Of all the good opinion pieces on the answers by the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to the question, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?” (and analogous questions for the other two schools), the very best essay is “Au Revoir, Harvard” by C. Bradley Thompson.
The essay contains two parts. The first is a moving memoir of Prof. Thompson at Harvard for two years, circa 1990, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation. The second part is an analysis of recent events, leading to the conclusion that “Harvard is now the place of the living dead.”
As a graduate of MIT, I submit this verdict:
I have only two points to add. First, American universities were already corrupt when I was a student in the 1970s. Secondly, that corruption extends today to universities even in conservative locales.
Scene: The small office of a professor on the campus of Cornell University, in the fall of 1972. The professor, 30s, sits behind his desk. Seated across from him is a freshman, 17 (yours truly), a student in the professor’s course on French literature. Both men speak softly and simply.
Me: You have been saying all semester things like, “we cannot know anything,” and “capitalism causes prisons” … . Do really believe those things?
Professor: That’s my bag, man. That’s what feeds my kid. That’s what people want to hear, so that’s what I tell them. [Although the other words of this dialogue may not be verbatim, I do remember these words by the professor verbatim.]
Me: But do you believe it?
Professor: You say it long enough, you get to believe it. I believe it.
After my freshman year, I left Cornell and transferred to MIT, where the education in science, mathematics, and engineering was stellar. But the institution was monolithically Leftist culturally and politically. One professor even admitted publicly to having given a grade of Incomplete to an A paper because the student had expressed disagreement with the professor in a preamble to the paper. (The administration at least overturned this grade.)
In 1975 or 1976, when I was a junior or senior at MIT, a renowned professor took me with him to the state capitol to hear about a new computer system that legislators wanted his company to build for them. Before briefly meeting the governor—Michael Dukakis, who would be the Democratic nominee for president in 1988—we sat down with a handful of legislators. They wanted a computer system that would contain an inventory of current political appointees so that, whenever a vacancy arose, the computer would print out the needed race, sex, and (if I remember correctly) ethnicity of the new appointee. Although this request came from the government, not MIT, my professor expressed no concern and dutifully fulfilled the government’s request.
In 1972, Ayn Rand wrote,
Controversy is the hallmark of our age; there is no subject, particularly in the humanities, which is not regarded in fundamentally different ways by many different schools of thought. (This is not to say that all of them are valid, but merely to observe that they exist.) Yet most university departments, particularly in the leading universities, offer a single viewpoint (camouflaged by minor variations) and maintain their monopoly by the simple means of evasion: by ignoring anything that does not fit their viewpoint, by pretending that no others exist, and by reducing dissent to trivia, thus leaving fundamentals unchallenged. …
As a result of today’s educational policies, the majority of college graduates are virtually illiterate, in the literal and the wider sense of the word. They do not necessarily accept their teachers’ views, but they do not know that any other views exist or have ever existed. There are philosophy majors who graduate without having taken a single course on Aristotle (except as part of general surveys). There are economics majors who have no idea of what capitalism is or was, theoretically or historically, and not the faintest notion of the mechanism of a free market. There are literature majors who have never heard of Victor Hugo (but have acquired a full vocabulary of four-letter words).
So long as there were variations among university departments in the choice of their dominant prejudices—and so long as there were some distinguished survivors of an earlier, freer view of education—non-conformists had some chance. But with the spread of “unpolarized” unity and Federal “encouragement”—the spread of the same gray, heavy-footed, deaf-dumb-and-blind, hysterically stagnant dogma—that chance is vanishing. It is becoming increasingly harder for an independent mind to get or keep a job on a university faculty—or for the independent mind of a student to remain independent. …
It is a paradox of our age of skepticism—with its proliferation of bromides to the effect that “Man can be certain of nothing, …. Reality is unknowable,” “There are no hard facts or hard knowledge—everything is soft [except the point of a gun]”—that the overbearing dogmatism of university departments would make a medieval enforcer of religious dogma squirm with envy. It is a paradox but not a contradiction, because it is the necessary consequence—and purpose—of skepticism, which disarms its opponents by declaring: “How can you be sure?” and thus enables its leaders to propound absolutes at whim.
It is this kind of intellectual atmosphere and these types of cynical, bigoted, envy-ridden, decadent cliques that the Federal Government now proposes to support with public funds, and with the piously reiterated assurance that the profiteering institutions will retain their full freedom to teach whatever they please, that there will be “no strings attached.”
The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. 1, No. 18 June 5, 1972, “‘Fairness Doctrine’ For Education.”
Now to today. Southern Utah University is in a county in which Biden got less than 20% of the vote. My subscribers may recall this video I made documenting this university’s all-out espousal of Critical Race Theory.
Southern Utah University also is, in my judgment, oppressing a professor who refuses to lie with pronouns.
See also this woke document that was circulated to faculty and staff in 2021.
Harvard’s crimson “H” may be the new scarlet letter, but the entire academy is the larger scandal.