Not a Right-Wing Academy at All: One Revolution Must Happen at the Top in Israel

Last week, Professor Jason Arday resigned from the University of Cambridge. Arday, whose appointment in 2023 received much publicity as the youngest black professor in the university's history, resigned following a series of allegations regarding plagiarism and inaccuracies in the description of his achievements and biography. Cambridge launched a new investigation regarding his qualifications and the appointments he declared, and in the process, he resigned.

It is too easy to turn the Arday affair into proof that all diversity policy is flawed. The problem, of course, is not Arday's skin color, but the possibility that academic institutions fall in love with the story they want to tell about themselves until they stop checking the facts with the same rigor (what academics call: "academic rigor").

We saw something similar in the Claudine Gay affair at Harvard: she resigned in 2024 following allegations of improper use of sources and in the shadow of criticism of her testimony in Congress, where she struggled to say unequivocally that calling for the genocide of Jews violates university rules. So when identity, representation, and virtue signaling begin to receive too much weight, the professional standard can turn from a constant variable into a context-dependent variable. Remember what Gay said at the congressional hearing? "It depends on the context"...

And this is exactly the problem that should bother us in Israel as well. The Israeli academy is not an innocent victim of politics; in parts of it, it has become a political player. More than 150 law lecturers organized within the "Forum of Law Lecturers for Democracy" (that is, as a forum for juristocracy), which was established around the struggle against the changes to the judicial system and published dozens of position papers and declarations.

Those lecturers, lacking minimal self-awareness, were not even ashamed to publish an article in an international journal where they boast about the political corruption they have inflicted on academic research in Israel. And in March 2023, the universities themselves as institutions participated in a shutdown as part of the struggle — a strike that is by all accounts a political strike prohibited by law. One can agree with these positions and one can oppose them. But it is hard to argue anymore that the institutional academy has remained outside the arena.

Law faculties are a particularly acute test case, precisely because they are supposed to teach students to distinguish between a legal argument, academic research, and a political position. When the same professional community researches institutions, interprets them, and at the same time mobilizes as a group for the struggle over their design, the boundary between knowledge and power becomes blurred. Because at the end of the day, the problem is not the very taking of a position. Rather, the problem begins when a factional-political position receives the aura of authority of "research". In recent years, lecturers have become "politicians in lecturer robes" just as Isaac Amit became a "politician in a robe", something the French have always warned against.

It must be emphasized: a lecturer should have almost absolute freedom to speak, write, research, and demonstrate. I would not want a government that decides which opinions professors are allowed to express. But academic freedom of individuals does not require institutional politicization. The University of Chicago formulated this distinction as early as the famous Kalven Report of 1967: the university must protect the freedom of speech of its members, and at the same time maintain as much as possible institutional neutrality in political and social matters.

Israel needs a similar principle. The ideal is not the establishment of a "right-wing academy" instead of a left-wing academy, but an academy that is not a party. University administrations should not use the brand, the budget, the mailing systems, or institutional authority to participate in factional struggle. The rules for using institutional resources for political needs must be transparent, equal, and neutral.

Government Decision 666 from 1977 also needs to be re-examined. The decision gave the Planning and Budgeting Committee an independent and strong status to protect higher education from direct political interference. The idea was correct, and it is still correct. But autonomy is not immunity from responsibility. If the state commits not to turn universities into an arm of the government, universities must commit not to turn themselves into an arm of a political camp. The solution is not for the Minister of Education to determine what is researched, but for public funding to be accompanied by clear rules of institutional neutrality, transparency, and separation between research and activism.

The same principle should also apply to diversity policy. Diversity is a worthy goal when it opens doors to those who have suffered from real barriers. But it becomes an ideology when the institution decides in advance which identities are worthy of cultivation and which views are considered suspicious. The "diversity" departments in universities in Israel (the equivalents of the woke DEI departments in American universities) practice affirmative action for women and Arabs, and not for Mizrahim as a category (but for related and much narrower categories). Because Mizrahim tend to vote right, and that is really not liked in the Israeli woke universities. So if they do take Mizrahim, they bring a radical left-wing woke Mizrahi, who has no connection to the preferences of the group from which he comes. Because a right-wing Mizrahi is not an "authentic Mizrahi", and someone like Yoseph Haddad is not an "authentic Arab". How woke.

The crisis of the academy is ultimately a crisis of legitimacy. The public funds institutions because it believes they are seeking truth, not because it agrees with the politics of their lecturers or worse: with the politics of the university institutions. Because the moment this trust is eroded, academic autonomy itself becomes vulnerable.

Starting from scratch in the academy means, therefore, not silencing the politics of the lecturers, but removing politics from the institution. The intention is not to replace one hegemony with another, but to return the university to its purpose: free search, competition of ideas, professional standards, and more importantly: the enrichment of human knowledge.

Professor Moshe Cohen-Eliya is an expert in constitutional law, founder of "Masad HaAretz — The Research Institute of the People of Israel". His name was mentioned as a candidate to serve as a member of the Council for Higher Education.