Something broke in the world on October 7, 2023. - and the current crisis in academia and medicine
Something broke in the world on October 7, 2023—and we are not referring here only to the atrocities committed on that day by the savages of Hamas when they invaded Israel, murdering and raping mostly young attendees at a music festival in the desert dedicated to peace, “exterminating” whole families (the word, “exterminating,” is here on purpose used to historically refer to the Holocaust), murdering and burning innocent children in their homes in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, and abducting over 200 hostages of all ages, including a baby that was murdered. Over 50 hostages—more already dead than still alive—are still held by Hamas under the threat of also being murdered should Israel try to free them.
What appears to have broken the world on that day—and basically ever since—was the response of the world to these occurrences. And nowhere were these responses more disappointing than at university campuses all over the world, including in the U.S. How the most educated youth—often in the most prestigious universities—could not only sympathize with a terror organization like Hamas (the U.S. and many other governments designated Hamas as a terror organization even before October 7, 2023), but positively identify with the organization (“we are Hamas”), was simply shocking. But even more shocking was the response of many university faculties and administrations—especially at elite schools, like Harvard and Columbia, and in Europe, for example, at Oxford University—making it abundantly clear that some of the world’s allegedly best academia had reached a major crisis point in fulfilling its educational obligations to students and society in general.
Instead of teaching and educating the youth of the country unbiased, faculties at especially elite universities have been taken over by followers of Critical Theory, often mixed with heavily Marxist undertones, and indoctrinated their student bodies accordingly. The results have been mostly catastrophic developments not only for universities but for society in general, including “defund the police,” tolerance by justice systems for the breaking of laws—often more concerned about the perpetrators of crimes than their victims—gender reassignments for children, males competing in female sport events and sharing bathrooms and dressing rooms, open borders, sanctuary cities and states, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) actually producing reverse racism and segregation, the abandonment of meritocracy, and discrimination (for example, against Asian university applicants and Jewish students post October 7).
Most disturbingly, however, too much of the country’s youth appear—in attempts to change society—to have become tolerant toward the use of force (as just again witnessed during the recent demonstrations in California), including political murder and, considering public denial and/or defense of Hamas atrocities of October 7, even worse. Examples, indeed, go beyond well-documented Hamas atrocities, when a 26-year-old Luigi Mangione can become a folk hero to many after in cold blood murdering Brian Thomson, UnitedHealthcare CEO, with a homemade gun in front of New York’s Hilton Hotel on 6th Avenue—like a real hero, shooting him multiple times in the back and then taking off.
Considering current political circumstances in the country, the Center for Human Reproduction (CHR) in this commentary expresses its deepest concerns about what we can only describe as an almost catastrophic educational as well as administrative crisis in U.S. academia that, especially at many of the most prestigious academic institutions (consider Columbia University in NYC and Harvard University in Boston), has reached historically unprecedented catastrophic levels, which, of course, also affect medical education and, therefore, current and especially future medical practice.
Introduction
It, of course, is exaggerated to say that all of academia is in crisis. That is clearly not the case. First-tier schools—the elite schools—are usually the ones in crisis, while less “famous” schools—of course, the vast majority of academia—are probably not only unaffected by the craziness involving Harvard, Columbia, and other similar schools, but may, indeed, benefit from getting some of the students fleeing some of these elite schools or choosing no longer to apply. Harvard supposedly lost over 15% of applicants, while the brand-new and extremely popular University of Austin in Texas already in its current second year of class recruitment may have a lower acceptance rate than Ivy League schools. But then the motto of this new university is, “Dare to Think!”—certainly not a very applicable phrase these days in any Ivy League school.
We here primarily address the obviously troubled elite institutions (there, of course, are many more beyond Harvard, Yale, and Columbia). The higher they were nationally ranked before October 7, 2023, the more they now have to lose. The likely most obvious case is, of course, Harvard University, which for several good reasons attracted the attention of the federal government (and it is not because Trump Jr. was not accepted; he never applied). Not only was the campus one of the most obvious anti-Semitic and discriminatory environments involving administration (remember the president’s performance before Congress), faculty, as well as the student body (remember 33 Harvard student organizations on October 9 “holding the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”), but the university—instead of starting negotiations as other universities like Columbia did—decided to fight the government in court.
Even if you have one of the highest-ranked law schools, that is not always the right decision, especially if one acknowledges that fighting the government is never easy and/or cheap. That is especially the case when legal wisdom, of course, demanded to be legally represented by conservative lawyers, with close relationships to an administration that just terminated payments in the billions of dollars to the university (even for Harvard with its billion-dollar endowment, a considerable sum). And if one can bet on one thing with absolute certainty at Harvard Law, there are not many conservative law school professors. Moreover, Harvard at that point was already under a consent decree with the government that mandated an end to racially based admission processes that discriminated especially against Chinese applicants for admission.
No wonder President Donal J. Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate whether the university’s not-for-profit status should be terminated. And all of this on top of a stop in research funding alone allegedly involving over $2 billion annually, and the withdrawal of a government license to enroll foreign medical students (representing almost a third of all Harvard students) by a district court judge at least temporarily revoked.
Harvard has $53.2 billion in its endowment—the largest endowment among all U.S. academic institutions; but this money is only partially freely available to cover daily administrative and/or research support. Most of the funds in the endowment are restricted to only certain uses. Here is a quick summary from the Harvard website itself:
$6.4 billion: the University’s annual operating expenses in the 2024 fiscal year.
14,600: different funds make up Harvard’s endowment.
$749 million: granted in financial aid and scholarships in the 2024 fiscal year.
70%: of the endowment’s annual distribution is donor-directed to specific programs, departments, or purposes.
$53.2 billion: the size of Harvard University’s endowment in the 2024 fiscal year.
These are, of course, quite impressive numbers (1)! What the university, however, does not disclose on its website, but what media have reported, is that—in addition to being tax-exempt—Harvard in 2025 could have expected in excess of $10 billion (yes, billions) in various grant supports from the federal government. If one then imagines that the federal government may, indeed, have the power not only to cancel those $10 billion-plus, but also the university’s tax-exempt status, it will immediately become very obvious that even an endowment of $53.2 billion—especially if mostly restricted—does not bode well for Harvard’s economic future.
How diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) became a dominant practice on campuses
The Republican Congress and the Trump administration very obviously don’t like what at most leading academic institutions has been transpiring since October 7, 2023, with pro-Hamas encampments and at times violent demonstrations expressing support for an organization that committed barbaric acts of horrific rapes, murders, and abductions involving even babies and children. They then simply murdered a majority of abducted hostages who didn’t die from starvation, including a mother with her two little children. Hamas, moreover, has for years been defined as a “terrorist organization” by Democrat as well as Republican administrations.
What has been transpiring on so many campuses since October 7, 2023, the Trump administration sees not only as a major administrative problem, but correctly perceives the protesting students as only the final product of a chain-linked education system that by now for decades has gone off track. After decades of benign government (and parental) neglect, the government finally discovered that from basic kindergarten to academic faculties at colleges and universities, almost exclusively leftist educators—in turn recruited by almost exclusively leftist administrations—unsurprisingly produced by now already sequential generations of radically-left students. And who can be surprised?
For all levels of the education system, elite universities in this decades-old multi-generational process of classical Marxist-style indoctrination, indeed, became the ultimate authorities. First outlined mostly in West German universities post WWII by such intellectuals as Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) before coming to the U.S., and influencing such later well-known individuals as Angela Davis, Abbie Hoffman, and Jürgen Habermas.
And this process, of course, also did not end with administrations; it even reached into board rooms, as Harvard once again probably better demonstrated than any other Ivy League school. The closest to a company board at Harvard are the current 13 members of the Harvard Corporation (a self-feeding board), with its chair being Penny Pritzker, heiress of the Pritzker fortune. She served as Commerce Secretary in the Obama I administration and guess who her brother is? Yes, you probably guessed right—Jay Robert Pritzker, the current (self-financed) Democrat billionaire governor of Illinois and potential 2028 presidential candidate.
As a major proponent of DEI, Penny Pritzker, according to reports in the media, was almost single-handedly responsible for the appointment of Claudine Gay, PhD, as President of Harvard. She allegedly insisted on a non-white female candidate by refusing to even interview male candidates. That Gay turned out not to be the best (who can forget her performance at the Congressional hearing on antisemitism) does, therefore, not surprise: A typical product of decades of academic DEI, her publication list was not even deserving of a professorship (and even that list was allegedly the product of plagiarizing). But none of that, of course, mattered, as long as she fulfilled the really important criteria of being female and Black!
One, therefore, can view the current status of the country’s leading universities as a takeover by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Marcuse was in the U.S. and elsewhere, indeed, widely celebrated as the “father of the New Left” and became the dominant theorist of the student movement already in the 1960s and 1970s in Germany, Austria, France, and, ultimately, also in the U.S.
How effectively Critical Theory has conquered U.S. academia is better understood once one comprehends Critical Theory’s most basic worldview: Though it followed many different political strategies since the mid-20th century, it is united by one sociopolitical purpose, which is to better understand human experience with the purpose of bringing about social change because a single truth does not exist.
Understanding Critical Theory, therefore, explains the relativity of morality—how some of the allegedly best-educated children at elite institutions can support Hamas; how a person can become a sympathetic and admired figure who point-blank shoots to death the CEO of a major health insurance; and how Critical Theory-trained prosecutors can express more sympathy for criminals than their victims.
Critical theory, therefore, also explains DEI, and how diversity could replace meritocracy, and equity could replace equality. Consequences are not only significant but diverse. It is how Harvard got a president like Claudine Gay, and how over the last decade almost all leading universities and colleges got a female president. And whenever the sex of a person or her skin color becomes more important than the person’s professional qualifications, the overall quality of performance of the institution, company, government office, etc., declines. And if this happens over decades, the consequences will be felt not only in academic institutions, but also in the control towers of our airports, the cockpits of airplanes and helicopters (sic. recent crash in Washington, DC), in small and large corporations and—yes—also in emergency and operating rooms in medicine.
What are the options for academic institutions which find themselves in crosshairs with the federal government?
While initially obviously motivated by the nationwide, at times violent, pro-Hamas demonstrations on campuses (how much non-university-based individuals and NGOs were involved in many of these events is apparently currently still subject to investigations), the current Trump administration thus understood the roots of what was happening at our elite universities. It, therefore, also understood that in order to change culture after decades of “inbreeding” of faculties, administrations, and institutional boards, major surgery had become necessary to reverse course.
Demands from universities like Columbia and Harvard, therefore, significantly expanded beyond initial demands of only controlling campus activism of radical, mostly pro-Hamas students, to the much broader goal of changing the culture of these institutions from the ground up. This meant starting with a radical improvement in diversity of opinion among teaching faculties (faculty members with conservative opinions in many departments at many prominent universities currently hardly exist and/or if they exist are often hesitant to express their opinions) and rebalancing leftist-Marxist and Critical Theory-based curricula. In other words, the demands of the Trump administration under the threat of withholding federal funding increased beyond just controlling campus antisemitism and other forms of discrimination.
At the time of this writing, demands and responses from only two Ivy League universities are known—Columbia and Harvard—and the responses of these two universities could not have been more different. Both responses represent the binary options universities currently have if the Trump administration perceives them to be discriminatory toward minorities among their student body. If they want to secure continuous funding from the federal government, they have to agree to address inequities at all levels and have to do so at times under the control of outside overseers.
Columbia University caved quickly. But then, the new temporary president of Columbia (on a side note, she was a physician who had replaced Columbia’s permanent female president after her resignation following a similarly obscene performance at the hearing before Congress on campus antisemites as the above-noted Harvard president) did not have the guts to acknowledge the agreement with the government. In front of members of Columbia’s for decades well-known pro-Palestinian and often openly antisemitic faculty, led by its Middle Eastern Studies Department, she then, as The Intercept reported, reassured its Middle Eastern studies scholars behind the scenes that she—“to appease Trump”—only pretended to have thrown them to the wolves (2).
EDITORIAL NOTE: The following is quoted from Editorial Policies and Procedures of The Intercept and characterizes well this publication’s leftist political stance.
“At The Intercept, we strive to hold the powerful accountable with truthful and aggressive reporting. We seek to be fair in our coverage, which means allowing people or institutions a reasonable window to respond to reporters’ inquiries before publishing a story that contains significant revelations about them. It does not mean mandating “balance” when one perspective on a subject — such as the science of climate change, or the justification for a war crime — is clearly without merit” (sic., - a typical Critical Theory statement!).
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Harvard Provost, Alan Garber, MD, became interim President at Harvard when Claudine Gay, PhD, was forced to resign and has since become the permanent President of the institution. He and Harvard’s governing board, the Harvard Corporation, chose the opposite strategy and decided to fight the government.
As a recent, quite prescient article in The New York Times noted, Garber, indeed, agreed with many of the criticisms brought by the government against Harvard (3) even before a recent in-house Harvard commission concluded that Jewish (to reflect equity and equality as well as Muslim students—even though the media did not report even a single event of anti-Muslim bias at Harvard) had been exposed to significant discrimination by the university. He—himself of Jewish faith—indeed, acknowledged that Jewish students at the university “had a problem with antisemitism on campus.” In contrast to Gay, he is a highly regarded academic physician-scientist, health care economist, and medical school administrator, who—in contrast to his predecessor—never strived to become president of Harvard and achieved leadership positions in academia based on merit.
Recruiting a powerhouse of—interestingly—conservative lawyers close to the Trump administration, he decided to lead the fight against the government in court, according to The New York Times article (3), allegedly “incensed that the government wanted to control faculty recruitment and the curriculum of the university.” For many at the university and in the media, this decision instantly made him a “hero” of the left and of the resistance to the Trump agenda, and it will be interesting to see how many other colleges and universities under government scrutiny will follow either the Columbia or Harvard example.
Considering Garber’s personality as described in The New York Times article, his fight-fight-fight position seems somewhat of a surprise, and one must wonder whether this was in principle really his decision or driven by the real top leader of the university, the chairwoman of the Harvard Corporation, Penny Pritzker, whose personality profile and, of course, political history, fits such a decision much better.
Billionaire and philanthropist Bill Ackman, MBA, as recently at Bloomberg (4) and other news outlets reported, has—not for the first time—been quite outspoken about the level of antisemitism and political indoctrination at his alma mater Harvard. He, indeed, called for Pritzker’s removal from her position and for a change in Harvard’s response to the government’s demands from legal warfare to negotiations (4).
Finally, little known by the public, the Pritzker and Trump clans have a long and not very friendly past joint business history through a partnership in real estate (the old Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street) in the 1990s that didn’t work out too well (5).
Where all of this will likely lead
To a degree, colleges and universities are a microcosm of societies, at least of educated societies, and—even more importantly—they represent a nation’s future political leadership. Consequently, considering what campuses these days reflect, what currently is happening at so many institutions of higher learning must be concerning.
But hold on for a moment: Those protesting students supporting Hamas and the murderer of a healthcare executive, of course, represent only a very small fraction of every total student body. Seemingly observable numbers still appear exaggerated since, as has become abundantly clear, many participants in demonstrations of sympathizers—on and off campus—often include behind masks hiding paid professional political agitators who may have nothing to do with the campuses where they are protesting. Most of these demonstrations are well organized, obviously supported by NGOs, which the government allegedly has started to investigate. Bluntly speaking, there is lots of money behind these demonstrations, likely involving similar sources to those that financed Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Black Lives Matter (BLM), with the single biggest donor likely being the little—but very rich—country of Qatar, which as media reported, has also donated billions of dollars to U.S. universities (one wonders why?).
A second interesting observation is the large majority of female protestors in comparison to males who usually take part in those demonstrations. At the library takeover at Columbia University, 61 out of 80 arrested protestors were females (6). One wonders why that is the case. Do they understand how their life would be under Hamas rule? The trend toward the political right among young men is strengthening. It appears that male students are getting increasingly tired of indoctrination (which often also stresses so-called “toxic masculinity”) they find themselves exposed to at our elite universities!
One more point: For the second year in a row, pro-Hamas protesters, mostly female protesters, again showed up in front of the annual Met (fashion) Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At a time when this youth appears obsessed with an international political problem like Gaza, it is interesting that there are almost no demonstrations whatsoever about the Ukraine war, the Sudan war, the conflict in Libya, the conflicts in Syria, the fighting between India and Pakistan, and we, of course, could go on and on.
And how does all of this relate to medicine in general and especially reproductive medicine?
Reproductive medicine is, of course, an integral part of medicine, and what is happening in academia matters to medicine, including reproductive medicine. Currently threatened cuts in budgets of, for example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), therefore, will have consequences for research in reproductive physiology and biology. But—maybe somewhat surprising for many readers—for two reasons these developments will have only relatively little impact on the infertility field: First, with infertility in the U.S. over the decades increasingly having moved out of hospitals into ambulatory and, often, private settings, the amount of academic research in the field—never a very prominent endeavor—has in the U.S. only further declined. And when nobody asks for grants, the NIH cannot award them.
A second reason is maintenance of the so-called Dickey-Wicker amendment by Congress which basically prohibits almost all federal funding for almost all IVF-related research and clinical practice unless—as we in these pages previously suggested—the amendment—hopefully—this year will finally be terminated by the Trump administration when the time comes to submit this year’s federal budget. The amendment, otherwise, automatically renews every year with passage of the annual budget bill. The current Congress, therefore, has a unique opportunity to greatly improve IVF-related research in the U.S. if it decouples and finally terminates this amendment (Mr. President, are you listening?!).
Otherwise, the practice of fertility medicine faces the same academic problems other medical specialties encounter. Medicine as a whole has changed at the physician level from a conservative into a much more progressive profession. In parallel, professional organizations—not only within the fertility field—but in all of obstetrics and gynecology have radically changed—none more so than the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which has truly become a bastion of DEI and progressive ideology, we often have difficulties to follow. To say it bluntly, the leadership of ACOG at times appears so lost in difficult to understand bombastic ideology that one must wonder what the organization these days really stands for.
One, therefore, has to give credit where credit is due to the leadership of the ASRM, which during recent years of “wokeness” just did the minimum to not be called out by the more radical membership of the society. Job well done!
At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that within less than two physician generations, the field of obstetrics and gynecology has undergone a successful sex change operation—from being a strongly male-dominated specialty to an overwhelmingly female-dominated medical field. Indeed, all of medicine is becoming increasingly a female profession, though not without significant complicating consequences: Though women make up now a majority of medical school students, they still make up only 37 percent of practicing doctors (7); and the reasons are manyfold but, of course, circle around motherhood, part-time work, and even just giving up on practicing medicine.
That women don’t practice the same number of hours as men can, therefore, of course, not surprise; but this fact, of course, will greatly contribute to the already existing physician shortage in the country, which is only expected to get worse. And, in the practice of equality, one must also acknowledge that male physicians now also routinely take paternity leaves when their children are born—an idea only several decades ago unthinkable—and now widely accepted.
But likely the biggest threat to medical academia—and in no medical specialty, likely, more threatening than in reproductive medicine, is the lack of desire by physicians to join academic faculties. With private equity controlling in the U.S. and in many other countries rapidly increasing percentages of the infertility practice market and—in a medical specialty which annually produces less than 100 graduating fellows in the subspecialty of reproductive endocrinology and infertility (REI)—aggressively competing for graduating physicians, academic faculties are starved of quality candidates. This represents an enormous problem for the specialty already now, and can only get worse, because who will then drive the field forward?
Summary and conclusions
At a time when important sections of academia are in the midst of a mostly political-ideological crisis, the field of medicine is, of course, fully exposed to all the storms currently clouding the future of many of our nation’s most cherished academic institutions. Medicine and, especially the practice of infertility medicine, in addition, however, also faces many additional specialty-specific problems which for too long have been overlooked and now to significant degrees threaten quality and progress in the field. Currently already very obvious trends make changes in infertility practice unavoidable. Their seriousness, however, still, appears widely underestimated. We hope this article will open some eyes.
We started the article with the statement that “something broke on October 7, 2023, which literally worldwide brought to the surface a level of antisemitism not seen since Nazism in the 1930s. In closing it is important to note that the medical field has, of course, not been spared in all of these developments. Who can forget the two Australian nurses who in a video interview with an Israeli journalist publicly claimed to have killed Israeli patients and threatened to kill more—whether they really did it or not (see photo montage below) (8). They were fired from their jobs at a Sydney hospital and a police strike force was established to focus on the antisemitic crimes since the Israel-Hamas war began in 2023 to investigate potential offenses stemming from the online video that contained the original claim, including breaches of hate speech law.
To this day, we, however, are unaware of any conclusion reached so far by this allegedly existing strike force! An article in The New York Sun reported on this video with the headline, “Video of Australian Nurses pledging to kill Israeli Patients is just ‘the tip of the iceberg’ in Australian health care system” (9). And not only in Australia!
Two Australian nurses – one female and one male (9) (the male in small upper photo on left erroneously identified as “doctor,” caught on video threatening an Israeli journalist (lower left photo) claiming to have killed Jews in their care. Via You Tube from the New York Sun (9).
One, indeed, does not even have to go as far as Australia: The U.S. co-author of a recently published study by StandWithUs very recently noted that academia—medical academia included—today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups. According to this report, 62.8% of Jewish health care professionals employed by a campus-based medical center reported having experienced antisemitism since October 7, 2023 (the study was titled, “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment”). Overall, the study suggested that almost 40% of all Jewish-American health care providers encountered antisemitism in this time period in their workplace, either personally or by observation (10). The study included 645 Jewish health care providers, among whom many claimed to have been subject to “social and professional isolation,” while 26.4% felt “unsafe or threatened.”
References
1. Harvard University. https://www.harvard.edu/about/endowment/
2. Bose M, Biazzo S. The Intercept. April 16, 2025. https://theintercept.com/2025/04/16/columbia-middle-eastern-studies-trump-attacks/
3. Kolata G, Peters JW. The New York Times, Amy 3, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/us/harvard-alan-garber-trump-administration.html
4. Lorin J. Bloomberg. May 5, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-05/ackman-slams-harvard-for-mismanagement-calls-for-pritzker-exit?embedded-checkout=true
5. McCormick et al., Wall Street Journal, may 6, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/penny-pritzker-harvard-board-trustees-f3545e40
6. Sabes A, McAdams A. FOX NEWS. May 8, 2025. https://www.foxnews.com/us/mostly-women-arrested-columbia-university-library-takeover-nypd
7. O’Connell-Domenech A. the Hill. February 22, 2024. https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/4479304-more-women-than-ever-are-becoming-doctors-heres-why-there-are-still-so-few/#:~:text=Women%20now%20make%20up%20more,37%20percent%20of%20practicing%20doctors.
8. McGuirk r. AP News. February 12, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/australia-bankstown-hospital-nurses-kill-israelis-4600438279d0a1e5b75f9a31a3108ff3
9. Zhukovsky N. New York Sun. February 17, 2025. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/footage-shows-pair-in-hospital-uniforms-bragging-about-killing-israeli-patients-20250212-p5lbf3.html
10. Pierre DJ. The Allgemeiner. May 7, 2025. https://unitedwithisrael.org/new-study-exposes-antisemitism-in-university-medical-centers/