Most organizational decline is self-inflicted. Such is the case with American universities. Their self-destruction, which has become apparent in recent weeks, isn’t just interesting to watch; it’s of great importance to us.
She had no other way out. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, finally announced her resignation on January 2. It was the culmination of weeks of controversy sparked by her disastrous hearing before the U.S. Senate. The Senate was investigating anti-Semitic intimidation of students following the October 7 terrorist attack in Israel, which the university did not condemn. The cascading revelations of plagiarism in her thesis did not help the president’s case.
During the hearing, the president indicated that she could not condemn these actions. When asked, “Is saying ‘Death to the Jews’ anti-Semitic?” she replied: “It depends on the context,” citing freedom of speech. Legally, this argument is understandable. Except that Ms. Gay, who has made the woke politics of DEI – Diversity, Equality and Inclusion – central to her administrative career for years, first as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, then as president, has created a veritable speech police. Essentially, you can be expelled from Harvard for making a tasteless joke or refusing to use the correct gender for a fellow student. Except that shouting “Death to the Jews” isn’t a problem. Behind the legal argument of defending freedom of speech lies a double standard: a “diversity” that tolerates only one body of ideas, an “equality” in which some are more equal than others, and an “inclusion” that does not include Jews (nor Asians, nor, of course, whites). Never before has the perversion of words and the cynicism of the underlying theories been so blatantly exposed.
The historian Niall Ferguson has experienced this drift from the inside. In a scathing article, he writes: “For nearly ten years I have watched with dismay the betrayal of my intellectual colleagues. I have also witnessed the willingness of administrators, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.
Lights out
This betrayal of intellectuals comes as a shock to us children of the Enlightenment. With Condorcet, we believed that men of knowledge, independent of power, would be the guarantors of public liberties. We grew up with the idea that education was the surest guarantee against superstition and hatred, that it would promote the moral virtues of a free and peaceful people. We believed that educational institutions, and higher education in particular, would lead this process. This belief was not only naive. It also reflected a lack of historical culture. Ferguson reminds us, in the article cited above: “Anyone who naively believes in the power of higher education to inculcate ethical values has not studied the history of German universities under the Third Reich.” In fact, these universities supported Nazism even before it came to power. The best jurists, the cream of science and philosophy, eagerly aided the Nazi effort. It was university students who burned books, not the uneducated masses. Like one man, the university willingly and eagerly placed itself at the service of a baneful political project, with catastrophic consequences. At the end of the Second world war, not much was left of the German universities, who never recovered. And this is not the only example in history. We need only think of the finest French intellectuals who blithely supported tyrants around the world, even though they hadn’t educated them, a tradition that continues today.
American universities are following the same path. The ideology is different, of course, but the logic is the same. This politicization is a cancer eating away at them. They end up training activists to serve causes they deem important, rather than citizens capable of making their own decisions. Generations of students are thus trained to believe that the end justifies the means; that what counts is being on the “right” side of history, or in the “right” political camp, in this case the camp of the “oppressed”. If Harvard’s motto is Veritas (truth), the search for truth has long since ceased to be the institution’s goal or the criterion for judging academic work. What counts is no longer how we think, but what we think, which must conform to the canon. Harvard is no longer a university, but a theological school. Ironically, that’s what it was originally! In this light, it’s no accident that the president’s thesis is a patchwork of plagiarized pieces. If sociologists have recognized that any regularity in the behavior of an institution must be understood in terms of its cultural context, the reverse is also true: the cultural context allows, elicits, and even justifies certain behaviors. It can therefore explain them. The cultural context here is that it’s “the cause” that matters, not the truth. The institution originally dedicated to finding that truth is corrupt at its core.
Will the president’s resignation change anything? Probably not. These universities produce a good of very high social value, access to an exclusive club for which the number of students willing to pay dearly is almost infinite. There will be changes, promises to behave, cross my heart, but nothing will change and the slow self-destruction will continue.
A gift to the populists
This self-destruction is important. It is important because American universities, through their prestige and power, profoundly influenced the world’s universities throughout the 20th century, both in their theories and in their institutional practices. This influence continues today, and therefore nothing that happens there can be indifferent to us. It is also important because the existence of institutions where facts are examined for what they are, without worrying about whether they please this or that authority, is fundamental to a democracy. While they should be the bulwark against fake news, conspiracies, lies, passions, fashions, historical falsehoods and fateful theories, universities have perverted their mission and are instead one of the vectors. As a result, they have become easy prey for their long-time critics, and there will be fewer and fewer people to defend them. Make no mistake: the big winner in this self-destruction of American universities is Donald Trump, and in his wake, every illiberal politician on the planet.
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🇫🇷 French version of this article here.
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