The Trump administration has taken a series of actions against Harvard University, and has stated explicitly that it is making an example out of Harvard

In a previous article on this subject I looked at some examples of ordinary Americans in everyday life who suddenly found themselves involved in political fights with people who were “triggered” by the mere presence of an opposing opinion – like a hat with a political slogan written on it.

I made the point that this was leading nowhere good in US society, and it turns out that this sort of intolerance is not just happening at the street level, as this recent article discussed, Harvard’s Glass Menagerie. The author relates some recent conversations he’s had with four people in the academic world in Boston.

First, a Millennial foreign student at Harvard:

… he said it has been a real shock to him — and to the other foreign students in his circle — to observe how “coercive” (his word) the intellectual atmosphere at Harvard is, at least in the areas he’s been studying. He explained that it is quite simply impossible to discuss certain things, and ask certain questions, because of the ideological rigidity of the American students and their teachers. My friend made clear that this is the consensus view of the foreigners he knows there, whether they are on the left or the right. My lunch companion said that the elites formed by this most elite American university are people who have set up a world in which they never have to encounter an idea, or a person, that they don’t already endorse or embrace.

They’re joined at lunch by the second person:

“a left-wing Baby Boomer who works in a very liberal Boston institution … he finds the ideological rigidity of Millennials and the generation behind them to be insufferable. Such joyless, humorless, incurious people, he said. The foreigner, though a Millennial himself, agreed.

Something two of my kids, Zoomers, have also commented on, though they’ve pointed out that they think their generation is increasingly extreme on both Left and Right. From the Millennial Harvard student:

On our way to the restaurant, I had mentioned to my foreign friend something I’ve heard from several of you readers of this blog who are conservative academics: that as long as old-school liberals remain in charge of faculties and academic institutions, there will be a place for right-of-center scholars. But when the Jacobin-like younger generation moves into leadership, that will be the end.

But it won’t be just the Right that gets excommunicated:

He told me one story about a left-liberal scholar he knows who has been turned into a non-person for questioning out loud some of aspects of au courant progressive dogma. I’m not easy to shock about things like this, but this particular story — my foreign friend named names — was for me a sign of how advanced the ideological militancy has become.

Third, a liberal journalist:

My journalist pal said that he’s seeing on the left a moralistic refusal even to consider ideas, people, and data that contradict these leftists’ moral code. Understand: it’s not that this new breed of progressives disagrees (though they do); it’s that they believe, and believe strongly, that even to confront information that contradicts what they prefer to believe is intolerable.

Said my friend: “No wonder these people are always shocked by the latest developments in politics. They refuse to see the world as it is.”

Fourth, a professor from a different Boston institution:

… at his university, white professors are genuinely afraid to give students of color bad grades. They are terrified of being accused of racism, and being forced to defend themselves in a university hearing. It’s a big problem of academic integrity, he said, but the diversity deans, and the “diversity and inclusion” mentality, are all-powerful. It’s not just at his college, the professor said; it’s spreading like wildfire throughout academia.

The author of the article then comments:

It’s not that Harvard is full of bad people; I personally know some good people at Harvard. And it’s not that this mindset is limited to Harvard, or even to just the Ivy League. From what I can tell, it is general across America’s leading educational institutions. I am not picking on Harvard alone. Still, it is quite extraordinary to hear this kind of testimony about the most elite institution of its kind in the world. It means something

It’s causing him to think about his own kids’ future with places like Harvard, and this is before the admissions scandal where parents were found bribing people to get their less-than-smart kids into Ivy League universities, not to mention the civil suit taken against Harvard and others by Asian-American parents who’ve found their kids not getting accepted despite having superb academic skills, because of “diversity”.

I gotta say, though, what a strange feeling it was to walk around the beautiful Harvard campus this past weekend, after that lunch conversation. When I was in high school, a group from my school took a spring break college tour of the Northeast, and stopped at Harvard. I remember being there, and thinking about how I would love to be a Harvard student. I didn’t bother to apply, not because of class issues, but because my father adamantly refused to allow me to take out student loans to pay for an undergraduate degree. (Though I hated him at the time over this, I eventually understood Dad’s wisdom, and will be forever grateful for it.)

Given the insanely high costs of university today and the crippling loans on students that result from this, it’s becoming an increasingly easier decision to not go to university and instead learn a trade.

Today, though, in 2019, I wandered the campus thinking that I do not, in any way, want my children to attend this college, or any college like it, no matter what advantages it might give them in climbing into the meritocracy. I do not want them to absorb the rules of this particular game, the prejudices of the American elites, and the fragility of their class, which will not survive contact with the real world.

What he then describes is basically all-out class warfare:

In the main, these are not our people. These do not have the best interests of our people at heart. Though honestly compels me to say that I have as much, if not more, in common with the average Ivy League person than I do with I do with the average working-class Trump voter back home in the country, when it comes down to it, I know with which flawed tribe I will take my stand. I do not want my children being part of an institution that forms the kind of people my foreign friend talked about this weekend. In fact, I would be proud of my children if they dedicated themselves in some way to dismantling places like this and the cultural hegemony they maintain.

A right-winger who sounds more like some traditional Left-wing revolutionary? The world turned upside down. And then people wonder why Trump has so much support in waging war on Harvard and other, similar American universities.

If you had told 17-year-old me, ambling across Harvard Yard in the spring of 1984, that I would ever come to that point of view, and come to it from the cultural Right, I wouldn’t have believed it. Back then, I was much more liberal, but more importantly, I believed in American institutions, and wanted to be part of them, to let them build my mind and my character. But that was a different time, and a different country.

Well as the saying goes, the past is a different country.

Leftie commentators on this subject provided a wealth of nuanced, thoughtful commentary, mostly focused on the dull-edged insult of Old White Guys, together with the implication that they, as Lefties, won’t get consumed in the flames of this anti-intellectual assault on Western universities. It’s also a dated insult, as Harvard showed a few years ago:

Harvard University’s administration has unilaterally surrendered to a mob of student-activists demanding the termination of law professor Ronald Sullivan as faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate residence, over his “trauma-inducing” decision to join Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team.

Now I always thought Harvey Weinstein was a piece of shit but Lefties loved him for his support of all the Leftie causes – Planned Parenthood, Womens Rights, etc – and Leftie US politicians, and his public loathing of the GOP, NRA, and so forth. So having him outed as a sadistic, bullying rapist and destroyed by his own team, was schadenfreudelicious. Still, he deserves to be defended in a court by a lawyer, and Sullivan is a very good defense lawyer:

He advised Sen. Barack Obama on criminal justice issues in 2008, represented the family of Michael Brown in their suit against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, and is responsible for the release of more than 6,000 wrongfully incarcerated people. His clients have included accused murderers and terrorists.

But that didn’t save him from the latest incarnation of the Leftie mob:

Danu Mudannayake, one the students leading the campaign to remove Sullivan, described the professor’s representation of Weinstein as “not only upsetting, but deeply trauma-inducing” and evidence that he “does not value the safety of students he lives within Winthrop House.” According to Mudannayake and her fellow radicals, Sullivan has made Harvard an unsafe and hostile educational environment.

And they won. He was turfed as the faculty dean of a Harvard House but kept his job as a Harvard Law Professor. If this crowd of Leftie fanatics cannot even comprehend such basic foundations of Western law as the presumption of innocence and defense lawyers, and if this “thinking” then we as a society are in deep shit. And this is just one of many examples of what Rod Dreher was writing about in the linked article on Harvard.

BTW – Here’s a photo of Ronald Sullivan and his wife Stephanie Robinson, who was co-Faculty Dean of the house and has also lost that job.

Perhaps it’s just my eyes but I can’t see any Old White Guys in that photo.