Despite all the horrors of the past few months, there have been some rays of light, and one of them was the glorious grilling that three heads of systemically antisemitic universities in the US got in Congress on Tuesday.
In particular, there was a marvelous moment in which Harvard president Claudine Gay was at last forced to admit to what we all know: Harvard University is decadent and depraved.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked Gay, Penn president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth if calling for genocide against Jews would violate the codes of conduct at their schools. All three said it would depend on whether the speech constituted harassment or bullying.
“So the answer is ‘yes’—that calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct, correct?” Stefanik asked. (Stefanik, who has a 2006 bachelor’s from Harvard, has called for Gay to resign. In 2021, the Harvard Institute of Politics removed Stefanik from its senior advisory committee.)
“It depends on the context,” Gay said.
“It does not depend on the context. The answer is ‘yes,’ and this is why you should resign,” Stefanik said. “These are unacceptable answers across the board.”
I don’t think it’s necessary to explain why Gay’s response was monstrous. Nor need I elucidate why it only underlines the absolute necessity of smashing the dictatorship of the professoriate that rules over American higher education before it has a chance to brutalize and kill any more Jews.
But it is necessary to point out one thing that has not been mentioned. Gay’s response was decadent and depraved, but one does not get the sense that she is. She appeared to be desperate, wriggling, small, trying to find some way to get out of that room alive. She was, in other words, terrified.
What she is terrified of ought to be obvious: the regime. That is, Gay knows that if she says one word that might indict the professoriate for which she is nothing but a figurehead, she is finished. She will lose her job, her reputation, her social standing, her wealth—in effect, everything she has worked all her life to achieve. She knows that if she steps out of line, the regime will destroy her.
One can’t help having a small amount of sympathy for her, because that’s what it is to live under a totalitarian system. One exists in perpetual fear of an omnipotent force that appears all the more menacing because it has no recognizable face. It takes the amorphous form of the mob, the demonstration, the protest, the petition, the social media campaign, the collective denunciation, the struggle session, compulsory reeducation, abandonment by colleagues and friends, media defamation, closed-door hearings with no legal recourse provided, and ultimately the public spectacle of either coerced repentance or execution.
The professoriate is totalitarianism of a different kind, one that the likes of Koestler and Orwell likely thought impossible. It is a kind of “benign” totalitarianism that does not murder, because it knows it does not have to. It can murder everything that makes men free, and that is enough.
Gay, of course, is not innocent. She helped build this monstrous edifice, if only by refusing to resist it. The regime has never made any secret of its methods and intentions. In fact, it has publicly announced them at every possible opportunity. In response, Gay and others like her did nothing. As a result, her students—especially her Jewish students—live in a fear far more terrible than she does. Our sympathies should be with them.
I do not think that any of the above is a reason to despair. First, the dictatorship of the professoriate is a paper tiger at best. It represents no substantial constituency, has no democratic mandate, exists only by corrupt and sometimes outright illegal means, and if authorities find the will do so, can be easily toppled. It is the will that is the problem.
If anything should comfort us, however, it is that deep down in the recesses of the unconscious—the place that can never be wholly crushed by tyrants—people despise this kind of petty tyranny and want to resist it, even if they cannot admit as much to themselves.
Personally, I have no doubt that the overwhelming majority of people inside and outside the academy loathe the professoriate and would be happy to see it destroyed. What is necessary is to present them with a path toward safe resistance. This can be done by stripping the regime of its powers to deprive people of their livelihoods and reputations, and by holding the regime accountable for its abuses. Again, if the will is there, this will not be difficult to accomplish.
In this sense, the professoriate’s open embrace and celebration of antisemitism, racism, terrorism, and genocide marks an opportunity as well as a moral nadir. Drunk on blood, certain of its triumph, the regime and its allies tore off their masks and exposed the murderous nihilism in their hearts to all the world. In doing so, they gave the rest of us the chance to discredit them completely and forever.
All our efforts ought to be directed toward this end, and a good first step is to let the professoriate’s oppressed subjects know that we are offering them a way to liberation.
My latest JNS column was published on Monday. It marks the death of Henry Kissinger and tackles the question of realism vs. moralism in foreign policy, especially in the Israeli context.
Harvard University, of course, occasionally benefits from the stopped clock phenomenon and does something right. I recently came across a fascinating interview with historian Niall Ferguson on Kissinger’s legacy, held at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.
Ferguson claims that Kissinger was, at least at one point in his life, an idealist. I’m not sure I agree, but he makes a pretty decent case for it and, in any event, it’s always good for cliches to be given a good smashing once in a while.
Brilliant‼️
Thank you. Next steps are starting. Mainly title 6 lawsuits. Discrimination against Jews. My understanding is what’s on the line is federal grant money if the university is shown to be out of compliance. Well this grant money is an enormous source of income for all major universities. They can’t function without it.
Of course individual donors can also stop donating. This is also impactful but Harvard has an endowment in the billions. But loss of federal grant money will bring these universities to their knees.