatment of all students. Abuses such as those documented in the AMCHA report were quite rare but dealt with immediately when they happened.

What happened to administrative oversight? The simple answer is that campus administrations are now mostly controlled by the very people who most need administrative oversight.

Takeovers usually proceed from the top down, but this one moved in the opposite direction. During the last three decades of the twentieth century, the radical Left’s campaign to remake academia in its image gathered momentum. A 1969 study found that university faculty’s political affiliations were generally balanced, with three left-of-center professors for every two right-of-center; by the end of the century, the ratio had grown to about five-to-one.

That growing preponderance gave radical faculty increasing influence over administrative appointments. Department chairs could rarely be chosen over the objections of the faculty they supervised, effectively neutralizing the first level of administrative oversight. The same dynamic then moved upward. Search committees for deans were typically composed of department chairs and senior faculty within the relevant academic area, making it unlikely that a dean they opposed would be appointed. Once deans were similarly constrained, radical faculty gained greater influence over senior administrative appointments—and eventually over the selection of campus presidents.

The function of campus administration had now been turned inside out. The proper concern of administrators was always oversight of academic programs and faculty performance, but now administrators were being chosen precisely to shield radical faculty from oversight. Worse still, many of these new administrators actually joined in the mischief. That’s why the AMCHA report shows faculty and students running wild without administrative intervention. They know they can freely use the resources of the university to promote their far-left politics of social justice and anti-Semitism.

In December 2023, the televised congressional hearings on campus anti-Semitism with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania must have puzzled most viewers. They saw these apparently distinguished academic leaders wriggling and squirming to avoid answering simple questions. They were bewildered, however, only because they didn’t understand the reversal of roles that had already taken place: they assumed that these college presidents still controlled their campuses. Not anymore: the presidents held their jobs at the pleasure of the wrongdoers they were being asked to judge. The enormous salaries that college presidents earn are the functional equivalent of bribes. They know that their splendid lifestyles would end if they ever tried to hold the radicals who installed them accountable for their misdeeds.

UC’s leaders are just as determined to avoid responding to the AMCHA report. Their silence was broken only when hundreds of faculty demanded a response, but the university’s subsequent statement merely claimed that it takes anti-Semitism “very seriously” and is looking into the report’s allegations. The university leadership effectively asked us to believe that they hadn’t known their campuses were awash with anti-Semitic incidents. Taken at face value, that would amount to a different kind of confession: that they know nothing of what’s happening on the campuses they supposedly oversee.

But it’s impossible to accept their claim. After all, two years ago, UC reached a voluntary agreement with the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) acknowledging this same problem and pledging to fix it. The AMCHA report proves that they’ve done little or nothing to fulfill that agreement.

Governing boards are responsible for the integrity of their universities, yet they have barely lifted a finger to stop the radical activists’ rampage. Some red state legislatures, such as Texas and Florida, have intervened in their universities both in curricular matters (banning critical race theory, for example) and even in aspects of faculty hiring. These measures are useful, but it would be far more effective to install reforming presidents intent on assembling campus administrations prepared to enforce professional standards and university policies that ban political indoctrination. Legislative control of funding provides leverage sufficient to compel the appointment of such leaders and to repel attempts to oust them via bogus faculty no-confidence votes. Serious reform of academia can begin only with the restoration of effective campus administrations.