How was I to know Bari was with the MAGA too?

I am kind of in awe of this apparently entirely unironic piece about someone who took her talents to Bari Weiss U and was shocked to discover that its mission was generic right-wing hackery, not “free speech”:

And so I felt blindsided when, on 3 March, UATX ended its relationship with the Mill Institute.

That morning, I got onto what I thought was a casual call with a senior colleague, someone who spoke with me regularly in order to keep the university updated on Mill Institute activities. Once we were past the opening pleasantries, it immediately became clear that something was wrong.

My colleague told me that we needed to talk about a social-media post of mine that “had become a big problem.” I rarely post anything online, so I was confused about what he meant. Apparently, it had something to do with DEI, and had angered a major funder. “We’re trying to slow things down,” my colleague told me. I got the impression that he was upset about the message he was delivering.  

I dimly recalled that I’d written something about DEI on LinkedIn. But I was still confused, because it had seemed like such an innocuous post (to me, anyway); and I couldn’t imagine how it would upset anyone in the UATX community, let alone lead to this ominous phone call.

In that post (reproduced below), I’d thanked writer and Yale professor Michael J. Strambler for mentioning the Mill Institute in a magazine article titled The False Binary of the DEI Debate. The piece, which struck a liberal tone, walked readers through the pros and cons of DEI programs, concluding that regardless of one’s position on DEI, none of us should lose respect for those who hold different opinions.

[…]

The tone of these communications baffled me. They betrayed a lack of patience for the more nuanced conversations about the historical challenges that DEI initiatives were originally designed to address. Still, it never crossed my mind that, at UATX of all places, I’d feel pressured to conform to any kind of institutional dogma…

Of all places!

…or that a more moderate perspective about DEI could be considered what Orwell called thoughtcrime. On the contrary, I assumed that opinions such as mine proved the university’s rule: I could freely express a critique—not just of the university, but of the federal government—believing that my (admittedly rather unoriginal) perspective added to the intellectual diversity of the university.

But what happened next suggests I was wrong.

By 5pm on 3 March—the same day I first heard that my LinkedIn post was a “problem”—my team of five and I were all on our way to being pushed out of UATX. I got the news from a junior dean whom I barely knew. He told me bluntly, “the trustees and the management have decided that we’d like to wind up Mill, and I’m calling to let you know that we’re letting you go.”

Oh, boy. This is the academic equivalent of the financial columnist who was convinced that the federal government would need you to hand fifty grand in cash to a stranger. (Wait until she finds out that Bari was never actually fired from the Times!)