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Igor Mazin
Inside Higher Ed
Excerpt: Ages ago, in the 1970s Soviet Union, a Jewish stand-up comedian, Mikhail Zhvanetski, remarked in one of his skits that if you want to argue about the taste of coconuts (not available in the Soviet Union at that time), it’s better to talk to those who’ve actually tried them. If you want to argue about antisemitism in academia, better ask those who have actually experienced it. Ask me.
The U.S. Department of Education is taking seriously a charge of “a pervasive hostile environment for Jewish students and faculty” at George Mason. This is as shocking to me (and to many of my Jewish colleagues at GMU) as hearing that I have broken two legs and never noticed it.
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AI arrived on campus as a crisis but has since become banal. Students can now do basically all their schoolwork automatically with AI—answering scientific problem sets, writing computer code, and drafting essays. Professors like me have no idea whether we are really teaching or just LARPing for students who are also pretending to occupy their role.
I’ve come to the conclusion that something bigger, stranger, and more damaging has been taking place for a long time. AI has combined with two other recent campus crises—the coronavirus pandemic and the research-funding cuts of the second Trump administration—to amplify a deeper truth: American college is incompatible with itself. Americans speak of “college” as if it is one coherent thing. That’s wrong.
Charlie Kirk’s family announced a wrongful death notice Wednesday, paving the way for a potential lawsuit against Utah Valley University officials, who, they allege, did not provide proper security at the outdoor event where Kirk was killed on Sept. 10, 2025, the Associated Press and other news organizations reported.
A rooftop sniper fatally shot Kirk at a university-approved event hosted by his conservative student organization, Turning Point USA. Kirk’s estate and heirs filed the notice against the university, its former president, its police department and the state of Utah, alleging that the shooting “came against a well-known backdrop of risk” and was the result of a “series of stunning failures and reckless decisions.”
There’s a common trope that liberals, especially liberal college students, often support using violence or shoutdowns to stop people they disagree with from speaking. It’s no secret that there are plenty of examples of this behavior. But are those isolated incidents, or do they reflect a broader pattern? Are liberal students more violent?
There used to be a massive gulf in support for violence between “very liberal” students (and democratic socialists, a separate ideology option in our survey) and everyone else, especially conservatives. That gap is gone, replaced by a gender gap, such that every male ideology is now more violent than its female counterpart.
