The Radical Norm at Elite Colleges

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

 

The remarkable thing about Russell Rickford is that there is nothing extraordinary about him.

 

The Cornell University prof gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of October 7 by declaring that he found the terror attack “exhilarating.”

 

He wasn’t specific about what was more exciting to him — the slaughter of hundreds of people at a music festival, including wounded people at point-blank range, the mass hostage-taking, the burning of people alive, or the horrific sexual violence.

 

For the committed anti-Zionist, there must be so many exciting moments to choose from.

 

Afterward, Rickford apologized for his “horrible choice of words.” But his remarks at a pro-Palestinian rally at the Ithaca Commons on October 15 weren’t a matter of mere vocabulary. He didn’t say “exhilarating” when he meant to use a word that means the opposite, or something less positive.

 

He was affirming throughout his comments about a cruel massacre. He said that “Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence,” that “Hamas has shifted the balance of power,” that “Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility,” and that “Hamas has changed the terms of the debate.”

 

All of this was unmistakable praise. Then Rickford added to his toxic brew the contention that Palestinians and Gazans on that day “were able to breathe, they were able to breathe for the first time in years. It was exhilarating. It was energizing. And if they weren’t exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by this shifting of the balance of power, then they would not be human. I was exhilarated.”

 

The problem with this passage isn’t that the sentiment is expressed imprecisely — it’s the sentiment itself. Sadly, Rickford was correct that many Palestinians exulted in innocent Israeli civilians getting gunned down in cold blood, but this was the perverse reaction of a people twisted by hatred that no one with an ounce of humanity could excuse, let alone share in.

 

Rickford stipulated that he “abhors” violence and the targeting of civilians. This caveat doesn’t mean much, though, if you are full of admiration for . . . a violent attack that targeted civilians. It’s a little like saying, “I wholeheartedly oppose harm coming to any Olympic athletes, but the 1972 Munich massacre sure was thrilling. I have never felt so enthusiastic.”

 

After the controversy over his warm words for October 7, Rickford took a “voluntary leave” and is now back in the classroom.

 

What’s outrageous isn’t that he hasn’t been disciplined by the school, but that he fits in so seamlessly. If Rickford, a history professor, went elsewhere to ply his wares, he’d in all likelihood be replaced by someone with equally pernicious views. What are the odds that Cornell is going to find — or want — a more fair-minded, down-the-middle instructor for its Socialism in America course?

 

Elite colleges are suffused with a deeply anti-Western ideology that defines the humanities and makes the likes of Rickford more the norm than the fringe.

 

Cornell faculty members joined in the anti-Israel encampment at the school last spring, and a “diversity and inclusion” officer expressed admiration for the Palestinian “resistance” upon the occasion of the October 7 attack, hailing the struggle “against settle[r] colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, [of] which the United States is the model.”

 

If the purveyors of such dreck enjoy free-speech protections, they are not evenly applied. We can assume that a faculty member using “poor word choice” to praise the tiki-torch marchers in Charlottesville would have gone on a “voluntary leave” that never ended.

 

That elite institutions, blessed with such enormous resources and given such influence over the development of young people, are so hostile to our own civilization is one of the scandals of the age. Thoughtless radicalism is commonplace, indeed banal. And so it is that a Russell Rickford, spouting his poisonous clichés, is only a symptom of a disease. It’d be less disturbing if he were a strange outlier rather than part of the fabric of contemporary academic life.