Cancel the Ivies

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, December 08, 2023

 

A number of our elite college presidents — at Harvard, MIT, UPenn — are in public-relations trouble after being pretty evasive about whether chanting out loud for the genocide of Jews amounted to a violation of their school’s code of conduct. They really couldn’t say.

 

The university presidents, exposed in Congress, looked like they hadn’t answered a question in a political space less left-wing than a phalanx of Red Guards during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Can we have more context? Is genociding the Jews punching down? I mean, what does “globalize the intifada” really mean when you are shouting it at someone in a yarmulke in a rich part of Boston?

 

Let’s be clear here. This debate cannot be resolved by resorting directly and only to principles of free speech. I agree with this magazine’s founder: Institutions such as Harvard and Yale are meant to be formative ones and in some ways are acting in loco parentis. Although the students have reached the age of majority, there are a million things that factor into this — for instance, the fact that the students’ parents go through a financial proctology before their children get their scholarships, awards, and loan offers.

 

Colleges ought to have codes of conduct, not only to protect academic integrity, but to form the character of students. That means, to some degree, governing what students can and can’t say and where.

 

The diversity of our colleges should produce a diversity of student codes. It’s perfectly appropriate that Westminster Seminary, formed in a Presbyterian split against theological modernists at Princeton, would have statements of faith that applied to students and teachers. These are the very basis on which learning begins. Similarly, if the University of Notre Dame decided to be what it ought to be, the world’s most serious Catholic institution of higher learning, it might also enforce behavior and speech codes consistent with that mission, rather than what it has now, which is a combination of embarrassed Catholic identity and a desire to be an SEC-type school but in the Midwest.

 

America’s Ivy League colleges — the most selective schools — have in recent decades recaptured the role they played in the early years of the American republic in New England, only they have expanded to the national level. That is, they are formatory institutions of a political, social, and business elite. We see this now everywhere: The number of Ivy Leaguers in Congress, the judiciary, and even in the top ranks of American business keeps going up and up. This is an exalted role for these institutions to play, and they have the financial and historical resources to play it well. Americans care about what happens at these schools now for very good reason: These people will be governing us, whether they are filling the C-suite at Disney or getting nominated to the Supreme Court or sitting as national-security adviser.

 

The problem is not that these schools have speech codes; it’s that these speech codes are enforced by means of an unwritten, controversial, and idiotic “woke” ideology that alienates the vast majority of people in this country. In fact, this ideology casts the vast majority of people in this country as contemptible and irredeemable villains deserving of violent comeuppance.

 

And so you have the spectacle of Yale University subjecting a (non-white) member of the Federalist Society to endless hours of self-criticism because, in a private email inviting students to a party, he referred to the venue as a “trap house” (slang for a dingy place where drugs are sold). Normal people would recognize this as an uncouth but harmless and self-deprecating way of referring to collegian squalor. But Yale’s wokified speech codes required the institution to treat it as a potential hate crime, caused by being adjacent to whiteness.

 

Meanwhile, an editor of the Harvard Law Review, an institution in which such figures as Barack Obama, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mike Pompeo, and Paul Clement have had leadership roles, was recently found on video menacing Jewish students at Harvard, chanting words like “exit” and “shame” at Jewish students because they were, based on the transitive logic of progressivism, avatars of the Jewish state, because they are Jews.

 

These standards of conduct — Maoist self-criticism for FedSoc party emails, and impunity for progressive non-white antisemites — are completely unfit for the type of institutions the Ivy League aspires to be. These standards of conduct are fundamentally at odds with the insane amount of patronage these institutions receive from the great American families, charitable institutions, and government of this nation. They are a recipe for producing shrieking human know-nothings where once there were citizens.

 

In other words, these institutions are breeding a profoundly unfit leadership class that will bring civil strife and ruin to this country. Protecting the First Amendment requires that we preserve civilized discourse from being drowned out by the yawping of barbarians. The Ivy League is producing an idiotariat; everyone could see that this week. Asking it to change is not hypocrisy. It’s the bare minimum of civilizational self-defense.