How academia sustains American ignorance
On March 8, 2025, Department of Homeland Security agents abducted Mahmoud Khalil as he was coming home from dinner with his wife. Khalil writes:
“….those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University…. Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration’s latest threats.”
His experience points to a deeper entanglement between academic institutions and state power. During the McCarthy era, professors suspected of communist sympathies were surveilled, blacklisted, or dismissed, creating a chilling effect on radical scholarship. Historian Ellen Schrecker argues in her book, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, that American universities were not merely victims but active participants in the persecution of leftwing faculty. They used the political climate to purge dissident voices. At the same time, as historian David Engerman documents, US government agencies and private foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller funded academic research with the explicit aim of countering communism at home and abroad. Area Studies programs, such as Soviet Studies and East Asian Studies, were heavily subsidised to generate knowledge useful for Cold War policy. This scholarship routinely portrayed communist societies as repressive and backward. Much of Cold War analysis emerged from the institutional and political pressures of, what Ron Robin terms as the “military-intellectual complex.” This provided intellectual justification for massive defence spending and a global containment strategy. The outcome was not merely the silencing of certain scholars. It was the construction of knowledge that fit neatly within US foreign policy goals, where American students learned to see the United States as the defender of freedom and assuming maintenance of capitalism as a universal good. This production of knowledge was accompanied by an absence of inquiry into the structural violence of American interventions abroad, a silence that rendered such violence minimised and ignored.
This dynamic between knowledge producing institutions and the state remains steadfast in the present. In 2025, in a move reminiscent of McCarthyism, the University of California, Berkeley gave the Trump administration the names of 160 faculty members and students as part of an investigation into “alleged antisemitic incidents.” This kind of political policing is part of a broader pattern that sustains what can only be described as American ignorance.
This does not mean Americans lack information. It is more pernicious than that. American ignorance refers to a set of false and/or incomplete beliefs about the United States, beliefs shaped by America’s status as a global power and by a collective refusal by Americans to confront the harm their country inflicts on others. Many Americans hold an (false/incomplete) unshakeable conviction that US interventions abroad are guided by noble ideals such as democracy and freedom. When these interventions result in devastation, as they do time and time again, the consequences are collectively perceived as isolated mistakes, rather than a pattern of abrogation of rights. The knowledge, testimonies and lived experiences of people from the Global South is discounted as biased or irrelevant. There is an arrogance to maintaining American ignorance.
Universities play a central role in maintaining American ignorance. Their primary commitment is not to free flow of ideas, but to preserving their legitimacy within the political order that funds and protects them. Universities allow debate only when it does not challenge U.S. strategic interests. When they adopt government talking points, such as conflating Palestinian activism with support for Hamas, they function as extensions of state power. This undermines their role as independent spaces of inquiry and has turned them into vehicles for legitimising United States’ foreign policy.
Recent events at CUNY illustrate how the Palestine exception shapes and distorts the academic landscape in deeply racialized and political ways. In February 2025, The New York Post reported that Hunter College was looking to hire a scholar in Palestinian Studies. The job ad read: “We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.” Soon after, New York Governor Kathy Hochul intervened to cancel the job posting. According to Hochul’s office, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State,” citing the use of terms such as “settler colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid” as antisemitic attacks. When such sorts of jobs cannot exist, courses that appear to challenge US foreign policy are effectively eliminated as well. As a result, students are encouraged to undervalue knowledge from marginalised communities that speak in support of Palestine, reinforcing narrow limits on our social and political zeitgeist.
This deliberate framing of Palestinian experiences as “antisemitic” is central to how American ignorance becomes systemic. When universities reduce wars in the Middle East to problems of “political Islam,” they are teaching generations of students that some histories are dismissible as simplistic (Muslims hate us), and some suffering too controversial to name. Over time, this framing hardens into common sense: our students believe that our country acts abroad in defence of freedom and democracy. The harm and contradictions are filtered out before they can even enter the archive of legitimate knowledge.
To call this a failure of courage understates the point. Universities are not merely avoiding controversy; they are reproducing the very epistemologies of ignorance that sustain American power. They do not simply reflect American ignorance, they manufacture it.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.