Two years ago, college students across America cheered as news emerged of the rape, torture, disfigurement, and slaughter of children, women, and men. Not in distant reaction to abstractions, but in real time, as the barbarism unfolded. They glorified mutilation. They celebrated kidnapping. They cheered mass murder as liberation.
This remains one of the most indelible aspects of Oct. 7 aftermath—not that terrorists committed atrocities, but that educated young people at our country’s elite universities celebrated them. Two years later, the question still haunts: How did we produce a generation capable of viewing such horrors as righteous?
The answer lies in what we taught them. For decades, universities have elevated intellectual traditions that glorify political violence while sidelining those that show alternatives. The texts we assign—and crucially, those we ignored—shaped the moral frameworks students carried into public squares that day.
Consider two thinkers shaped by similar colonial experiences: Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi. Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” remains a staple across undergraduate curricula. His work appears on countless reading lists, dissertations, and professional school syllabi. Memmi, who endured the same French colonial system and understood its psychology with equal depth, reached radically different conclusions. Yet in today’s academy, Fanon is canon while Memmi is footnote.
Born in 1920 in the Jewish quarter of Tunis, Memmi grew up under French colonialism and survived Nazi occupation. He knew oppression not as theory but as lived experience. His works—”The Colonizer and the Colonized” and “The Pillar of Salt”—diagnosed the psychology of domination with honesty and empathy. Yet he refused to glorify revenge. In his contemporary Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” students read “confrontation is a cleansing force” and that decolonization is “always a violent phenomenon.” For generations of students, these words have become a kind of secular scripture.
Memmi warned of something entirely different: that every movement embracing political violence would reproduce the authoritarian structures it fought to destroy—a prediction that proved prophetic from Algeria onward. He rejected the fashionable relativism that cloaked violence in the language of virtue.
Memmi issued warnings that remain urgently relevant today. He cautioned that political violence rarely achieves its intended goals: movements born in blood seldom produce freedom. Violence corrupts the very passion that fuels it, turning righteous energy into moral blindness. Those who embrace destruction as destiny will find themselves imprisoned by it.
Yet universities chose Fanon over Memmi—chose the prophet of cleansing violence over the prophet of its inevitable corruption. The consequences of that choice became visible when students celebrated the Oct. 7 massacres, their frameworks shaped by decades of one-sided curricula that taught them to view atrocity through the lens of “resistance.”
The numbers tell the story. Google Scholar lists 117,000 sources citing Fanon but only 20,600 citing Memmi—a ratio of nearly 6 to 1.
When students spend semesters reading about confrontation as regenerative, when they learn that peaceful solutions are futile and reform impossible, they absorb not just information but hierarchies of ideas—who counts as serious, which methods count as real. They learn to critique existing systems but not to build better ones. They carry these frameworks into public life, into social media and campus protests, chanting for “resistance” that blurs boundaries between liberation and annihilation, invoking “revolutionary necessity” borrowed directly from assigned texts.
The problem isn’t teaching about political violence—it’s teaching only one side. Fanon’s most influential readers weren’t critics but insurgents (Che Guevara’s revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, the Palestinian fedayeen, etc.). His rhetoric of “cleansing” violence inspired movements that treated destruction as destiny.
Universities now present these texts as academic exercises, stripped of consequence. Faculty claim they’re taught “in context,” but context doesn’t neutralize impact when it frames militancy as sophisticated and alternatives as naïve. As amplification systems, universities confer prestige on certain ideas and disseminate them into education, journalism, law, public health, social work, and other fields. The genealogy is clear—and the relative omission of Memmi makes it complete.
Students deserve to read both Fanon and Memmi, and to see why liberation leaders from Gandhi to Mandela to Václav Havel ultimately chose different paths. With political unrest rising, higher education can no longer indulge in curricular laziness. Every graduating class leaves campus fluent in destruction, illiterate in construction.
Todd L. Pittinsky is a professor of Technology, AI, and Society at Stony Brook University (SUNY). His forthcoming book is Antisemitism Online: An Ancient Hatred in the Modern World (Oxford University Press). He blogs semi-regularly at The Times of Israel Marketplace of Ideas.
