Is academia a cult?

New Caligulas are being produced on an industrial scale, and it is only a matter of time before they rise to power.

I have always been cautiously fascinated by cults, likely because of the question that bedevils most Jews: How did Hitler do it? Nazism had all the qualities of a cult. So, understanding how cult leaders like Charles Manson and Jim Jones persuaded their followers to commit horrendous atrocities might solve the mystery of how Hitler did the same on a much grander scale.

However, I’ve increasingly realized something rather disturbing: I myself have experienced things that were vaguely cult-like. In particular, growing up in a very progressive suburb’s public schools echoed the cult experience in a highly attenuated form.

There was, for example, the enforcement of belief in a specific ideology by means not unlike those of a cult: Ostracization, forced confession and repentance, mandatory groupthink, demonization of non-believers, and so on.

I encountered something even worse during my brief sojourn in American higher education: A system in which this enforcement was not subtle and slightly ashamed of itself, but open, unapologetic, and cruel.

That sojourn took place 20 years ago. What I witnessed then seems to have now reached its consummation: A dictatorship of the professoriate that rules American academia through totalitarian means. This regime practices a kind of intellectual Manson-ism, with unmistakable and increasingly public echoes of Nazism—in particular, antisemitism. Given that the regime’s institutions are essentially manufacturing centers for America’s political, cultural, and economic leaders, the consequences of this are certain to be dire.

If American academia has become a new Peoples Temple, we must wonder: Is its Jonestown far away? Will the United States have the cyanide fruit juice forced down its throat?

I believe that the answer is very likely yes. If this is so, then the imperative of the moment would seem to be to prevent a civilizational Jonestown. But it cannot be prevented if we do not first accept that academia has indeed become a cult—a cult of a particularly dangerous kind.

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All cults are unique in their own ways, but they do have certain characteristics in common, and many of them are shared by the professoriate regime:

Ideological blockade

The primary means by which a cult is created and maintained is control of its members’ access to outside ideas. This ideological blockade, sometimes crudely referred to as “brainwashing,” is intended to foster an environment in which people not only reject heretical ideas but do not even know they exist.

Ideological blockade is the source of the cult’s atmosphere of fanaticism. Its adherents, ignorant of any competing ideology, become involuntary monomaniacs. Their understanding of the world and reality itself shrinks down to a single organizing principle. Since this principle is dictated by the cult and its leaders, members can be easily weaponized. Driven by invulnerable surety, they will readily commit acts they would never even contemplate in another context.

It has been said that every man who has ever changed the world has been intolerant, fanatical, and violent. This is true of organizations as well as individuals. Monomaniacal intolerance results in a concentration of forces that can bring about immense religious, social, and political changes. But it also gives people license to say and do almost anything on behalf of these organizations—including horrendous crimes.

Examples of such crimes are numerous: The Peoples Temple members at Jonestown murdered their children before committing mass suicide. Scientology has been credibly accused of slavery, systemic financial exploitation, and causing several preventable deaths. The Children of God cult practiced religiously sanctioned child molestation and incest. David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, maintained a harem of wives, several of whom were minors. The Manson Family’s mass murders, including of a pregnant woman, were so gory that they have become an indelible part of America’s collective psyche. The list is a long one.

In the case of the professoriate regime, one finds an almost perfect case study of ideological blockade. I have experienced something like it myself. During my secondary education, I and my fellow students not only opposed conservatism but could not understand how anyone could be conservative. Our puzzlement was inevitable because we had been kept wholly ignorant of conservatism, about which our teachers, by remarkable coincidence, had taught us nothing.

Our lessons on McCarthyism, for example, strongly emphasized the innocence of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage in 1953. It was only years later that I discovered that, even back in my high school years, the consensus among historians was that they were guilty. We were also taught about the horrors of the Red Scare in great detail, but not that Soviet intelligence had successfully infiltrated the US government and other institutions in the 1930s and 1940s. The obvious intention was to ensure that we would consider the Red Scare an act of pure evil rather than a reaction—however problematic—to genuine acts of subversion.

The professoriate regime has perfected the ideological blockade. Its view of the United States is a simple one: It’s colonialism, slavery, genocide, racism, oppression, imperialism, and atrocity all the way down. There is literally nothing else. To enforce this obviously inadequate Manichean theology, the regime either refuses to acknowledge the existence of discrediting evidence or dismisses it as an avaricious lie.

When such methods fail, the regime turns to violence. It suppresses dissenting ideas through “direct action” such as disrupting events and shouting down speakers of whom they disapprove. Punitive speech codes, harassment, emotional blackmail, intellectual terrorism, the threat of ostracization, show trials, and sometimes outright physical assault are widely employed.

These practices are pathological enough, but in recent months the regime has become particularly diseased. Its violence has begun to take on disturbingly racist and antisemitic overtones, with rhetoric that sometimes descends into the openly genocidal. Whatever was holding back the worst of the regime’s violent impulses seems to have given way, and we should not discount the possibility that a mass casualty event like Aum Shinrikyo’s Tokyo gas attack or the Waco standoff will be the ultimate result.

Repairing the world

Almost all cults claim that they are saving the world. Some like Scientology tell their followers that they are engaged in the actual work of redemption. Others like the Peoples Temple claim to be providing a model of what a redeemed world might look like. In both cases, such cults see the existing world as wayward, corrupt, or evil. Outsiders, it is held, are pitiable fools who adhere to false and empty values or are outright agents of satanic forces. The ultimate goal of the cult is to enlighten the fools and overcome the armies of darkness. In this metaphysical struggle, cult members and especially cult leaders are seen as the vanguards of this apocalyptic confrontation.

Interestingly, these redemptive cults are often vague on the precise nature of redemption and what the redeemed world might look like. This is almost certainly deliberate. It allows the cult’s leaders to portray the work of redemption as perpetually incomplete. In turn, they can credibly admonish their followers for their failure to repair the world. This creates a sense of shame and inadequacy that makes followers highly susceptible to further emotional terrorism and blackmail. They will return to the work with renewed vigor, now hoping to not only redeem the world, but also themselves.

An amorphous vision of redemption also shields the cult leadership from accountability. All apocalypticists are threatened by the simple fact that, at least so far, the apocalypse has not come. The messiah continues to tarry. If a leader constantly promises redemption, the absence of redemption will eventually threaten his authority. If he can blame his followers for this, however, the leader can continue to assert his infallibility and saintly nature. It is not his fault that the world remains corrupt and evil. If his followers had only worked and prayed harder—and perhaps tithed more generously—everything would have been fine.

The professoriate regime follows this strategy almost to the letter. First, it preaches to its subjects that the world is eternally broken and corrupt. Everything that exists is a skein of oppression and exploitation. This has been the case, it claims, throughout history, occasionally punctuated by righteous and heroic but thus far failed uprisings on the part of the wretched of the earth. It is the duty of the human being to take the side of the wretched and play his role in the final revolution, which is certain to come and will usher in a repaired, redeemed, and liberated world.

Obviously, this is a theological, not a rational worldview. And it is indistinguishable from the ideology of a redemptive cult.

Like such cults, the professoriate also leaves the nature of the repaired world deliberately vague. For example, it is fond of saying that its goal is “social justice.” Beyond bromides about overcoming racism and other forms of systemic discrimination, however, the professoriate never actually says precisely what “social justice” might be.

There is a reason for this: As a catchphrase, it sounds inherently noble and appealing. But once examined, it dissolves into thin air. It means more or less nothing at all. What is meant by “justice”? How is it defined? What is its nature? Philosophers like Plato wrote entire books wrestling with such questions. The regime never makes the slightest effort to do so.

The professoriate’s minions could say, for example, that justice is a state of absolute economic equality. Critics could then reply that this would be a state of injustice. Some people work harder and achieve more than others, so it is only just for them to be disproportionately rewarded for their disproportionate efforts. There are arguments to be made for both sides, but the point is that the regime does not allow the argument to occur at all. Perhaps it fears that its devil might be found in the details.

The term “social” is equally problematic, because in many ways it is incommensurable with “justice.” Any given society is a web of different individuals and groups with divergent beliefs and interests that are often irreconcilable. For example, religious traditionalists disapprove of same-sex marriage and transgender ideology. Progressives are usually anti-clerical and unequivocally support such things. How are the two parties to be reconciled? Can they be reconciled? Again, the regime not only does not attempt to address these questions, it acts as if the questions do not exist.

As in the case of redemptive cults, the reason is simple: It is far better to elide redemption by using empty slogans than face the possibility that redemption is impossible. The idea that perhaps the best we can do is to ameliorate the worst of the world is useless as a means of admonishing the faithful and administering stern reprimands. Redemptive fanaticism can only be maintained without concrete goals. Rather than risk the apocalypse’s absence, it is preferable for the faithful to strive forever.

Charismatic tyranny

Perhaps the best-known characteristic of a cult is the presence of a charismatic tyrant at its head. The most notorious examples are probably L. Ron Hubbard, Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Jim Jones. Less familiar, but no less tyrannical, have been Hubbard’s successor David Miscavige and the Children of God’s David Berg.

What the tyrants all share is an overwhelming narcissism that demands constant and unquestioning worship. This provides what psychiatrists call “narcissistic supply,” so called because the narcissist’s pathological lack of a sense of self must constantly be “supplied” with affirmation and worship from others.

Often, the entire structure of a cult is constructed to provide narcissistic supply. The leader takes every opportunity to garner approval, acclaim, and worship. He gives speeches at which rapturous applause is required, dispenses favors to ensure universal indebtedness and gratitude, punishes those insufficiently deferential to meet his needs, and often engages in financial and sexual exploitation that gives him confidence in his wealth and virility.

The primary role of the tyrannical cult leader is to define reality. To the followers of the cult, the world is as the leader hands it down. This may be the ultimate narcissistic supply: The belief that one controls the world entire.

This power is often demonstrated through sudden changes in the leader’s ideology and demands. These changes must be instantly assimilated by and adhered to by the cult’s followers. In their minds, if the leader decides the world should change, it changes. This not only feeds the leader’s ego. It also ensures that his followers live in a state of constant anxiety. They never know when reality itself might change and must be constantly ready for it to do so. This provides the leader with what—except for his narcissistic supply—he most values: absolute control.

The professoriate regime differs somewhat from a cult in this regard. It has no single tyrannical leader. While it may be sliding down the slippery slope toward something like Nazism, it still thankfully lacks a Hitler.

However, the regime does have a multitude of gurus. Many of these academic “superstars” preside or presided over something like a sub-cult or a mini-cult. They include intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Ibram X. Kendi, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Andrea Dworkin, Edward Said, and others. These thinkers are viewed by their followers as little less than gods. They and their work control their followers’ beliefs, behavior, lifestyle, spirituality, emotional well-being, what they eat and drink, and ultimately their understanding of reality itself.

The tyranny of the professoriate is decentralized, with individual gurus presiding over small but interconnected fiefdoms. Nonetheless, the gurus are very much like the classic cult leader. Some, like Chomsky and West, are explicitly referred to as “prophets” by their adherents and consulted like oracles whenever their followers want to know what to think about some important issue or event. And like their cult counterparts, these gurus are often abusive toward critics and dissenters, as well as acolytes who prove insufficiently enthusiastic about the guru’s admonitions.

Like the cult leader, the reality these gurus define is ever-shifting. It is never certain which words and terms are acceptable and which are unthinkably blasphemous or offensive. The behavior expected of acolytes is equally fluid, with causes, beliefs, ideologies, and even historical facts suddenly becoming anathema, then mandatory, then anathema again. A disciple of Noam Chomsky, for example, was first required to believe that the Cambodian genocide never happened, then that it might have happened, then that it did happen but the United States was responsible. Entire worldviews can be built on any one of these claims, only to be instantly shattered and reconstructed on the basis of a new catechism. The anxiety provoked by such emotional manipulation is considerable.

The professoriate’s gurus are most akin to the cult leader in that they imply and sometimes explicitly state that they have access to a kind of secret knowledge that reveals the true nature of the world. Disciples believe that if the guru’s admonitions are unquestioningly followed and their work studied with the dedication of a biblical scholar, this secret knowledge will be revealed to them as well.

In the case of both academic gurus and cult leaders, this belief in the revelation of secret knowledge is toxic. It destroys the disciple’s individual identity by discrediting his own understanding of reality. This leads the disciple to jettison his own independent beliefs and opinions, replacing them with those of the guru. If the guru blocks access to his secret knowledge or rejects the disciple, the disciple’s ego is destroyed. This is both an intimidating weapon and an effective means of deterring dissent.

The worshipful attitude that these punitive tactics create is expressed in the ferocity of the disciples’ defense of their gurus. Anyone who has criticized Noam Chomsky or Edward Said has experienced this phenomenon. One is instantly hit with a deluge of denunciation and abuse. The disciples are loyal foot soldiers. This relieves the guru of the need to defend himself by himself, which is no doubt convenient for men with limited time. And to be passionately defended by others without even having to order them to do so must be a formidable narcissistic supply. As always, the only victims are the believers.

Disconnection

One of the most insidious aspects of a cult is the deliberate isolation of its members by cutting them off from their friends and family. In Scientology, this is notoriously referred to as “disconnection,” but it exists in almost all cults to some extent. The practice is clearly designed to ensure that the cult becomes the member’s entire life.

It also cuts off all possible escape routes. Without a support system outside the cult, it becomes supremely difficult for members to leave it. A toxic dependence develops that keeps even disgruntled members in the fold. They lose any confidence in their ability to function in the outside world and thus give up any hope of doing so. The only thing to do is to make the best of remaining loyal. Puzzled outsiders often ask: Why don’t they just leave? The answer is that they believe they have nowhere to go.

This occurs among subjects of the professoriate regime but in an attenuated form. Certainly, the professoriate has constructed a system of dependence, in that it is all but impossible to maintain a middle-class lifestyle without a college degree of some kind. This gives the regime’s subjects every reason to remain in the fold and to conform to the regime’s dictats. Nonetheless, students usually maintain their previous relationships and regularly visit with their families. Complete disconnection is very rarely demanded.

However, the regime does invest considerable resources in alienating its subjects from outside relationships. One example is gender identity. Students who adopt a transgender identity often face puzzlement, discomfort, or outright opposition from their family and friends. Within the regime’s institutions, however, their new identity is usually embraced, validated, and encouraged.

This may or may not be admirable, depending on one’s point of view. However, it does become toxic when the regime begins to demonize the student’s family or friends who are uncomfortable with the student’s new identity. If, as is often the case, these intimates are cast as oppressive bigots who should be defied at all costs, then cutting off previous relationships, even with parents and siblings, comes to be seen not as a devastating loss but a righteous necessity. This does not always happen, but it is hardly unknown.

The same phenomenon occurs regarding other issues, such as race, sexual preference, political loyalties, variant views of patriotism, and even whether or not to eat meat. Such divisions are not unusual in late adolescence, but when the professoriate exploits this opportunity to effect disconnection, it is decidedly cult-like. The regime becomes the student’s world, the only place where he or she feels accepted, nurtured, and understood.

Known as “love-bombing” among cult experts, this form of ultra-affirmation makes an often fragile ego dependent on the regime’s validation. This creates the cultish emotional dependence that makes dissent difficult if not impossible. Thinking for oneself becomes undesirable and even threatening due to the emotional cost involved.

Having created this emotional dependence, the regime can demand almost anything from its subjects. They will obey the dictats in order to remain in the only environment in which they feel they can “be themselves,” whatever the cost to their previous relationships. Perhaps for sympathetic reasons, they have ceded their ego to the regime. The regime is prepared to make use of it.

The Caligula Syndrome

There is a strange psychological phenomenon that is typical of cults, but appears to have occurred in many contexts throughout history: Once they gain something like absolute power, otherwise normal human beings begin to descend into abusive and sometimes murderous behavior. Ultimately, they dissolve into outright psychosis. This does not appear to require any preexisting psychological disorder. It is inherent in the nature of domination.

There are numerous examples of this, but perhaps the most notorious is that of the Roman emperor Caligula. When he first took up the purple, Caligula largely conducted himself with appropriate decorum and even generosity. Over time, however, he became increasingly violent and sadistic. In the end, he went more or less completely insane. Caligula’s atrocities were so infamous that the ancient historian Suetonius, writing almost a century after the mad emperor’s death, described him as “rather a monster than a man.”

Suetonius had good reason. Over the four years of his reign, Caligula murdered family members, former allies, and eventually random victims; had numerous people tortured and branded; committed open incest with his sisters; raped the wives of the nobility; financially dispossessed the aristocracy and ultimately the entire citizenry to pay for his extravagant luxuries; reportedly intended to appoint his horse as consul; and generally acted like a psychopath. As Suetonius put it, he was “the best of slaves and the worst of masters.”

Caligula once told his grandmother, “Remember that all things are lawful for me.” He seems to have genuinely believed this, as his ambitions ultimately became genocidal in scope. He once said, “I wish the Roman people had but one neck” so he could slit all their throats at once. Caligula’s descent was effectively bottomless, but if it had an end, it would have been the total destruction of the world.

Caligula was not alone. Numerous tyrants have followed the same path. The phenomenon is so common that it often seems as if there is a kind of Caligula Syndrome that defines tyranny itself. Only a tyrant can say, “All things all lawful to me.” At that point, the darkest and most malignant human drives, usually kept in check by repression, erupt, with terrible consequences for those under the tyrant’s power.

The Caligula Syndrome has struck numerous cult leaders, such as David Berg, L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige, David Koresh, Jim Jones, and so on. The organizations these “little Caligulas” have constructed are obsidian reflections of their derangement.

The professoriate regime today appears to be in the grip of the Caligula Syndrome. Decades ago, the regime’s conduct was repressive but relatively benign. As it increased its totalitarian grip over academia, however, it became increasingly violent and sadistic. Once, it quietly silenced critics. Now it brutally suppresses dissent. Once, it was quietly intolerant. Now, it enables hate crimes and genocidal incitement. The downward slide is obvious.

This is an ominous development. It indicates that one of society’s most important institutions is not simply corrupt or abusive, but a clear and present danger to life and limb. It literally threatens the physical integrity of its victims. This does not bode well for a society that depends on such institutions to produce its future leaders. It means that new Caligulas are being produced on an industrial scale and it is only a matter of time before they rise to power.

Apocalyptic suicide

At the end of Albert Camus’s play Caligula, the mad emperor allows himself to be assassinated. As the knives of the assassins strike home, he screams, “I’m still alive!” Suicidal madness, Camus believed, is the final stage of tyranny.

Cult violence is often outer-directed, but in essence, it is suicidal. A cult’s apocalyptic worldview appears to create an irresistible urge toward self-immolation.

This immolation is sometimes literal. The Branch Davidians ended US authorities’ 1993 siege of their compound by perishing in a fire almost certainly set by themselves. To them, the inferno was preferable to surrender. In other cases, the method varies, but the results are largely the same. The residents of Jonestown famously “drank the Kool-Aid,” a reference to the cyanide-laced fruit juice they fed to their children and then consumed. Some 900 people were killed. Members of the bizarre Heaven’s Gate UFO cult drugged and suffocated themselves to death in anticipation of being carried off to a higher spiritual plane by Comet Hale-Bopp.

There are two likely sources of this suicidal impulse. First, self-annihilation represents the ultimate expression of the cult’s condemnation of the outside world. The cult deems that world so irredeemably corrupt that its members no longer wish to live in it. Or, they believe they will ascend to a higher and better plane of existence by destroying their mortal bodies.

Second, for the cult leadership, mass suicide is the ultimate expression of control. In a suicidal cult, the leader does not only hold the power of life and death in his hands. He is so powerful that he does not even have to exercise that power himself. His victims will do his dirty work for him. There is no greater affirmation, no more potent narcissistic supply, than other people’s willingness to die for you, especially at their own hand.

For the most part, the professoriate shies away from this kind of openly suicidal violence. Its self-destructive tendencies tend to be expressed in more indirect ways. The 1960s radical leftist group Students for a Democratic Society, for example, was perhaps the first iteration of the professoriate regime, and it proved remarkably adept at annihilating itself.

Initially dedicated to non-violence, several extremist splinter groups eventually broke off from SDS, the most famous being the terrorist Weather Underground organization. SDS shriveled as the terrorists began to slaughter their way through American society, ending with several of its leaders in jail and student radicalism, for a time, in shambles. It took years for the radicals to reconstitute themselves. When they did so, they rejected revolutionary change and adopted a strategy of embedding themselves into academic institutions so as to eventually seize absolute power over them. This strategy proved successful with the consolidation of the professoriate regime.

Notoriously, some of the student terrorists eventually held high academic positions. Perhaps the most famous example is Bill Ayers, who escaped penalty for his atrocities on a technicality and then became a high-ranking academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The regime’s capacity for suicidal violence is still there.

This is not solely due to revolutionary nostalgia. Violence is essential to any totalitarian regime. Whether it is a state, an academic institution, or a cult, no such regime can rule without the threat of force. And totalitarian violence always contains within it the seed of its own destruction.

This has sinister implications. It is by no means inconceivable that the professoriate regime, as it comes under increasing pressure, may return to its terrorist origins and, eventually, immolate itself. But if it does so, then as in the past, many innocent people will die along with it.

This, perhaps, is the most ominous possibility of all, because the professoriate’s cult of apocalyptic suicide is universal. It wants everybody to kill themselves. The regime desires a cosmic Waco, in which everything it despises—America, the West, civilization itself—is burned to the ground. It wants to take all of us down with it.

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In another context, this mad necrophilous vision would be almost comic. In our current moment, however, it is a chilling reality. Because if we accept for the sake of argument that the dictatorship of the professoriate is a cult, then we must also accept that we have all become involuntary members of it.

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is increasingly led by people who are members of the cult, educated by the cult, or morally and psychologically dependent on the cult. Our world is being run by people who should not under any circumstances be running it. The worst of all possible leaders are being installed.

We are not fully under their power, but they nonetheless exercise considerable influence over our lives. When they rise to positions of social and political authority, as they often do, the policies they adopt can have terrible consequences for all of us.

But the scions of the cult are perhaps most dangerous because of their rank incompetence. They came of age in an environment divorced from the outside world. They were educated in institutions in which the only ideas they encountered were those approved by a regime that is at war with reality itself. Through the use of coercive techniques, the acolytes learned how dangerous it is to think heretical thoughts. As a result, when they rise to power, they are out of sync with the world as it is. They cannot begin to conceive of the true horrors of life, let alone how to confront and overcome them.

For any society led by such a ruling class, this is a death sentence. Civilizations can survive many things, but incompetent rulers are not one of them. The horrors of life cannot be fooled. They will do what they do. A society whose leaders are incapable of contending with these horrors will succumb to them. Eventually, there will be one too many Caligulas.

It is clear, then, that there is an existential question before us. There is only one answer to it: Smash the cult.

This is very far from a hopeless cause. The first step is to liberate those who have accepted the cult’s apocalyptic theology. The average student activist, adjunct professor, or hapless administrator has, like any other cult member, forgotten that they can leave whenever they want. They should be reminded of it, though not in a punitive manner. Instead, it should be gently pointed out to them that they are paying a heavy emotional, financial, and sometimes physical price to remain under the control of people who treat them horribly. Why, they should be asked, are you putting up with this?

Empathy with the victims’ predicament is essential. They have, after all, been brutalized by a group of wholly unscrupulous people. The sincerity and sensitivity of the victims should also be acknowledged. Ironically, it is precisely those virtues that made them so vulnerable to the regime’s exploitation. They must be reminded that it is the people who have done this to them who are the corrupt sinners, not them.

While none of this is easy, deep down most of the professoriate’s victims likely do know that the regime is monstrous. Something in them must resent the abuses they have suffered. If they are offered liberation, they will eventually take it.

What happens to them after they do so is just as important. As noted above, one of the reasons people do not leave cults is because nothing is waiting for them outside. The professoriate regime’s victims are no different. Thus, a safety net must be constructed for those who choose to escape.

For example, standardized testing should be mandated for most professional jobs so a college degree is no longer essential to a middle-class lifestyle. Alternative institutions should be developed and existing institutions that dissent from the regime’s ideology should offer safe haven to victims. Some colleges and universities are already doing so by reaching out to Jewish students who have been subjected to systemic antisemitism at schools like Harvard. Ultimately, top-down reform must be enacted to truncate and finally destroy the regime’s power.

Such reform is largely a matter of will. For the most part, almost everything the regime does is at best unethical and at worst illegal. The regime gets away with it because it is allowed to. The key to smashing the regime is simply to enforce the laws and codes of conduct that it systemically violates.

The process could begin with the following measures: 1) Launch an independent investigation into political bias, institutional corruption, and the use of illegal methods by faculty, administrators, and campus organizations. 2) Enforce codes of conduct regarding corruption, bias, or illegal activity. Violations should be punished with dismissal, even for tenured faculty. 3) Take the powers of hiring and dismissal away from faculty and administration and give them to an independent committee. 4) Enforce the right to counsel for any student or faculty member who is subject to disciplinary hearings. 5) Dismiss or expel any student, faculty member, or administrator who is found to be involved in politically motivated harassment or violence. 6) Mandate that political activism of any kind must occur off-campus, not on university grounds.

It will take more than this to dislodge a regime that has had decades to entrench itself. But like all tyrants, the regime is a coward. Even tentative first steps will terrify its leaders and deter some of their worst atrocities.

As for those leaders, they are likely beyond redemption. The only recourse is to simply expose them and destroy their pretense of moral authority. All cult leaders, and the professoriate is no exception, present themselves and believe themselves to be members of a caste of saints—the finest and most moral people who have ever existed in the history of the universe. This is laughable, but it works because the regime enjoys the halo effect of prestigious institutions and credentials. This halo ought to be extinguished. It should be publicly demonstrated that the professoriate’s leaders are human beings like everyone else—and not particularly good human beings at that.

Something like this occurred when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn were recently hauled before Congress. When they refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their schools’ codes of conduct, most observers were appalled by their blatant nihilism. UPenn’s president was forced to resign and Harvard’s president followed her after being exposed as a plagiarist.

This reckoning was long overdue. There should be one, two, a million such reckonings. They come when the professoriate is made to answer to institutions that are more powerful than it is. In American society, this means institutions like Congress that enjoy democratic legitimacy. That is, unlike the professoriate, people have actually elected them.

In such forums, the professoriate’s leaders are forced to face their essential weakness: They have no democratic mandate, enjoy an unjust exemption from laws that all other citizens must follow, and adhere to an ideology so alien to the majority of their fellow Americans as to be almost farcical.

When they are locked away behind their ivy walls like Prince Prospero at his Masque, the rulers of the professoriate can afford to ignore all of this. Outside them, they are forced to acknowledge that they are part of a larger society to which they must answer, if only because that society directly or indirectly helps pay their salaries. They are introduced to the terrible reality of who is paying the bills and the rights inherent therein. This alone is enough to stop the clocks.

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No cult is easy to overcome. To defend themselves, they can deploy fanatical armies of acolytes and the enormous amounts of money they have fleeced from their members. They are extremely adept at exploiting the laws and liberties of their host societies to their advantage, limiting the authorities’ capacity to hold them accountable. Scientology, for example, went so far as to “go to war” with the IRS and win.

The professoriate has already begun to mount its defense. It is employing and will continue to employ a tactic common to the leaders of cults, terror organizations, and other high-control organizations—the weeping tyrant. The weeping tyrant blames everyone but himself, claims to be a persecuted martyr, howls that he is a prophet without honor who is being punished for daring to dissent from social consensus, and collapses into tears at the very thought of his unfathomable pain and suffering.

Liberal societies are particularly vulnerable to this kind of emotional terrorism. Such societies take pride in the values of freedom, diversity, and tolerance. The weeping tyrant claims that he is entitled to the freedom to exploit and abuse others; that his poisonous ideology is just another in the rich mosaic of diverse beliefs; and that society has an obligation to tolerate his despicable and often illegal behavior. Liberal society often finds it difficult to withstand such blackmail.

There is not a liberal society in the world that has not faced this dilemma. Some have chosen to look away, but in doing so they have abandoned their citizens and themselves to the weeping tyrants. Often, the consequences were terrible.

As a liberal society, the United States now faces a formidable challenge: The weeping tyrant is not just in its midst, he is running some of its most essential institutions. Smashing the tyrant’s cult and holding him accountable will take years if not decades. It will require compromises that liberalism finds deeply uncomfortable and often prefers to avoid.

But in this case, it cannot afford to avoid them, because liberalism itself is under threat. If liberalism means freedom, diversity, and tolerance, then liberal society must face the fact that, if the professoriate wants to destroy anything, it wants to destroy freedom, diversity, and tolerance. The regime may profess fealty to these basic liberal principles, but this is mere hypocrisy. In fact, it sees them as an existential threat to its power. It has already destroyed them in the institutions it controls. If given the chance, it will destroy them entirely. If American liberalism fails to stop the regime, then we may be forced to admit that perhaps the regime deserved to win. It did, at least, have the courage of its convictions.

It need not come to this. Nothing is invulnerable, and cults are no exception. Indeed, they are often deceptively weak. When faced with tyranny, even a weeping tyranny, most people hate it with every fiber of their being, even if they are too intimidated to admit it even to themselves. This is especially true in a country like the United States, which at its best values liberty above all things.

There is no reason to think that when the professoriate is, at long last, held accountable, its fate will be different from that of any other tyranny. The Bastille will be stormed. The weeping tyrant will drown in his own tears. The tyranny’s victims will smash it. We must provide them with the sledgehammers.