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Trumpism and the academic left

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Michelle Goldberg (gift link) discusses the already overwhelming evidence that — prepare to clutch your fainting couches — American university administrators are collapsing like a house of cards in a tropical storm in the face of the Trump administration’s forthcoming attack on criticism of it emanating from the institutions they mulct lead. (I don’t know about at your place, but at mine the upper administrators love to talk about leading with leadership, to the point where they reflexively refer to themselves now as “campus leaders.”).

The situation at — where else? — Harvard is symptomatic:

Creeley, at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, predicts that many state legislatures, local officials and university trustees are going to enlist, either out of enthusiasm or expediency, in the crusade to bring the academic left to heel. “I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a pre-emptive action on those fronts,” he said.

Just look at what’s happened at Harvard this week. On Tuesday it announced that, as part of a lawsuit settlement, it would adopt a definition of antisemitism that includes some harsh criticisms of Israel and Zionism, such as holding Israel to a “double standard” and likening its policies to Nazism. Though Harvard claims that it still adheres to the First Amendment, under this definition a student or professor who accuses Israel of genocidal action in Gaza — as the Israeli American Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov has — might be subject to disciplinary action.

In a further act of capitulation, the Harvard Medical School canceled a lecture and panel on wartime health care that was to feature patients from Gaza because of objections that it was one-sided, The Harvard Crimson reported.

“I think that Harvard likely read the room, so to speak, from a political perspective, and decided to cut their losses,” said Creeley. In this period of capitulation, it probably won’t be the last school to fall in line.

I realize some people on the left consider FIRE an essentially right wing group, but my sense is that they’ve been pretty good about this stuff on the whole, and in any event they’re certainly not going to get the opportunity to be “balanced” about it in the second Trump administration.

Scott made an absolutely crucial point the other day, which is that attacks on DEI, that in theory might be relatively narrow criticisms of something that in fact deserves plenty of criticism, since it very often functions as a griftathon for various consultant types who are in bed with the corporate PR machine that employs them, are really just advance positions in an all-out war on the contemporary civil rights movement. The people attacking DEI don’t want to just get rid of dumbass consciousness-raising PowerPoint presentations: they want to, very literally, repeal the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Relatedly, the demand that any serious deviation from right wing orthodoxy on Israel/Palestine now be treated as “anti-Semitism” (there’s plenty of real anti-Semitism on the anti-Zionist left, but if calling the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza genocide counts as anti-Semitism then the latter term has lost all real meaning) is another advance position in the war against left wing ideologies on college campuses, which are treated by grifting thugs like Christopher Please Don’t Deport My Mail-Order Bride Rufo as “anti-Americanism” tout court.

And if you’re expecting your tenure rights to protect you via the profiles in courage that are your campus “leaders,” I have a whole lot of LoomCoin to sell you.

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