Cary Nelson’s Mindless and the Tragedy of the Western University

There are moments in intellectual history when an essay appears not merely to comment on events, but to distil an entire civilisational crisis into a single, urgent cry. Cary Nelson’s Mindless: What Happened to Universities?, published in The Jewish Quarterly (Issue 259, March 2025), is such a work—a philosophical intervention that strips bare the illusions of our age and compels us to reckon with a simple, harrowing question: what has become of the university?

Nelson is no outsider casting stones from the wilderness. He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and served as President of the American Association of University Professors from 2006 to 2012. His books—Manifesto of a Tenured Radical and Hate Speech and Academic Freedom—have long marked him as one of the few scholars willing to challenge the orthodoxies of his own camp. In Mindless, however, he does more than challenge. He indicts.

And he does so with the moral clarity of Camus and the rhetorical precision of Lévi-Strauss. This is not merely a critique of campus culture—it is a philosophical exorcism, a reckoning with the erosion of truth, the betrayal of reason, and the return of an ancient hatred in modern dress.

Nelson’s thesis is as radical as it is unflinching: the contemporary university has become the principal site for the intellectual laundering of antisemitism. Not the old antisemitism of blood and race, but its newer, socially acceptable twin—anti-Zionism. He argues, with a forensic elegance, that the pretence of a distinction between the two has collapsed. No longer a matter of policy debate, anti-Zionism on campus has become the principal theatre in which Jewish students are isolated, harassed, and ideologically blackmailed into erasing a core part of their identity.

The essay opens in the wake of October 7, 2023—a date that marked the most brutal massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. What might have been a moment of moral clarity instead triggered a global frenzy of justification and inversion. On campuses across the West, Israel was blamed within hours. Chants calling for its destruction echoed through the courtyards of Columbia, SOAS, and the Sorbonne. And in this theatre of moral inversion, professors did not merely remain silent. Some, like Columbia’s Joseph Massad or SOAS’s Gilbert Achcar, applauded.

Nelson does not write this as a polemicist but as a witness. He shows, with academic precision, how anti-Zionist dogma has become embedded in curricula, departments, and hiring practices. Courses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are routinely taught without a single reading sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Faculty appointments increasingly hinge not on scholarly rigour but on ideological conformity. There is, he notes, no “Zionist discipline” to counterbalance this trend—Jewish Studies and even Israel Studies are themselves often dominated by anti-Zionist staff.

And all of this takes place in the name of justice.

But Nelson peels back this masquerade. What is justice, he asks, when it cannot recognise the humanity of murdered Jews? What is liberation when it demands the erasure of a nation? What is scholarship when it collapses into sloganeering, when chanting “from the river to the sea” replaces the slow, painful labour of thought?

He refuses the luxury of euphemism. He reminds us that the chants—“Globalise the intifada,” “Death to Israel,” “Resistance by any means”—are not metaphor. They are calls to violence, legitimised by the institutional cowardice of university administrators too paralysed to speak plainly. And while some might dismiss such slogans as marginal, Nelson marshals empirical data: surveys showing majorities of Jewish students fearing for their safety, mounting hostility from faculty, and the rising correlation between anti-Zionist sentiment and classic antisemitic tropes.

But what makes Mindless truly innovative is its moral geography. Nelson refuses to retreat into nostalgia or reactionary lamentation. He is of the left—a “minority left,” as he calls it, in the tradition of those who once believed in universalism and emancipation without annihilation. He mourns what the university could have been: a place where Jewish students need not amputate part of themselves to belong, where anti-racism includes Jews, where intellectual diversity does not mean erasure of Zionist thought.

In passages of almost Talmudic cadence, Nelson explores the collapse of “psychological safety”—a prerequisite for learning, for risk-taking, for experimentation. He recognises the paradox: that universities must be places of discomfort, of challenge; but they cannot function if students fear violence or are hounded for their ethnicity. It is not that ideas must be safe—it is that people must be.

His discussion of “performative protest” is perhaps the most incisive in the entire piece. The campus encampments, he shows, are not sites of debate but rituals of purity. Their chants are not arguments but incantations. Their actions are not directed toward resolution but toward erasure—of Israel, of Zionism, of Jews who refuse to conform. This is not politics. It is liturgy.

And yet, Mindless is not a text of despair. It is a call to action. Nelson challenges us—to speak, to resist, to reclaim the university not as a battleground of slogans but as a sanctuary of thought. He offers no easy fix. But he insists on one truth: that silence, especially in the face of this new antisemitism, is complicity.

In the end, Mindless stands as a monument to intellectual courage. It is a work that dares to name the unnameable, to confront the collusion of ideology and indifference, to rescue the university from its own descent into ritualised bigotry. It is a Kaddish, yes—but also a challenge. A reminder that the university, like civilisation itself, is never more than one generation away from collapse.

Cary Nelson has offered us a mirror. Whether we have the courage to look into it is another matter entirely.