“No,” Jack Miller tells me, “I am not at all surprised” by what has been happening on college campuses the past few weeks. “Students for Justice in Palestine has been very active on campuses across the country for many, many years. … They’re very organized. They’re well-funded by our friends in Iran,” he explained. But on a deeper level, he said, “I’m not surprised about young people joining in (because) they’ve had a lousy education.”
Miller, 95, is the founder of the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. And as many donors to higher education struggle to understand how elite universities became hotbeds for the celebration of murder, anti-Americanism and antisemitism and how to fix it, Miller has some thoughts. “Instead of e pluribus unum, they have e unum pluribus,” Miller notes of the current trend. While “intersectionality” is relatively recent, the idea that people can be reduced to their group identity has been around for some time and runs contrary to the idea of the United States as a “nation of individuals … who are all created equal.” It’s an idea that “comes straight out of the Torah,” says Miller, who is Jewish. “They all came from Adam, all created in the image of God.” But now he notes that campus progressives only think in terms of the “oppressor and the oppressed.” As soon as Israel became a strong country, in Miller’s view, then liberals would no longer defend it.
