The presidents of Penn, Harvard, and MIT were blasé about antisemitism on their campuses at a congressional hearing, and now we all must have an extended freakout about the leadership of our elite universities. Sorry, those are the rules.
Except: I’m kind of down for it? The presidents of such universities are, as a species, a bunch of vapid, spineless careerists. Trust me, I get the emails: the newsletters, the campus updates, and the fundraising appeals (so many fundraising appeals) sent in their name. All pablum. Social justice pablum, to be precise. (A recent chancellor’s “holiday greetings” urged me to give the gift of a YA novel “about an internal organization of spies protecting people of color.” Give it a rest!) But you come away with the sense that these glorified apparatchiks would gladly offer up whatever sort of pablum the political winds might call for. I’m hesitant to say that there’re no longer any adults in the room, or that there’s a crisis of the ruling class, or that these so-called leaders are spiritually desiccated ciphers, but . . . yeah.
Was the campaign to oust Harvard president Claudine Gay a cynical one? Yes. But was her fall today actually pretty satisfying? Yup, that too. Turns out intersectional privilege will get you only so far.
Are words violence, or not? Are safe spaces in or out? We still doing microaggressions? I’m just looking for some clarity here. I didn’t find any in Gay’s resignation letter. Gay led an elite university, so, naturally, the letter—which ignores her flop at the hearing, her plagiarism, and her hypocrisy about her plagiarism—is contradictory gobbledygook.
Gay looks forward to “a better future” at Harvard. She lays out something of a three-point plan. The “people of Harvard” must (1) “combat bias and hate in all its forms,” (2) “create a learning environment in which [they] respect each other’s dignity,” and (3) “affirm [their] enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth.” If I thought that these three imperatives, understood as the “people of Harvard” understand them, were actually co-equal to her, and that she truly wanted to harmonize them, my response would be: Good luck with that. But that’s not what I think because I wasn’t born yesterday. (In fact, I was alive in the summer of 2020, back when praise for something like “the pursuit of truth” made you quite possibly a racist.)
Gay hopes that her “brief presidency” has shown “the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education.” So . . . no more on-campus struggle sessions? Right? Or is “rancor and vituperation” only a problem when it’s pointed in the wrong direction (e.g., at Claudine Gay)? No justice, no peace!
Here’s something Paul Graham just tweeted:
Love it. From his keyboard to God’s smartphone screen. But I doubt this sentiment bears any relationship to life on the ground at elite colleges. Foolish indeed is the professor who concludes that he no longer has to worry about whether his “open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth” is likely to infringe on some students’ sense of “dignity,” or fall within their idea of “bias and hate in all its forms.”
When Harvard Law professor Ronald Sullivan agreed to represent Harvey Weinstein, a lot of Harvard students were quite upset. In response, Sullivan invoked the long line of lawyers who have readily, even proudly, defended unpopular clients. Then an associate dean, Gay didn’t just side with the students; she did so in the name of therapeutic equity.
Students “depend[ed]” on Sullivan, she said, and he had a “responsibility” for their “well-being.” The “intensity” of their “response” to his decision was a “powerful reminder” of this. She underlined the “impact” of his choice. She called his reply to the students “insufficient.” Gay’s point, beneath all the passive-aggressive administrator speak, was that the students’ emotions were self-justifying and righteous. Their assumption that Sullivan’s legal work was their business, and worth losing their composure over, was self-evidently correct. That these students were, in this instance, to judge the professor’s comportment, not the other way around, was too obvious to need saying. Sullivan wound up losing his position as faculty dean of an undergraduate house.
This is what I take Gay to have in mind when she talks of “combatting” bias and hate, “respecting” dignity, and “committing” to open inquiry and free expression. The third item comes in a distant third, and the words that make up the first two mean more than meets the eye. I don’t doubt that Gay’s outlook still reigns supreme at elite universities. Her ouster is good fun for those who reject the new illiberalism, but it’s a provocation to everyone who espouses it, which continues to include everyone who matters at places like Harvard.