The Jewish Quarterly

Extremism, antisemitism and intolerance are thriving on campus. How did this happen?

After October 7, the university – an institution dedicated to the search for truth, knowledge and freedom – became overrun by a toxic and dangerous fervour. Civil discourse was abandoned, as campuses became the epicentre of hate speech, bigotry, conspiracy theories, denialism and antisemitism. Yet, as Cary Nelson reveals, this betrayal of the university's ideals was decades in the making.

In this groundbreaking essay, Nelson, an academic and writer whose years of involvement in university organisations has made him a leading expert on higher education, explains the causes of the institutional failure that has been evident on campuses worldwide. Mindless shows how universities came to abandon a commitment to shared intellectual principles and fractured into disciplines that – unconstrained and unchecked – slid towards conformity and indoctrination.