From left to right: Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn president Liz Magill, professor Pamela Nadell of American U, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth testify before Congress on December 5. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? In the immortal words of Hitch (peace be upon him), as you listen to these people, “You see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they have dined.”
The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.
Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.
In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.
This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.
The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”
Freedom of speech in the Ivy League extends exclusively to the voices of the oppressed; they are also permitted to disrupt classes, deplatform or shout down controversial speakers, hurl obscenities, force members of oppressor groups — i.e. Jewish students and teachers in the latest case — into locked libraries and offices during protests, and blocked from classrooms. Jewish students have even been assaulted — at Harvard, at Columbia, at UMass Amherst, at Tulane. Assaults by woke students used to be rare, such as the 2017 mob at Middlebury that put Allison Stanger in a neck brace — but since 10/7, they’re intensifying.
If a member of an oppressor class says something edgy, it is a form of violence. If a member of an oppressed class commits actual violence, it’s speech. That’s why many Harvard students instantly supported a fundamentalist terror cult that killed, tortured, systematically raped and kidnapped Jews just for being Jews in their own country. Because they have been taught it’s the only moral position to take. They’ve diligently read their Fanon, and must be puzzled over what the problem is. Palestinians are victims of a “colonial,” “white,” “settler-state” and any violence they commit is thereby justified.
It would be wrong to see this as a function merely of old-school anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism is simply a subsidiary of the entire rubric of “anti-Whiteness” that is taught as the supreme principle of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” DEI does not mean and has never meant diversity, equity and inclusion for all. It means active support for the “oppressed” against the “oppressors.” It means challenging “whiteness,” as represented by individual white people. Let’s go to the Smithsonian to read a definition of the term:
Since white people in America hold most of the political, institutional, and economic power, they receive advantages that nonwhite groups do not. These benefits and advantages, of varying degrees, are known as white privilege. For many white people, this can be hard to hear, understand, or accept — but it is true.
Now replace the word “white” with “Jewish,” and it all fits neatly into place, doesn’t it? Jews “hold most of the power.” Jews “receive advantages” others do not. Jews have “Jewish privilege.” Within “white supremacy” there is, definitionally, “Jewish supremacy,” because Jews in America (and even Israel!) are defined by their “whiteness.” They may not want to hear it, but they are the oppressor class now. If “white supremacy” is changed to “Jewish supremacy,” you even get the title of David Duke’s 2003 book, Jewish Supremacism.
The tropes, the structure, and the psyche of anti-Semitism have simply been copied and pasted onto anti-whiteness. There’s the same envy and resentment of an all-controlling racial group that is deemed not inferior (as in anti-black racism), but superior — by underhanded, shifty, rigged means. That’s why the word “merit” is now derided in the Ivy League: it doesn’t exist in neo-Marxist eyes. Only power exists.
As whites, Jews helped construct a Constitution long ago that pretends to guarantee equal rights, but once you “awaken” to the racist conspiracy that will always define America, you can see it was actually designed to oppress non-white goyim forever. This is what the New York Times believes, as we discovered in 2019, in an entire issue of their magazine, which they then distributed to high-school kids, so they could learn which groups to hate in America, and which groups to love.
This is why when non-whites commit hate crimes, they are instantly redefined as enacting “white supremacy.” It is why it is not “triggering” to call a conservative student a “white supremacist” or a white gay man of my generation a “queer” — we deserve it as oppressors — but it is a form of violence if you misgender a trans person or ask where someone is from. Even “Silence Is Violence,” as the BLM protestors insisted. In fact, some say, “silence is the worst form of violence.” Could Chairman Mao have put it better?
It is why you can set up a segregated dorm at MIT, call it “Chocolate City,” and be praised by the president, Sally Kornbluth, as being about “positive selection.” It’s why due process exists in sexual abuse cases for women on campus, but is denied to all men. It’s why these universities have racially segregated graduations for everyone — except “whites.” And because this grotesque racist engineering requires admitting vast numbers of students who cannot meet the academic standards of the evil past, 80 percent of Harvard and Yale students now get an A or A- as a grade. This is not “equity,” however they re- and re-define it. It is the hard bigotry of no expectations.
The absolute worst thing you can do right now is what the presidents of these woke institutions now say they intend to do: switch Jews out of the “oppressor class” and into the “oppressed one,” and re-apply all the DEI discrimination on their behalf.
That doesn’t solve the problem; it compounds it. Pro-Palestinian, and anti-Israel speech should no more be censored than any other — and the suppression is real. There should be one standard and it should be free speech. But there can be no free speech and no guarantee of it until the toxins of critical theory, and the architecture of its enforcement, DEI, are excised from the university altogether. Asking the current leadership to correct these lost institutions is an exercise in futility.
End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academic merit alone. Save standardized testing — which in fact helps minorities, and it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids,” as Steven Pinker said this week. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut or shout down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students, and see them as free human beings with open minds. Treat them equally as individuals seeking to learn, if you can remember such a concept.
David Wolpe is a distinguished and learned rabbi who resigned this week from Harvard’s advisory committee on anti-Semitism. In a tweet, he wrote:
Harvard is still a repository of extraordinary minds and important research. However, the system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil.
Yes, it is evil. This is no time to be mealy-mouthed about it. And we must root it out. Before its poison makes our liberal democracy almost impossible to reconstruct.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a discussion with David Leonhardt on the dwindling American Dream; a dissent over my latest piece on populism; a handful of notable quotes from the week in news; 19 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break with the Conan O’Brien and Triumph; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From an old-school subscriber:
Attached is a picture of an old Dish shirt I purchased way back in the blog days.
Like many of my shirts, my wife adopted it immediately. She loves it so much that she continues to wear it well past its expiration date. As you may be able to see in the photo, it has pin-prick holes from cat claws, is threadbare, and has various unremovable stains. The collar is ragged. But she loves it so.
New On The Dishcast: David Leonhardt
David is a journalist and columnist. He writes the NYT’s flagship daily newsletter, “The Morning,” contributes to the paper’s Sunday Review section, and co-hosts “The Argument,” a weekly opinion podcast with Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg. In 2011 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary on economic questions. His new book is Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream.
Listen to the episode here. (FYI it was taped on November 8th.) There you can find two clips of our convo — on African-American lefties against mass immigration, and black voters moving to the GOP over crime. That link also takes you to commentary on Cat Bohannon’s episode on women driving evolution, along with other convos.
Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Carole Hooven returns to talk about her tribulations at Harvard, McKay Coppins discusses Romney and the GOP, my old friend Joe Klein and I do a 2023 review, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Very few readers sent criticism over last week’s column on populism. Here’s one from “an older Millennial born in the early ‘80s”:
I think your column forecasting doom and gloom for Biden ignores one major issue: abortion rights. I don’t know how often you socialize with people born in 1980 or later, but the sense of anger and frustration amongst younger Americans over the loss of abortion rights across a huge swath of the country is palpable. Don’t forget that Millennials now outnumber Boomers due to death, and most of Gen Z has reached voting age.
Abortion rights are a vital issue for Democratic turnout. I agree entirely — it is a point I’ve made about Roe for decades. And I noted I got 2022 wrong because I underestimated it. Trump, however, gets this too. Which is why he remains a threat, even on this issue.
As always, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. Follow more Dish discussion on the Notes site here (or the “Notes” tab in the Substack app).
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers topics such as the move to silence pro-Palestine voices, the latest GOP debate, and what the hell is happening in Guyana. Below are a few examples:
Kahlenberg is disappointed the new Rustin biopic ended before his fight against racial preferences.
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? (A few details have been altered or hidden to make the view more challenging.) Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. A sleuth from last week wrote:
Greetings from a very wet Vashon Island. It struck me in looking at this contest, “What a crazy fucking world we’ve made.” Sitting here, in the PNW, on my phone, I can find and then explore a location, including 360-degree photos showing almost the same view, and photos of the inside of the building. Heck, I could basically do a walking tour of the building all for free; all from thousands of miles away; all while sitting on my ass holding a small metal-and-glass device. Truly incredible.
Try explaining that to your great-grandparents, then get ready to explain to them why you’d want to use so much of your free time trying to determine the location of a random picture. To be fair, I can’t adequately explain it to my own, living family, let alone ancestors I never met.
