Newman is weeping in his grave

In 1852, John Henry Newman wrote The Idea of a University, an essay explaining exhaustively what his alma mater Oxford and other such institutions were for, what kind of minds they were to train.

Universities, he wrote, should teach students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.” (Note that the word ‘discriminate’ was used in its proper meaning, exercising discernment). Their primary role was to give students a “perfection of the intellect … the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”.

I haven’t seen any recent mission statements but, by the looks of it, Oxford and our other universities are committed to churning out feral humanoids as bereft of intellect and feeble of mind as they are volatile of temper and devoid of manners.

Evidence for this melancholy observation is served up every day, and yesterday came the turn of the Oxford Union debate on the motion “This house believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”.

That the motion passed by 278 votes to 59 was to be expected. Those young firebrands are driven by visceral hatred of Israel because it’s a) Western, b) Jewish, c) opposed to the Third World’s assault on what’s left of our civilisation.

That animus is so powerful that it would nullify any attempts at cerebral activity even if these descendants of Newman were capable of it. But they aren’t. If they were, they’d know that, however much they dislike Israel, it practises neither apartheid nor genocide.

Forget about the ability “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.”  These callow yahoos don’t even know the meaning of the words they use.

Thus ‘apartheid’ means institutionalised racial segregation, which manifestly has nothing to do with a country in which Jews, Muslims and Christians coexist in greater harmony than anywhere else in the Middle East. And ‘genocide’ is mass murder by ethnic, racial or religious category – again, not the fate suffered by the non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

A sensible debate can only occur when the parties start from a sensible premise. Since such a premise was lacking, a sensible debate wasn’t on the cards. What was? Oh well, exactly what happened: a show of gonadic, mindless savagery aimed at anyone attempting to introduce a note of sanity into the proceedings.

Students at our formerly great universities are no longer taught how to arrive at a truth by sequential dispassionate steps, each carefully thought through and subjected to destructive testing. They are indoctrinated to believe that they – and all their thoughts – are perfect as they are. Students aren’t equipped with the techniques of honing their minds, expanding their intellects, embarking on a lifelong effort of daily self-improvement.

Such techniques are an inalienable property of an intellectual elite, the kind Newman had in mind. An inability to wield such techniques at every step taken through life is a characteristic of the faceless masses that, according to Ortega y Gasset, have been in revolt for at least two centuries. Well, they are still revolting.

It was Ortega who correctly identified a malignant problem of modernity as the unqualified masses being empowered and encouraged to fill the spaces previously occupied by qualified elites. Anyone seeking an illustration should compare Newman’s idea of a university with the reality of today’s Oxford, supposedly our best.

Instead of the budding scholars they used to be, the intellectual elite in the making, today’s students are shrill, hysterical zealots worshipping at the cult of any subversive ideology on offer. And ideological zealots have no opponents to debate or reason with. They only have enemies to eliminate, ideally physically but, barring that, in any way that will make them mute and invisible.

So yesterday’s debate proved. When broadcaster Jonathan Sacerdoti took issue with the motion, sputum-sputtering hecklers shrieked “genocidal maniac” and “sick mother***er” at him, and threatened violence with the credibility lacking in their thoughts. That Oedipal expletive, by the way, suggests an international nature of the event. Though it’s slowly gaining currency in Britain, it’s still mostly associated with American usage.

And fair enough, people for whom that idiom comes naturally were in attendance. One of them, Israeli-American activist Miko Peled, described the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, 2023, as “an act of heroism”. It’s good to see that even at a mature age of 62 Mr Peled retains youthful passions liberally laced with cretinism.

Luckily for him he wasn’t asked to explain, in a logical, detached manner, how murdering and raping (not always in that order) hundreds of unarmed women, men and children fits any accepted definition of heroism.

But his audience didn’t require any explanations – some things just go without saying. When asked if they would have reported Hamas terrorist plans to authorities, thereby preventing the carnage, 77 per cent of the participants said no. And what do you mean, ‘terrorist’?

“What happened on October 7 was not terrorism – these were acts of heroism of a people who were oppressed,” explained Mr Peled to almost universal approval. He then called for “a Palestinian state from the river to the sea”, which is to say for the wholesale murder of the seven million Israeli Jews just like himself (plus any number of non-Jews seen as collaborators). I’m sure that, should such genocide happen, Mr Peled would be cheering from across the ocean.

Young people have always gravitated towards the radical end of things, and they’ve always tended to speak emotionally, often without taking the trouble of thinking first. Nothing new about that.

What is new, however, is our universities’ reluctance and increasing inability to direct youthful passions into the conduit of intellectual rigour and emotional self-restraint. Today, no professor will keep his job for long if he begins to explain to students that – and why – their thoughts are nothing but immature drivel.

That’s why those who’d be inclined to do so seldom become university professors. And if by some chance they do, they have to master the art of subterfuge putting to shame the mediaeval Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity but continued to practise Judaism in secret.

As a result, we no longer have universities, those Newman would recognise as such. We have hatcheries of crepuscular thought and febrile zealotry. If such is our elite, one has to re-evaluate one’s rating of Mao’s Red Guards.