A Harvard lesson: There is little room on campuses for nuanced thinking

The narrative in academia that former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s failings were manufactured by right-wing activists sounds a lot like the denials from Israel’s critics on college campuses about the savagery of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks (“Right-wing reporting brought plagiarism allegations to light,” Page A1, Jan. 4).

At too many universities, the default postcolonial worldview holds that race and power are the primary means through which we should understand the past and present. On the home front, that means Gay’s inability to condemn Hamas or antisemitism vigorously — and her failure to cite sources adequately in her scholarship — should be ignored because she is under attack by those with historical privilege. On the world stage, it means that reports of Hamas’s rape, mutilation, and murder of young women are either untrue or justifiable because Israel is a colonialist state born in sin, and so all forms of “resistance” are legitimate.

The postcolonial worldview leaves no room for nuanced thinking on campuses, where everything is just another prop in America’s culture wars.

The solution is for academia to recommit to intellectual diversity and move away from the intellectual orthodoxy that got us here. Students must understand that the postcolonial worldview may be one lens through which to look at the world but is not the only lens.

RACHEL FISH

Waltham

The writer, a cofounder of the group Boundless Israel, is special adviser on antisemitism to the president of Brandeis University. She holds a doctoral degree in Near Eastern and Judaic studies-Israel studies.