One industry in America pumps out toxic waste day and night, but suffers no penalty for the damage it causes.
It operates at enormous public and private expense, sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars in government money.
Its toxic bilge poisons much of society, but those who complain about it are often dismissed as ignorant or bigoted.
Its product is largely free of state and federal regulation.
That industry is higher education.
And the toxic waste it emits isn’t chemical but intellectual sludge, in the form of racial bigotry, antisemitism and crude Marxism.
“It’s amazing,” constitutional scholar Ilya Shapiro said a few days ago in testimony to a committee of the US Commission for Civil Rights: “The heart of antisemitism in America lies on campus, among the most educated and progressive people in the country.”
This isn’t the workplace bias and schoolyard name-calling that once marked antisemitism in this country — it’s now reached the performance stage.
Like the recent incident in which antisemitic Cornell student Austin Franco rejected a job offer from a Jewish-owned startup with the hateful message “Not interested in working for a Jew” — then raised more than $20,000 from equally antisemitic goons on a crowdfunding site.
Franco attends the same campus where antisemitic students this semester trapped the university’s president in his car, holding him hostage after he hosted a civil debate over Israel.
Violence, threats and taunts have hit Jewish students on campuses across the country, from Columbia and Yale on the East Coast to UCLA on the West.
Why have universities been so limp-wristed in addressing this unvarnished hatred?
One reason is money: Arab sheikdom Qatar has pumped tens of billions of dollars into US universities in recent years — and in the academy, money talks.
But another reason is that our universities have been the Petri dish in which this nasty ideology is cultured.
Law schools and humanities departments have embraced Critical Race Theory, which views everything through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed.
No crime, however vile, is treated as beyond the pale if those committing it are classified as “oppressed.”
Meanwhile, those seen as “oppressors” can do nothing right: Their very existence is an offense.
This worldview got a double shot of espresso during the 2020 George Floyd hysteria.
And it’s informed campus thinking — and by extension, all of leftist culture — with a bigoted, frankly racial perspective on everything.
Jews are coded as oppressors — even though Israel was founded as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust — and that justifies rape, torture and murder by “oppressed” Palestinians.
The sickness isn’t limited to race: Academic feminism has divided the sexes and introduced poisonous views of masculinity and femininity as “progressive,” when they’re really just prejudice and hate.
The poison has spread from universities into government and the corporate world through the insidious mechanism of federally enforced “anti-discrimination” rules.
Meanwhile, schools of education turn out teachers who are literally more interested in indoctrinating students in social justice than in teaching them how to read or do math.
Specious academic theories of education have turned out to be far less successful at actually educating children than old-fashioned methods like phonics and drills.
Worse yet, academia has instilled in its graduates an undeserved sense of superiority simply because they attended college.
Yet plenty of smart people don’t have a college degree — and plenty of college graduates didn’t learn much.
Test results confirm that: A major study of 2,300 students not long ago reported that 36% of them showed no improved learning after four years of college.
And much of what students learn isn’t so.
For example Marxism, which has never worked in the real world, remains stylish on campuses — still treated as a hot new concept, though it hasn’t changed much in over a century.
Racism, sexism, antisemitism and destructive economic ignorance, all from a huge and vastly expensive system that was supposed to make our society better.
It’s time for a change.
In this country, we don’t (or at least we’re not supposed to) censor people’s views, however noxious and, frankly, evil they might be.
But as more Americans recoil from higher education’s foul products, taxpayers, legislators and parents will increasingly wonder why they’re supporting it.
No wonder Congress is considering multiple bills to defund colleges and universities that are being undermined by big bucks from adversaries like Qatar and communist China — and no wonder the Trump Justice Department is suing schools like UCLA that let antisemitic violence and discrimination fester.
About time, too: No other industry this toxic would have gotten away with its pollution for this long.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
