The modern conservative movement in America began with an attack on the Ivy League.
God and Man at Yale — William F Buckley Jr’s first broadside against the stifling left-liberal establishment of the 1940s and 50s — kickstarted an intra-elite revolt in 1951. Calling out liberal hypocrisy — open-minded about everything but conservatism — began its long and storied career in American culture and politics:
Sonorous pretensions notwithstanding, Yale, (and my guess is most other colleges and universities) does subscribe to an orthodoxy: there are limits within which its faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be tolerated.
Nothing much has changed, has it? (For more reflections on that, check out the Dishcast’s riveting interview with Buckley’s new biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, this week.) Except that after several generations of conservative complaint about the Ivy League, and mistreatment within it, the last decade saw an ever-more extreme and dogmatic leftism take over, with liberalism itself now deemed just an emanation of “white supremacy.”
I witnessed my own generation’s experience with this when Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind came out in 1987. Siloed at Harvard as some right-wing weirdo who liked Aristotle and went to Mass, I found in Bloom’s text a sweet relief — a brilliant, erudite evisceration of the postmodern, exhausted nihilism of the liberal intelligentsia. Yes, in that familiar phrase, the leftists’ minds were so open their brains fell out:
The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
I loathed this smug presentism wrapped in moral superiority. But it’s still true that I also thrived at Harvard, as Buckley did at Yale, even as I was morally and intellectually condescended to by most of my peers. It’s an oppressive place for a non-leftist, but for me, as with Buckley, that was more a challenge than a fate.
I responded with a determination to fight back intellectually, to expose the flaws of liberal intolerance and smugness, to pierce its reflexive atheism, and to focus on detonating even worse currents in critical theory that were then emerging from the neo-Marxist swamp. You can see Ross Douthat’s emergence as a public intellectual in a very similar context; his first book was Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. And Buckley, of course, insisted in a speech at a Yale Daily News function when he was at the college:
Believe it or not, I do not intend to prescribe here for faculty members the precise limits to tolerable opinion consistent with the basic aims of proper education.
The conservative tradition, properly understood, defends the independence of universities from political control. My own Oxford College, Magdalen, for example, has an annual event which I was able to attend each October as a special scholar called a “demy”. It’s called the Restoration Dinner and commemorates the college’s refusal in 1687 to go along with King James II’s attempt to impose on the fellows a president they had not selected themselves. The culture war back then was a sectarian one, and James was trying to rein in Magdalen’s protestantism. He expelled 42 scholars and demies for resisting him, appointed a Catholic president; but after public outrage at his interference, he was forced to relent in October 1688, weeks before he was deposed from the throne entirely.
That was how I found myself three centuries later: a young, devout Catholic, passing a huge loving cup to and from my fellows and reciting “Ius Suum Cuique” (“To Everyone, Their Rights”) celebrating Protestant resistance. And I was happy to. The independence of the university as a sanctuary for liberal learning is a foundational basis for a free society — as modern conservatives, Oakeshottabove all, argued. No government should be able to intervene. That was the line between a free and an unfree society.
Harvard in recent years has betrayed that liberal calling, of course, effectively sacrificing the idea of a liberal university in favor of an illiberal machine for systematic discrimination and neo-Marxist indoctrination. This is not true of all of it, of course. For a defense of the freedoms Harvard still maintains, and the excellence of a lot of the scholarship it still produces, check out Steven Pinker’s op-ed today. But it proudly selects students and faculty by race, sex, and ideology — and seems to have largely ignored the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. And when a public university breaks civil rights laws, suppresses free debate, allows intimidation of Jews, and chills dissent within, it should be held to account.
So let me say upfront, I have no problem with suing Harvard for its discrimination, and penalizing it for allowing the physical and psychological intimidation of Jewish students — or indeed of any students not wedded to the maxims of critical theory. I don’t have a problem raising taxes on university endowments either. They have a lot of money and charge exorbitant fees. But there is a clear line between demanding a university abide by the law and pay its taxes and dictating what it can teach, how it conducts its own affairs, and whom it can hire. Harvard is as right to resist King Donald I in this respect as Magdalen was in defying King James II.
And this administration’s assault is quite obviously not an attempt to reform higher education because nothing this administration does is about serving a common good — a concept literally meaningless for Trump. He cannot conceive of a society where everyone wins by the open expression of competing ideas. He is, rather, of the view that every human relationship and society is zero-sum — that there are only winners and losers, and the entire point of power is to win, not lose, and to target and punish your enemies. Harvard is the enemy. Ergo Harvard Delenda Est.
Stripping Harvard of hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research in order to punish queer theorists in the English Department is capricious, idiotic, and malevolent. But the blunt withdrawal of certification so that Harvard has to lose a quarter of its student body immediately, along with an even greater percentage of its tuition income, is clearly an attempt to destroy the place. It’s spite and vengeance.
This is not about ending wokeness; it’s about extending wokeness to correct what DHS calls, in classic woke terminology, “an unsafe campus environment.” It’s not about expanding free speech; it’s about more surveillance, restriction, and sanctions on free expression, as the case of Rümeysa Öztürk proves. The DHS secretary — who graduated from South Dakota State University at the age of 41, and who has no idea what habeas corpus is — wants Harvard to provide “any and all video footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years.”
Not violence, not criminal action, just “protest activity.” What is this, the Soviet Union? We already know Rubio is surveilling and targeting foreign students purely for their speech in a blatant assault on the First Amendment. And this assault on Harvard is merely an extension of the administration’s attempt to control and censor political debate.
In all this destruction, the damage this administration is doing to this country’s investment in scientific and medical research is profound, irreparable, and moronic. Targeting smart foreign students the US should be eager to attract is another act of egregious self-harm. Forcing a quarter of a university’s students to leave the country almost at once is malice, not policy. The persecution of foreign students — I was once one of them — makes no sense, except as cheap jingoism, xenophobia, and the crudest nativism.
I’ve lamented Harvard’s steep decline, illiberalism, intolerance, and racism. I find its leftist faculty terrifyingly illiberal and its liberal faculty, for the most part, spineless cowards. (There are effectively almost no conservative faculty left.) But when an administration is pursuing policies not for reform but destruction, when it is focused on targeting every institution in society that does not echo its own ideology, when it is motivated by revenge and malice and not the common good, and when it is run by know-nothing demagogues like Noem, I will rally behind Harvard as doggedly as Magdalen’s 17th century dons fought back against King James. This is the West.
Ius suum cuique!
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click hereto read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: an epic chat with Sam Tanenhaus on Bill Buckley and the Old Right; listener commentary on previous pods; a few corrections from readers; 14 notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award for a disillusioned gay; 20 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of the great Walton Goggins; a stirring window view from the German Alps; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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I’ve been following you (quietly) since the lead-up to the Iraq War. I’m a paid subscriber, and I really look forward to your weekly emails. You and your readers push me to consider other points of view. My kids joke that I talk about you like I know you. You and Chris do amazing work. Thank you!
New On The Dishcast: Sam Tanenhaus
Sam is a biographer, historian, and journalist. He used to be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a features writer for Vanity Fair, and a writer for Prospect magazine. He’s currently a contributing writer for the Washington Post. His many books include The Death of Conservatism and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, and his new one is Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.
It’s a huge tome — almost 1,000 pages! — but fascinating, with new and startling revelations, and a breeze to read. It’s crack to me, of course, and we went long — a Rogan-worthy three hours. But I loved it, and hope you do too. It’s not just about Buckley; it’s about now, and how Buckleyism is more similar to Trumpism than I initially understood. It’s about American conservatism as a whole.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find three clips of our convo — on Buckley as a humane segregationist, his isolationism even after Pearl Harbor, and getting gay-baited by Gore Vidal. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with David Graham on Project 2025. We also hear from readers on Pope Leo and a smattering of other subjects.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the Biden cover-up, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Robert Merry on President McKinley, Tara Zahra on the last revolt against globalization after WWI, N.S. Lyons on the Trump era, Arthur C. Brooks on the science of happiness, and Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Pope Leo is not from the “South Side of Chicago”; he’s from a south suburb called Dolton. My cousin and her family lived about six blocks away from him and would never say they lived in any part of Chicago. Folks who live in the suburbs of Chicago are very proud of their towns. Just FYI.
Another nit:
Trump drinks Diet Coke, not Coke Zero — which is a million times better than Diet Coke. Just something else that dipshit gets wrong.
My bad. I love Coke Zero. Please keep the corrections, and dissents, coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish discussion in my Notes feed.
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 subjects such as the GOP’s budget bill, the abundance agenda, and the “dead internet theory.” A few examples:
Helen Pluckrose fisks David Klion for claiming that the Harper’s letter led to Trump’s assault on free speech. She also responds to dissent over the “woke right.”
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions 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? 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 at 11.59 pm (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 sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Our super-sleuth in Japan finds a vintage version of the key clue for this week’s contest:
This picture is from the plumbing company’s Instagram and shows the founders with one of their first vans:
From our super-sleuth in West Orange:
I can contribute something notable about our View’s general vicinity. Last year the field of criminology lost one of its leading lights, Prof. Richard Rosenfeld. He was universally beloved in the field for his kindness, brilliance, and evenhandedness. Among other things, he was an early critic of the “Ferguson Effect” (the theory that protests against police cause crime to spike), before coming around to a very nuanced perspective. Something like the Ferguson Effect was transpiring, he believed, but the mechanism was not protests. It was a breakdown in police-community trust, of which protests were a symptom but not a cause.
I didn’t know him personally, but I was an avid reader of his work and admired his ability to think beyond the dogmas on this and other issues. And he was based at the university just around the corner. Your readers may find his work interesting!
