On Sunday, I watched the movie Remember This, a remarkable tribute to former Georgetown University professor Jan Karski, a messenger for the Polish Underground who was the first man to take an eyewitness account of Nazi labor camps directly to President Franklin Roosevelt.
On Monday, I read a Townhall story about how the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where Karski taught for 40 years, is now requiring the whole college to “embed Antiracism and [diversity, equity, and inclusion]” ideologies “as core principles of the school.”
Tomorrow, Saturday, Jan. 27, is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The juxtaposition of these three items makes my heart ache. Let me explain.
Georgetown is my alma mater. While I was never fortunate enough to enroll in a class from Karski, he walked the campus as a legend, upright, angular, with a grim-but-courtly look, the visage of hard-won character. My good friend and classmate, columnist Deroy Murdock, who took Karski’s class, told me Karski was “an extremely engaging and often entertaining lecturer” with a “thick Polish accent and Old World charm” who was so inspirational that, at the end of one class where he discussed his war experiences, students “gave him a standing ovation and considered ourselves immeasurably fortunate to learn from such a pillar of sheer courage.”
The movie Remember This, a one-actor tour de force performance by David Strathairn, makes gut-wrenchingly clear the horrors of the Holocaust that Karski, a Catholic on a mission to save Jews, witnessed and reported to the West. As someone treated horribly or outright tortured by both the Soviets and the Nazis, Karski was an apostle of free thought, opposed in all ways to totalitarian groupthink and to the idea that group identity should determine policy or outlook. And he was a direct witness that the Jewish people are the victims of “an unprecedented species of criminality.”
Tomorrow’s Holocaust Memorial Day attests to those atrocities. Yet here the foreign service college at Georgetown (the university consists of five separate “colleges”), for which Karski was the undisputed leading light for 40 years, has for several years been pushing a DEI regime obsessed with racial categorization and with the idea that Jews are “colonizers” and thus not a victimized people but oppressors. As the City Journal has reported, this anti-Israel bias is extraordinarily pervasive at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.
This pernicious bias, which would appall Karski, comes in a direct line from the DEI “agenda” (quoting school documents) that SFS “embeds” in its curriculum, including a mandatory course called “Race, Power, and Justice” that posits an “urgent need for racial reckoning.” The reckoning repeatedly references “settler colonialism” as a “global” evil — and, by these lights, it is Jews who supposedly are today’s foremost practitioners of “settler colonialism.” The school’s “Anti-Racism Toolkit” features prominent endorsements of the work of the scandal-plagued, hard-left Southern Poverty Law Center and of the black-racist work of openly anti-white agitator Ibram X. Kendi.
So pervasive is the hatefulness which is, yes, embedded at SFS, that even three weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, the college hired long-standing, documented antisemite Aneesa Johnson to be the “primary point of contact” for master’s students regarding “everything academic.” A week later, the school put her on leave after students highlighted her posts saying she has a “deep-[seated] hate” for “Zio[nist] bitches, because they’re dogs.” But for Georgetown to have hired her in the first place, with her easy-to-find history of hatefulness, shows just how morally purblind the DEI outlook is.
DEI, as often (or even usually) practiced, can also run afoul of the principles of civil rights laws and of the Constitution. This was confirmed Jan. 11 even by a liberal federal judge appointed by former President Barack Obama. Judge Wendy Bettlestone of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania wrote that DEI can “plausibly” be construed to create “a race-based hostile work environment.”
It’s an environment Karski never would have countenanced. Indeed, as one acquaintance of mine asked this week, why are DEI bureaucracies and policies even needed at a Jesuit, Catholic, liberal arts institution? The entire ethos of the humanities, especially as informed by long-standing Judeo-Christian values and especially at a university where humane exchanges of ideas are the very reason for the school to exist, organically promotes cross-cultural understanding. This long has been particularly true at Georgetown, which is known for attracting an unusually international student body.
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Even back in the 1980s, when I attended, the remarkably polyethnic makeup of my own circle of friends, and of the friendships and peer groups of almost every single student, militated strongly against racism while actually effectuating true diversity of both “origin” and viewpoint. Rather than promoting that genuine diversity, today’s DEI regimes are a national plague, an authoritarian imposition of what has become a self-chosen mental disorder. They absolutely require, by explicit rule, a stultifying, deterministic unity of thought that automatically ascribes character traits to people based on their ethnic or sexual “identities.”
From there, it’s a short step toward advocating the destruction of the entire nation of Israel, “from the river to the sea,” because it supposedly is an evil example of “settler colonialism.” Jan Karski may have taught at Georgetown for 40 years, but by embracing radical DEI, Georgetown and every other collegiate DEI regime rejects the humane truths to which he so valiantly bore witness.