Trump, Harvard, & A Liberalism Of Suckers

And: Ulster Gay Race Communists; Zemmour On Christianity's Survival In Europe

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So, El Trumpo is playing hardball with Harvard now:

Then, within minutes of the meeting’s end, news alerts lit up the students’ phones. Chaos was breaking out again: Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had notified Harvard that its permission to enroll international students was revoked. With that, the degrees and futures of thousands of Harvard students — and an integral piece of the university’s identity and culture — were plunged into deep uncertainty.

“There are so many students from all over the world who came to Harvard to make it a better place and to change America and change their home countries for the better,” said Karl Molden, a student from Vienna who had just completed his sophomore year. “Now it’s all at risk of falling apart, which is breaking my heart.”

The university has faced rapid-fire aggressions since its president, Alan M. Garber, told the Trump administration in April that Harvard would not give in to demands to change its hiring and admissions practices and its curriculum. After the government froze more than $2 billion in grants, Harvard filed suit in federal court in Boston. Since then, the administration has gutted the university’s research funding, upending budgets and forcing some hard-hit programs to reimagine their scope and mission.

The end of international enrollment would transform a university where 6,800 students, more than a quarter of the total, come from other countries, a number that has grown steadily in recent decades. Graduate programs would be hit especially hard.

I gotta be honest, this makes no sense to me, except as a naked power move to force Harvard to comply with the administration’s other demands. It makes sense to me that the government would assert its right to determine which foreign students can study at US universities, for reasons of national security. For example, if it had grounds to fear that Chinese students posed a national security risk, I could understand why the Trump government, or any government, would ban them. (Keep in mind that I’m not saying that Chinese students do pose this risk; I’m just saying it’s a hypothetical.) But imposing this across-the-board ban? It seems wrong to me.

Nevertheless, I understand why the administration wants to break Harvard, the most prestigious US university. We all know that Harvard has an influence on elite American life far beyond its students. It’s like this: some people don’t understand why conservatives like me constantly focus on The New York Times. After all, it’s only one media outlet. The vast majority of Americans never read the Times. The point, however, is that the Times has power far, far beyond its circulation. Simply in the world of journalism, I can tell you from personal experience working for several newspapers around the US for much of my career that newsrooms informally look to the Times to set their own agenda. If the Times decides to pay attention to something, so will the rest of the media. It’s not that the Times tells other media what to report; rather, it is the model for the rest of the mainstream media. There were times when I worked as a newspaper writer when I would cite the Times in discussions with my own editors, saying things like, “The Times is reporting ____.” The subtext was: Therefore, we should pay attention to the same thing in our writing and reporting.

This is just how it goes. Similarly, if Harvard does or does not do something, it matters throughout the entire ecosystem of higher education. What’s more, Harvard and other Ivy League universities educate many of the American elites. The standards they learn at Harvard go with them into their professional lives everywhere else.

This is what J.D. Vance, then a candidate for US Senate, meant in his 2022 NatCon speech saying that universities (not just Harvard) are the “enemy”. Excerpts:

So much of what we want to accomplish, so much of what we want to do in this movement, in this country, I think are fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions—specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

… The universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth.

Yes, of course this speech was provocative. It’s not at all what Americans are accustomed to hearing. I think his claims were perhaps overstated, for rhetorical reasons, but broadly speaking, he was telling the truth.

About Harvard, here is an interview Chris Rufo did with Omar Sultan Haque. Dr. Haque is an acclaimed psychiatrist and philosopher (here’s his personal website) who used to teach at Harvard until he got fed up. Excerpts.

City Journal: Give us a sense of the ideological landscape and your experience at Harvard.

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

Dr. Haque speaks at some length about the way DEI has corrupted Harvard:

…These beliefs infect teaching, research, grading standards, hiring, promotions, campus debate, what is considered an acceptable topic for invited lectures, what projects get funded, and so on.

He also says that Harvard’s commitment to ending illegal DEI-based discrimination is only superficial:

With SFFA, I thought the discrimination would end. But after the ruling, I saw Harvard’s first essay prompt for applicants to the university: “Harvard has long recognized the importance of enrolling a diverse student body. How will the life experiences that shape who you are today enable you to contribute to Harvard?”

So, Harvard has this sneaky, but technically legal, escape hatch from the Supreme Court ruling. Admissions officers can ask about “life experience” (wink, wink), and use that to sort applicants by race and assess them accordingly. They don’t ask about patriotism or spirituality, only diversity. The university’s recalcitrance and denial, its commitment to DEI, and its rationalization of racial discrimination has been truly shocking.

Here’s where it matters the most:

CJ: What is your sense of the political makeup of Harvard’s students, faculty, and administrators?

Haque: Per surveys, Harvard has become much more ideologically homogeneous than conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale. As a result, Harvard is too narrow-minded in scholarship, myopic, intolerant, and anti-intellectual. It favors progressive viewpoints to the detriment of open inquiry, especially on social, moral, and political topics in teaching and research. Courses, exams, research, trainings, grants, and campus life too often become predictable exercises in mouthing univariate explanations and dogmatic platitudes. Harvard’s institutional culture increasingly functions as a combined finishing school and seminary, not for a traditional religion, but for the progressive Left and the Democratic Party. It’s a totally corrupted institution.

After you finish the Dr. Haque interview, if you want to know more about how Harvard systematically discriminates against disfavored minorities, read this additional report by Rufo and Ryan Thorpe.

This goes back to the question I posed in this space the other day: What is the moral and social responsibility American universities have to the broader community?

The working assumption in American life has long been that universities need to work autonomously, because they can be trusted to be good stewards. Whether or not you agree with Vance’s claims, or what the administration is doing to Harvard, I find it hard to justify being indifferent to the way many universities behave in their teaching and in their administrative decisions.

Yesterday I wrote here about what a Muslim migrant to Belgium told me about how the schools in that country begin indoctrinating children early on in gender ideology — and how they police parents to make sure the parents comply. This is a claim that two non-Belgian Christians who live and work in Brussels confirmed to me later. The schools in that country are playing a massively important role in imposing a radical way of thinking among the rising generations, and parents who disagree feel obliged to conform, out of fear of losing their children.

We know that this kind of thing starts in universities, and in schools more broadly. The Pakistani taxi driver told me that his wife argues with their young daughters about this. She tells them, “No, you are girls; you can’t change your gender” — and the children respond, “But teacher says that we can choose our gender.” What the hell right do schools have to do this, to poison the minds of children subject to their authority, and to turn these children against their parents? Does the liberal ideal of leaving universities alone mean that people living within a society have no choice but to submit to this kind of thing, or stand guilty of being fascists?

How is this remotely democratic — you know, characterized by the idea that the people have the right to decide how they will be governed? As a friend put it to me the other day, for so many elites today, if they have to choose between liberalism or democracy, they will choose liberalism every time. As I’ve said here before, when Viktor Orban said in a 2014 speech that he wanted to build an “illiberal democracy,” what he meant was that his goal was a democracy that does not submit to what liberalism has become in this decadent era. He was talking exactly about the kind of ideology that has taken hold in Belgium and throughout western Europe: a way of thinking that says that if you don’t accept without protest mass migration, gender ideology, and the rest, then you are illiberal, and must be suppressed.

In the interview with Dr. Haque, we learn that Harvard — again, the most important US university in terms of setting the agenda for all of US higher education, and in shaping the way American elites think — continues to be dedicated to its radicalism. It’s a radicalism that corrupts the entire purpose of education. As shocking as J.D. Vance’s speech was, and as shocking as the Trump administration’s assault on Harvard and other Ivy League schools is, you see where it comes from.

A society is more than the sum total of individual actors, and individual institutions. There is no way any of us can avoid the effect that leading institutions like Harvard have on the entire society. You might be a plumber in Poughkeepsie, but Harvard affects you and your family, however indirectly, by setting the standards and developing the practices that guide the way national, state, and local institutional elites behave. This, in the same way that the journalists who work for the Daily Bugle in the capital of your state are influenced by The New York Times, even if they rarely read the Times.

What can be done about it? What can be done in a way that also respects the autonomous rights of these institutions? I sometimes quote this cartoon from SPY magazine in the 1990s, commenting on the controversy back then over arts funding:

The principle the cartoonist identifies and mocks is dead center of so many of these debates today — about Harvard, and everything else. Does liberalism mean that the chump on the left of the image has to pull out his wallet without question? If so, then why should he be liberal? Does liberalism require him to be a sucker?

The fact that these questions never occur to liberal elites tells you a lot about how and why we have gotten to this point with the Trump administration and the Ivies.