Ideological Capture in Higher Ed is the Real Story
Supposed antisemitism, racism, sexism, and most other 'isms are not the biggest problems at elite universities.
There are so many dimensions to the higher education hullabaloo that’s been playing out these last weeks that I keep changing my mind over what I want to say about it. It covers so much ground that is of interest to me; politics, culture war, race, free speech, wokeness, Israel, Palestine, education, that it’s been hard to pick a direction.
For those who spent the Christmas season under a rock (or I guess, concentrating on low-stakes trivialities like family and joy) , Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, who are [/were] the presidents, respectively, of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn testified before Congress about supposedly rising antisemitism on their campuses. A 90-second exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) dominated most of the coverage of the nearly 6 hour hearing and led to calls for all three women to step down or be fired. Magill quickly got the axe, Gay held on for a spell but is now gone also, and the jury is still out on Kornbluth.
The exchange itself was…pretty stupid. Stefanik was demagoguing, pretending not to understand the difference between reprehensible speech and reprehensible speech that is targeted at individuals. Specifically, she was asking whether calls for genocide of Israelis or Jews violated the colleges’ prohibitions on harrassment or bullying. The three presidents gave waffling, “it depends” answers, and came across as generally smug and dismissive.
It shouldn’t have been a hard question to answer. Let’s try:
“Calls for genocide of anyone are evil and heinous and my university condemns such calls in the most stringent possible terms. But unless they are targeted at individual people, they amount to constitutionally protected speech and we don’t issue sanction. For example, a student creating a flier that calls for a genocide against ginger-haired people is behaving despicably, though not in a way that violates our codes. However, if that student were to pin said fliers to the doors of ginger students, it would amount to harassment and bullying, and we would punish him/her accordingly.”
As free speech questions go, this one isn’t even really interesting. It’s high school stuff. “Down with gingers!” is constitutionally protected speech. “Go kill the nearest ginger.” is not (incitement). Neither is, “I’m going to kill you, you hideous, ginger asshole.” (threat) nor “I wish somebody would put a gun to your stupid, ginger head and pull the trigger.” (bullying/harassment/menacing).
It might’ve been easy for the three presidents to get out of this jam, but for two problems. First, they didn’t answer carefully, plainly not sensing the minefield into which they’d trodden. Second, the idea that any of these women are champions of free speech is so laughably ridiculous that even their staunchest defenders couldn’t have helped cringing at their trying to claim that mantle.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranks American colleges on their free speech bona fides. On this year’s list, Harvard came in dead last. UPenn was 2nd to last (MIT rocked it, landing an impressive 136th). The rankings are based on metrics like how readily the university punishes faculty for controversial speech, whether or not they crack down on students who disrupt lectures, how frequently speakers are deplatformed, etc. In fairness, these schools are all private, and aren’t obligated to respect 1st Amendment principles. But the hypocrisy here is pretty intense. What anyone paying attention, FIRE Org included, knows is that these institutions eagerly punish speech that offends their favored classes. Jews just don’t make that cut.
Here we must also note that evidence for calls of actual genocide against Jews on these campuses is pretty thin. I can understand why Israel supporters do not enjoy hearing chants like “Intifada!” or “From the river to the sea!”, but the genocidal intent of these slogans is hotly debatable.
What’s been genuinely interesting about all this though is how the controversy has shone a spotlight on the extraordinary ideological capture that has taken place at American universities. To folks like me, who follow this stuff regularly, it’s no secret that universities today are less centers of learning and more activist training camps. But more are waking up to the problem now, and it’s even leading to (misguided) legislative attempts to basically choke the woke out of campus life in America.
It may surprise some, given my extreme impatience with woke chicanery, that I do not generally support governmental attempts to mitigate it. I remain supportive of a university’s right to express stupid nonsense, and even to enshrine it in its operation, I just wish they’d do it less. I’d make some carve-outs for instances of clear discrimination based on identity. For example, dormitories and graduation ceremonies in which students of particular ethnic backgrounds are not welcome should not exist. If it takes the law to end those practices, so be it. But this stuff is usually less overt than all that, and the rules that get applied differently tend to be the unwritten ones. The law can’t fix that. Only better ideas can.
And what I think should be a bigger part of this conversation is that facets of this scandal are making it very clear that college identity politicking isn’t just stupid and dangerous, it’s unnecessary. Claudine Gay and Harvard are perhaps the best examples of this.
Gay held onto her job for several weeks despite extreme pressure for her to be pushed out. Among the many issues that fueled calls for her ouster were reports that she plagiarized not only her (award winning) PhD dissertation (at Harvard), but close to half of her published articles. As plagiarism scandals go, this one was maybe a two-star out of five; mostly instances of missing quotation marks and citations. But there was a degree of seriousness to it. In many cases, Gay lifted entire paragraphs from books and articles by other scholars, changed one or two words, and presented it as her own work. Some of the plagiarized writers joined in the calls for her to step down whereas others were more magnanimous, but the point remains: according to Harvard’s own guidelines, what Gay did was plagiarism. And this isn’t something she did once or twice, this was a pattern.
My sense is that Gay’s true sin was not her supposed antisemitism, nor even her questionable academic integrity. It was that she became an avatar for everything that non-leftists think is wrong with higher education, and she ended up taking a full canon blast that was really meant for all of western academia.
Gay’s career has focused primarily on racial politics. And that interest wasn’t just the subject of her research, it appears to have been her administrative raison d’etre. A leaked memo that she penned during her time on the shortlist for Harvard’s presidency spells out her goals and visions for the institution should she take over. It’s actually quite alarming.
Quick thought experiment: imagine you were on the cusp of leading America’s oldest, most storied university, with a multi-billion dollar endowment. What would you want to do? What would you want to learn? What ideas would you express to the hiring committee to make yourself look like the best candidate?
From start to finish, Gay’s memo, and the ambition it expresses, is just rank, race-obsessed drivel. No, “Let’s cure cancer.” No, “Let’s figure out how to get to Mars.” No, “Let’s crack the secret of cold fusion.” Just, “Let’s promote fewer white people, remove signs I don’t like, and throw money at my pet interests.” That’s it. And it got her hired!
I guess two things are possible here. Either it’s really the case that all Dr. Gay could think of to do with that INCREDIBLE resource for pursuing knowledge was promote woke stuff and tear down signs. That would be bad. Or, worse, she just said all that because she knew that’s all the search committee cared about hearing.
Either way, geez. What a bleak vision for higher education. When people talk about wokeness being a “mind virus”, this is what they mean. Such a monumental lack of imagination can only come from something having eaten the part of the brain in which creativity and invention reside.
But Gay’s story is highly instructive. She’s from a privileged background; a graduate of Phillips Exeter, Stanford, and of course, Harvard. She was on the young side for the job - early 50s - and her body of scholarly work was suspiciously light for somebody in that role. She was exposed as an ideological hack, a plagiarist, and her clumsy testimony before Congress thrust her university into a political firestorm, leading donors to threaten withholding funds and members of the hiring class to threaten slush piling applicants from the school.
Yet despite this, and despite her equal at Penn having been swiftly invited to the chopping block, Harvard’s board initially elected to stand by Claudine Gay. Why? Is it possible, just maybe, that Gay’s combination of identity and politics shielded her from the consequences that another in her shoes might have faced? Put differently, if a white, conservative man, in an ecosystem like Harvard’s, had gotten himself and his school into that much trouble, is there any chance he could’ve held on as long as Gay did? I’m talking about today, mind: 2023/24. Not 1963, when that white, conservative man would not even have made news with any of this.
This dynamic was made all the more jarring for Gay’s defenders screaming that the attacks on her could only have been fueled by racism and sexism. This idea - and it’s a mighty damn prevalent one - would seem to be undercut by Gay’s white counterpart at Penn getting the boot straightaway. And of course it ignores the ways in which Gay’s race, gender, and political persuasions appear, prior to this incident, to have been serious boons to her career. It’s the politics, I think, that’s really a key part of this. Many in the commentariat have zeroed in on her race, but I can’t see Harvard having worked this hard to defend somebody like John McWhorter, Glenn Lowrey, or Thomas Sowell, all of whom are black, but all of whom are highly skeptical of the prevailing political winds on campus.
Gay, it’s worth noting, was not free of controversy even before this. Harvard, under her leadership, worked feverishly to find ways to defy the Supreme Court and continue discriminating against Asian and Asian American applicants. Reason being, those groups post grades and test scores that are so astronomically higher than those of other groups, that if Harvard had purely meritocratic admissions, the school would be close to ethnically homogenous. And they don’t want that.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that the spaces in which traditional racial discrimination and privilege seem least to be problems are the spaces in which the tone of the conversation about them is the most hysterical? That the more progress we make in mitigating racial discrimination, the more it seems to haunt our discourse?
Claudine Gay is the first person of color ever to hold the Harvard presidency. Harvard was evidently so excited about this fact - they could scarcely drop her name without mentioning the historic nature of her tenure - that they were willing to look past an incredibly rich professional history that would almost certainly have sunk a candidate who couldn’t boast her characteristics.
Given all this, and in spite of America’s inarguably ugly history of racism, is it really reasonable to think that Harvard, specifically, today, is a place where black students and faculty should fear discrimination based on their race? Is it really reasonable for Harvard’s president to have made combating this phantasmic discrimination her sole policy priority?
My problem with the conversation over race and privilege has always been that it’s incomplete, not that it’s wrong, per se. It is undeniably the case that having white skin offers unearned advantages in some corners of society. But *society*, it turns out, is a pretty big place, with a lot of corners. If I’m in the back of a police car, I’m likely to be pretty grateful for my white privilege, thank you very much. But if I’m, say, an embattled administrator at an Ivy League university, is the picture quite the same? The cop car is an important place to ask questions about racial privilege, no doubt. I’m just not sure that it’s important to the exclusion of everywhere else.
If the left is going to continue to be so animated by issues pertaining to identity and justice, it’s going to need to broaden and deepen the conversation. If it doesn’t, the not-already-persuaded will conclude, perhaps correctly, that the left doesn’t actually want to end privilege hierarchies, it just wants to reshuffle them. At Harvard, that reshuffle may already be complete. By assuming black, brown, and gay students to be members of a victim class, while placing Asian, white, and (apparently) Jewish students into an oppressor class, Harvard not only treats the needs and preferences of these groups with different degrees of seriousness, it openly aspires to favor or disadvantage them according to…I don’t know. History? The zeitgeist?
It’s highly consequential too, because unlike economic prosperity, these ideas really DO trickle down. Harvard sets the tone for higher ed, and higher ed sets the terms of what we, as a species, learn about and focus on. Not only does this episode make me wonder if we really want that to be *this*, it makes me wonder if we really need it to be, or if so, for how much longer.
I didn’t really care one way or another if Claudine Gay kept her job. I wasn’t bothered about Liz Magill and I don’t have strong feelings about Sally Kornbluth. I have no connection to their institutions, and no plans to form any. But I would like to see their efforts at ideological unification wind down, if for no other reason than I want Harvard, and MIT, and Penn kids working on ways to make my iPhone do cooler stuff, rather than fixating on whether their cafeteria signs are sufficiently inclusive.
I think the claims of sexism and racism in this instance are wrong, and only make sense if your mind has been so poisoned by identitarianism that you think the most important things about these presidents are their races and genders. And if Claudine Gay’s defenders find it distasteful that she gets called a “diversity hire”, they might consider whether their own rhetorical laser-focus on her identity, and apparent disinterest in anything she actually did, could have aided some in forming that impression.
Some wanted to see these women fall because they wanted criticism of Israel to be as limited as possible. Others saw and see them as avatars for the DEI/PC/woke capture of academia, and want them gone for that reason. A few were likely fixated on how they ascended their thrones in the first place, I.e. did the hiring team expressly want a woman, a black woman, etc? And is that fair?
What I have seen almost none of though - and I scour some dark places on the internet - are people honest-to-Betsy attacking them, 60s-style, just for who they are. By the way, that’s good news! The progressives accusing this generally don’t present any evidence for their claims, it’s just what they feel in their guts; that bigotry must secretly be behind any call-outs of such objectively great people. I think that game is wearing thin, but I might be a bad judge. I never much liked playing it to begin with.