Why uni governance is guilty of corrupting Western campuses
The appearance of three university presidents before a congressional committee last week was such a spectacle – a “teachable moment” – that the surreal video has been viewed by more than a billion people.
Asked for a simple yes or no on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates their university’s code of conduct, they said it would depend on the context. A visibly stunned congresswoman Elise Stefanik (a Harvard alumna) remarked incredulously, genocide actually had to be committed to launch disciplinary action?
Instead of squirming with embarrassment, they seemed to drip with condescension that a mere representative of the deplorables would presume to question Claudine Gay, president of Harvard; Sally Kornbluth of MIT; and Liz Magill of Pennsylvania.
In recent times, all three universities have downgraded free speech concerns – which they used to justify tolerance of the anti-Semitic chants on campus – while denouncing, disinviting and punishing people for voicing alternative views on pronouns, biological sexual identity, race and affirmative action.
According to the campus free-speech rankings of FIRE, Harvard is dead last of 248 US universities for 2024, with a negative score of 10.69. Penn is second worst with a score of 11.13, and MIT ranked 136th with 45.13
This is a crisis of university governance. First the parasitical administrators took over the university, with their numbers and salaries increasing disproportionately. Then the wokerati took over the administration by a successful coup via DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion); DIE (division, intolerance, exclusion) is a more accurate description. The result is the sickening obfuscation on full display last week, cloaked in a veneer of superior moral sensibility.
Referencing some of the prior Harvard clampdowns, Republican Steve McGuire asked Gay: “In what world is a call for violence against Jews protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?” Gay did not answer. As dean, she had engineered the ouster of Ronald Sullivan, a law professor who believed every accused person deserves legal representation. Stefanik noted subsequently Harvard has warned students that “‘cisheterosexism’, “fatphobia” and “using the wrong pronouns” qualified as abuse and perpetuated ‘violence’ on campus – but not anti-Semitism”.
DIE enemy No.1 is white males. DIE has shoehorned Jews into white supremacist oppressors and colonisers. Can Jews be colonisers of their own ancestral land that is also intimately woven into their core religious texts?
“Oppressed” students may disrupt classes, de-platform controversial speakers and shout down and hurl obscenities at them, block members of oppressor groups from classrooms and lock them into libraries, and even for good measure assault them sometimes. Any student engaging in such antics deserves expulsion.
The hypocrisy and double standards were obvious and indefensible. The public, political and donor backlash was swift and brutal. Within a day, scrambling efforts to undo the damage and walk back the tone-deaf remarks began.
At the weekend, Magill announced her resignation, followed by the chair of Penn’s board. Pressure is still building on the other two to exit stage left also, including allegations of multiple allegations of plagiarism by Gay, starting with her PhD thesis as discussed in The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student-run publication.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire donor to Harvard, tweeted on December 7 that “someone with first person knowledge” had told him the search committee “would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria”.
In years to come, he says, we’ll look back on the DEI era “as the McCarthy era Part II”.
Six of the eight Ivy League university presidents are women. MIT adds another. If you believe this reflects decisions based solely on merit and performance, there is this lovely bridge in Sydney I’d like to sell you.
The current US Vice-President’s two biggest qualifications were gender and race. That hasn’t worked out very well. The newest US Supreme Court justice was chosen from a shortlist of black women, even though she couldn’t define a woman.
The trio’s congressional performance is the inevitable end point of the journey on which American, British and Australian universities are embarked: of identity politics, intersectional hierarchy of victimhood and grievance, protected groups classified accordingly, and microaggressions, need for safe spaces and trigger warnings, speech and silence as violence, hate speech and incitement to physical violence and even genocide as free speech, rape as resistance, and the like.
Berkeley professor Ron Hassner surveyed American students who endorsed the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. Only 47 per cent could name the river and the sea.
Remarkably, some thought it meant the Nile River and the Caribbean Sea – territory which doesn’t even include Israel.
Anti-Semitism is being normalised in Western societies, thanks to the malignant spread of DIE toxicity through and by universities. Elite universities that used to be the crown jewels in the US soft power have been corrupted into institutions pushing political agendas downstream of culture wars. The share of young adults who rate a college degree highly fell from 74 per cent in 2013 to 41 in 2019; 61 per cent of Americans believe higher education is going in the wrong direction.
While viewpoint diversity is ignored, the expanding DIE bureaucracy keeps commandeering more personnel and resources.
Emeritus professor John Ellis pins the blame for much of the West’s ills on the corruption of higher education by radical political activists. The “captured” universities train school teachers and college professors, civil servants and corporate executives, journalists and NGO activists.
The solution is to end DIE in its entirety. Fire those administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Severely prune HR departments. Admit students and hire faculty on academic merit.
As celebrity Harvard professor Steven Pinker says, standardised testing helps minorities, for it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids”.
Ramesh Thakur is emeritus professor at the ANU. He was chair of the United Nations university’s appointment committee from 1998 to 2007.
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