Let’s all pause for a moment and feign a collective gasp. Australian universities — those glittering, taxpayer-funded citadels of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and mandated pronoun badges — have a glaring blind spot.
According to the harrowing testimonies echoing out of the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism, it turns out our proudly progressive campuses are, in fact, remarkably conservative.
And by conservative, I certainly don’t mean they are secretly voting for Angus Taylor or campaigning for lower corporate tax rates.
I mean they appear perfectly comfortable winding the clock all the way back to 1930s Europe when it comes to the Jewish community.
They preach diversity, equity, and inclusion with the fervour of a televangelist, yet when a Jewish student steps onto the quadrangle, their progressive ideological software suddenly glitches.
The evidence dragged into the daylight this week is nothing short of grotesque.
We have a University of New South Wales tutor subjected to literal Nazi salutes in a business class.
An incident that supposedly resulted in the university quietly binning his shifts after he had the audacity to complain to the police.
We have a student at the Australian National University who can’t even use her real name at a campus coffee shop for fear of being harassed over her heritage.
We have students needing security escorts just to walk the campus.
But should any of us actually be surprised by this institutional cowardice?
Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock knows that for years, we’ve watched our tertiary institutions morph from halls of rigorous academic debate into heavily subsidised hotbeds for breeding left-wing lunatics.
We have allowed a culture to fester where professional activists masquerading as students can openly state that they don’t hold their movements “to a standard that says there can never be any violence.”
It takes a special kind of ideological gymnastics to champion every conceivable micro-minority while simultaneously telling Jewish students that the blatant racism directed at them is just a “deliberate misinterpretation” of a political movement.
It is the political horseshoe theory playing out in real-time on our manicured university lawns. You go so far left, you eventually circle back to garden-variety fascism.
Education Minister Jason Clare has announced universities will now be forced to adopt clear definitions and transparent complaints processes for anti-Semitism.
It is a sad day when you have to legislate basic human decency for the supposedly smartest people in the room.
Until these institutions stop coddling the fringe radicals they helped create, the only thing truly progressive about them is how rapidly they are sliding backwards.
