Bias is not quite a strong enough word for the rot in higher education we’ve put under the microscope since three university presidents bellyflopped their recent congressional testimony. The latest development in the case of Harvard President Claudine Gay underscores this point.

Gay stands accused of plagiarism, and the evidence is robust and damning. Even the New York Times is treating it with the seriousness it deserves. Letting the leader of the country’s most prominent educational institution skate on serious evidence of intellectual fraud sends a very specific message to students about the expanding ethical boundaries of the elite ranks. The other piece of bad news for Harvard today is that billionaire donor Len Blavatnik is joining those withholding their money from their alma mater until Harvard addresses its anti-Semitism problem.

What these two stories have in common is that they both demonstrate that the problem on campus is not only what students are taught—though the story there isn’t particularly sunny—but also how they are taught to think. Of course, this isn’t a new criticism of higher education in America. But the scrutiny that system is now under is new. Additionally, it’s worth explaining how academic anti-Semitism harms the classroom quality of the entire institution by changing the way professors teach students to process the information they encounter.

The current semester at Princeton University, which ends tomorrow, features a course in Near Eastern history taught by an assistant professor named Satyel Larson. The instructor has assigned, as part of the course at this extremely prestigious university, a modern version of the famous anti-Jewish blood libel as expressed in a book with the academic merit of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim.

It is not surprising to see a rabidly anti-Zionist course reading list at an Ivy League school—Larson’s class also must read Edward Said and the patron saint of decolonization lunacy Frantz Fanon—but the inclusion of Puar’s book is illustrative of the lasting damage being inflicted on students’  intellectual development.

Puar is a tenured professor at Rutgers University. Her rise to fame—expressing anti-Semitism is the quickest way to the top in higher education—came after a Vassar lecture she gave in 2016, which later became the book under discussion. Her main accusations are that the state of Israel engages in organ harvesting from Palestinians and that the Jewish state deliberately maims and stunts Palestinians.

As Cary Nelson has shown at length, these accusations can be definitively debunked, although it feels icky even engaging them. There is no organ-harvesting project, obviously, though a single doctor’s team 30 years ago took cornea extractions and the like almost certainly largely from Mizrachi Jews—illegal in Israel but legal in much of the West under presumed consent laws precisely because it is not “organ harvesting.” The growth of young Palestinians is monitored and studied regularly by the UN and Palestinian health bodies, all which refute the idea that there is a stunting crisis in the Palestinian territories and the that Israel was responsible by withholding nutritious food.

And the “maiming” accusation requires a special level of madness, since it is a criticism of Israeli troops shooting to injure instead of to kill in various situations. There is obviously no such thing as “shooting to maim,” a spectacularly idiotic invention that requires knowing less than nothing about all involved subjects, including basic science.

Puar is neither the first nor the last pseudoscience fanatic to incite the world against the Jews. She is, in fact, following a very old formula, hence the reference to medieval blood libels. And yet her work poses a very particular challenge to the concept of academic study, and it is one that the academy has failed.

As Nelson has pointed out, Puar announced her commitment to “an anti-Zionist hermeneutic,” which means she begins from an anti-Semitic position and interprets all information to fit that worldview. This is the opposite of honest inquiry, and it is what she teaches her students. Additionally, her accusations “represent the kinds of conspiratorial thinking that can influence faculty who are teaching about contemporary Israel.”

In other words, and this is a hugely important point, our most esteemed academic institutions are teaching students to think conspiratorially. They are rewiring the brains of generations of future leaders in public service and private industry to process information in an anti-intellectual manner.

If you think there is a predilection among the public to glom on to wild conspiracy theories, this is a major clue as to how it came into existence. Ivy League schools are teaching students to un-think. And we have only begun to see the consequences for wider society.