A Modest Proposal to Zionize American Academia

By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | September 13, 2014

In the true spirit of capitalism, I’ve identified a niche in the academic market and plan to fill it. First, let’s state the problem: the recent spate of campus firings from Yale to the University of Illinois (with earlier episodes at Princeton, Brooklyn College and other institutions) have left schools in the messy position of having to rid themselves of controversial, undesirable prospective faculty and, God knows, sometimes even chaplains. The ensuing bad publicity generated by activist troublemakers too often gives these institutions a black eye they don’t deserve.

Wouldn’t it be better if schools could vet job candidates with a group of trusted consultants who would explore their background (especially their Twitter feeds), seeking embarrassing material and ideologically suspect expression in order to save administrators the trouble of learning about it when it’s too late? I call this new product I plan on offering, ZioCredit™. It’s based on the model of accreditation committees which travel the country examining the fitness of universities to call themselves legitimate academic institutions.

In my case, for a small fee, schools throughout the United States (but especially in communities with large pro-Israel markets) may hire my company to ensure peace of mind. A few of the more cynical among you may liken what I propose to protection rackets in which the Mafia offered businesses protection from assault. Those who refused often met unpleasant ends. If that’s what you’re thinking, you can put your mind at ease. This is the 21st century after all. Not Little Italy in the 1950s. We don’t operate that way. We’re as clean and classy as our clients and sport academic pedigrees to prove it.

So this is how the process works: if we find a candidate in the ideologically lower-tier it would be best to be rid of him or her immediately. We can take care of that for you (no, you won’t find him at the bottom of the East River in cement shoes–I kid!). Why should you get your hands dirty?

We will accredit your university, department by department to ensure each one hews to a proper line. We will even examine course curricula and weed out overly contentious books, essays and ideas.  We will examine individual job candidates and prepare them and their case files for presentation to hiring committees and boards of trustees. Earning our accreditation (hence the company name, ZioCredit™), is the pro-Israel Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Working with us will guarantee that you will never face the unwanted attention of the Israel Lobby because after all, we are the Israel Lobby! But we’re a manageable and cooperative version.  We don’t aim to embarrass you publicly. And we ask for so little in return.

There may be a few of you Old School academics worried about values like free speech and academic freedom. I can assure you that your concerns are unwarranted. After all, these values are overrated. Like tenure, they’ve outlived their usefulness in the modern age.

The premise behind ZioCredit™ is that in this new academic age what students really want is comfort. They want to enjoy their academic experience. They want civility. They don’t want unpleasant interactions with alien groups they’ve never met in their life. Ideas should be challenging but not too challenging. After all, you don’t want to scare off your students by forcing them to face realities better off avoided.

We will help transform the campus environment from a raucous free-for-all, in which feelings become bruised and identities confused, into a polite, civil society in which everyone takes their turn and knowledge is parceled out in nice, bite-sized packages.

Back to my product, it takes into account that there may be some candidates who, though suspect, are still for various reasons beneficial to the faculty. They may fill an unspoken race or gender quota; or even an ideological quota. They may help promote the school within certain demographic profiles and market niches.

For an extra fee, my company will work with such candidates to reframe academic interests so as to be acceptable within the community. After all, academics are such unusual individuals raised like hothouse flowers in intellectual environments so alien to the average person (by which I mean any supporter of Israel). They need to be coaxed into the real world, to be shown proper manners and etiquette, if you will. In particularly awkward situations, we may even be engaged to cleanse reputations and eliminate particularly egregious examples of anti-Israel hate speech from a candidate’s internet identity.

If the University of Illinois had only had such a product available, it could’ve avoided all that Steve Salaita unpleasantness. So messy and so unnecessary.

Now I can hear a skeptic or two among you (a small minority of course) wondering how this consultancy will be structured. I assure you we will engage some of the foremost experts in the field of internet surveillance and Zionist identity politics. These will be individuals with impressive resumes and who are lionized by everyone who matters. Discussions have already commenced to hire such luminaries as Ayan Hirsi Ali, Carey Nelson and Alan Dershowitz.  They know what a good candidate should bring to the table. Either they will help your job seeker to become the best pro-Israel candidate he can be; or they will tell you in no uncertain terms to toss him aside. After all, who wants to waste time on hopeless causes?

Since there is a growing acknowledgement that the customer should be represented at the table, we’re engaging students too, who’ve proven their allegiance to the cause, to sit on these vetting committees. Two of the stars of the field are Daniel Mael and Chloe Valdary. It’s a pretty tough environment for hiring such stellar young people. They have offers of employment at FoxNews and the Wall Street Journal respectively.  But we hope to lure them with promises they will make the campuses of America safe for Israel. A more sacred mission I can’t conceive.

Though we believe this is a lucrative field we’re entering (creating, really), we don’t want our clients to think of us as money-grubbing capitalists. To that end, we plan on donating 5% of our net revenues (you didn’t think we were nuts enough to base this on gross revenues, did you?) to various worthy, non-political causes like Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum, and one of our sister Israeli organizations, Im Tirzu. We’re proud of our association with our Israeli brethren who are bringing a “second Zionist revolution” to Israeli academe.

Please don’t get the idea that any of this is political.  Zionism, after all, knows no denominations or sects. There are Christian, Jewish and heck, even Muslim Zionists. It’s entirely non-partisan. And that’s as it should be. There are so many enemies of the Jewish people out there flapping their mouths. God knows what they might say.  But we know what’s right.  And there isn’t a political bone in our body.

Don’t get the idea that we’re affiliated with one Israel Lobby group like Aipac. After all, how would it sound to say: Aipac Certified?  That’s thinking too small. No, we’re going big. We want the whole enchilada. That’s why we call our process Zio Certification.

There may be a few holdout institutions who think they can do things the old-fashioned way. They can honor all the old cliches like academic freedom and pay the price by standing by faculty who speak inconveniently in public settings. To them I say, God speed.  You don’t need our help. You need a time machine. You’ll find that you’re dinosaurs and this Brave New World we’re entering will soon pass you by.

My message to academe is: we’re ready to go–are you? Zionize or die.