Veritas Betrayed: Wake Up, Stand Up; Harvard Has Lost the Primary Truth-Seeking Purpose Of A University

It is better to fight for the truth-seeking values of our university and our civilization, than to acquiesce in the shade, but on our knees.

Originally Published 1/15/2024 on The Pursuit Of Truth

Why would Harvard Professor Avi Loeb – one of the most respected physicists in the world – and a tenured Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, say that Harvard University “became more of a police organization”?

When one enters a crime scene, little often needs to be said. That is because the problem is so apparent already. The primary question is not “what happened”, but “who did this”? Nonetheless, since many people are still at the “what happened” stage about Harvard, let me try to tell the truth about our current situation. 

The historic levels of grade inflation on campus also match levels of denial, insularity, truth inflation, and ideological capture. For instance, a shorter version of this heterodox essay you are reading at this moment was rejected by the Harvard Crimson. The well meaning editor told me they “didn't feel this particular piece was a good fit at this particular time”. I wondered, when exactly would be a good time. Faculty job applicants already have to do diversity/DEI loyalty oaths, and students can’t speak their mind in an academic institution. 

Openness to dissenting voices and free inquiry are as rare at Harvard as is spotting the mythical dodo bird of the Ivy League in Harvard Yard: a student who is working class, conservative, religious, rural in origin, heterosexual, and believes their gender matches their biological sex.

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I.

What is the telos, the purpose, of a secular university?

It is supposed to be a non-sectarian place with a primary purpose of the pursuit of truth, come what may. Any idea or theory – no matter how sacred or taboo or orthodox – should be up for intellectual scrutiny. It should employ freedom of inquiry on any academic question, and use meritocratic and rational – and not ad hominem – standards for the assessment of ideas. Universities are supposed to be places where everyone is judged as an individual based on their actual contributions to truth-seeking, not their group membership, or whether the results of their research are socially and ideologically acceptable. In a university, a diversity of viewpoints and ideas should be sought out primarily so that one may better pursue the truth and eliminate falsehoods and errors, regardless of which bodies and brains those ideas originate from. Period.

In contrast, a partisan think tank is explicitly factional and partial in its aims. There are many think-tanks in America that have explicitly partisan aims and practices, such as the Center for American Progress (liberal), Claremont Institute (conservative), Cato Institute (libertarian), Guttmacher Institute (pro-abortion).  Though intellectually oriented and often producing robust scholarship, these are not universities. Consistent with their ideologies, these institutes tend to only ask a small range of all possible intellectual questions, and their answers are more predictable than not. The Guttmacher Institute, for instance, rarely does a study on post-traumatic stress disorder and moral injury after abortions, and the Cato Institute rarely writes reports documenting the needs of the most vulnerable in society and how social safety nets could help.

Harvard, by these standards, is much more like a left wing progressive Institute, than it is a university. In its most passionate moral exhortations, Harvard resembles a secular ideological church. There are some quantitative pockets of flourishing, non-partisan academic life, but in general, Harvard does not live up to the values of a university and is more like a think tank.

There is nothing wrong with that, as everyone eventually worships something; and radical left wing thought — if you can look beyond its history of barbarism in practice — has a number of moral truths which I and many endorse, such as the importance of helping the dispossessed and unfortunate.  

There are many exemplary think tanks in America, and Harvard could be one of them. But most people in America and the world do not know the truth about Harvard. They think it is more like a university. So folks, we have a problem here.

How did this happen?

I believe that most people at Harvard - faculty and students alike - are good natured people devoted to learning and teaching and scholarship, who mean well. As devoted expressive individualists, they have buckled under the weight of heroic self-creation, and have been lured into an all-encompassing and creeping secular religion with its mask of compassion; this ideology — whether you call it wokeism, identitarian neo-Marxism, or critical social justice — takes advantage of their atomized state, trait agreeableness, and their breathlessness from lost meaning from traditional sources (sacrificial responsibilities in marriage, parenthood, faith, and citizenship). This secular religion is intrinsically antisemitic, anti-Asian, anti-white, sexist against males, heterophobic, and more.

This great awokening and cultural revolution has happened in many institutions in America. But Harvard is in many ways ground zero; Cambridge, MA is the Wuhan of the woke mind virus. A number of Harvard’s intellectual entrepreneurs have been the wet market or lab managers that culturally produced wokeness. And today, it is where some of the most florid and acute infections and fascinating case studies can be observed. Unfortunately, as wokeness spreads, herd immunity decreases, rather than increases. Therefore, our only mask — and our only vaccine — is direct exposure to sunlight, to the intrinsic luminosity of telling the truth.

Harvard is in many ways ground zero; Cambridge, MA is the Wuhan of the woke mind virus…our only mask — and our only vaccine — is direct exposure to sunlight, to the intrinsic luminosity of telling the truth.

II.

Except for the hard sciences and their cousin departments where mathematical reasoning and statistical evidence predominate, Harvard is not primarily committed to the disinterested pursuit of truth. In its admissions, hiring, research, teaching, and administrative practices and goals, it chiefly values political and social orthodoxy, and outcomes consistent with those norms, to filter people and scholarship and teaching. Just join a faculty meeting, or a student discussion room, or an administrator’s conference room. Truth-seeking too often takes the back seat to competitions towards orthodox thinking or ritualized virtue signaling. 

Academic discussions, and even the results of research and scholarship, are often implicit – and sometimes explicit – post-hoc rationalizations to meet ideological ends. Not in every single corner; but in enough corners to create a culture of orthodoxy, with taboos, blasphemy, heretics, a secular liturgy, and worst of all, a stultifying and perpetual fear of wrongthink, and being found to be unworthy.

Nearly all admit that the problems of pious insularity, and born-again cult-like thinking and behavior, are more pervasive and severe in the humanities and social sciences, which research consistently shows are the most radicalized. For instance, in 2022, Harvard disinvited the philosopher Devin Buckley from speaking at the English Department when her blasphemous views on transgenderism were found out, even though she was scheduled to speak on an unrelated arcane philosophical topic. Buckley is a feminist herself, but not sufficiently radicalized for Harvard. Here we see the 99.9th percentile of the radical left canceling the insufficiently orthodox mere 75th percentile leftist.  

Similarly, because the African American Harvard Law School Professor Ronald Sullivan – a Democrat – provided legal representation to a very distasteful and famous man accused at the time of sexual violence, Professor Sullivan had a mob form against him. Sullivan was canceled, and was forced to step down at his job as Faculty Dean of Winthrop House at Harvard. He had to explain to his 9-year-old son how to interpret the left-wing KKK-esque spray painting of “Down With Sullivan” on the wall next to his home done by true believer radicals intending to intimidate and terrorize a family where they live.

He explained the context of this political vandalism to his son by saying:

“that representing unpopular clients serves an important constitutional role in our democracy and that I had done nothing wrong. As you might imagine, it was hard to see my son read that piece of graffiti. The administration said and did nothing in response to the vandalism.”

Shera Avi-Yonah/The Harvard Crimson

Sullivan concluded that:

“Unchecked emotion has replaced thoughtful reasoning on campus. Feelings are no longer subjected to evidence, analysis or empirical defense. Angry demands, rather than rigorous arguments, now appear to guide university policy.”  

Yes, my dear colleague, this is pretty much what people observe it is like when they are in a religious cult.  Welcome to the revolution.  Again, here is a case where the 99.9th percentile of the radical left has canceled the insufficiently orthodox mere 75th percentile leftist. 

Although you may find it hilarious to observe the self-cannibalization that results among radicals competing for the trophy for most puritanical secular progressive, the zealotry is no laughing matter: students, faculty – and knowledge itself – is systematically corrupted for generations.  Entire fields of inquiry become unreliable and useless to those outside the cult. 

The most obvious example at Harvard is the case of president Lawrence Summers who presented a wrongthink paper in a 2005 academic conference talk.  While also mentioning two other competing hypotheses, Summers cited a third empirically well supported hypothesis in the social sciences about greater male variability at extreme ends of population distributions as explaining some portion of sex differences in representation in the sciences at top universities. 

This happened not at an Islamic fundamentalist meeting in the 16th century at the Kabul Institute for Advanced Islamic Sciences where someone presented a non-orthodox hypothesis of the nature of the Qur’an; it was an academic conference in the social sciences in the 21st century in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  However, similar fundamentalist dynamics ensured. Spasmodic protests against Summers emerged, and soon thereafter, he was no longer president of Harvard.

As a result of this high status persecution, since 2005, how much research and teaching of sex differences was never proposed or pursued in the social and medical sciences? Any mildly reasonable scholar would conclude, “If that is what happens to the president of Harvard, I better study or teach a different topic”. Yet, despite being less likely to be taught and researched, sex differences will go on existing anyway, and will continue to be consequential to human life and human social dynamics.

III.

Perhaps in your mind you cleave these non-serious departments and factions off as you would a rotten part of an apple that you can nibble around with convenience.  Unfortunately, the worm at the core of your fruit has spread, and the rot has left very little that is nutritious and left to consume.  The entire academic culture is spoiled, festering under its frothing dogmatic mold, and has even undermined parts of the sciences themselves. 

Honorable and brilliant faculty like Kit Parker (Engineering), Carole Hooven (Evolutionary Biology), and Tyler VanderWeele (Epidemiology) have been persecuted for wrongthink by mobs of convulsing left-wing fundamentalists for freely expressing reasonable and well-argued non-radical left wing ideas.  For example, Professor Parker had his course canceled because students didn’t find his reading list included enough radical left wing explanations.  I thought Professors determined what was in their courses.  Parker believes the university has been taken over by left-leaning activists.  

These harassments and cancellations have happened not in grievance studies departments teaching “me-search” seminars on things like “intersectional autoerotic-ethnography of the semiotics of self-oppression”.  Rather they transpired in extremely quantitative and scientific fields in the natural and biomedical sciences: Engineering, Evolutionary Biology, Epidemiology.  

Everyone, please wake up. 

I would suggest anyone who thinks these oppressive puritanical dynamics are limited to the humanities and social sciences to go to the Harvard Medical School campus and look for the portraits that used to exist of all the famous scientists and physicians over the centuries who contributed heroically and devoted their every waking moment to discovering cures and unlocking mechanisms of disease that have saved millions of lives. 

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Their portraits have been taken down for being too White, too Jewish, too male, too heterosexual, etc. The same cancellation of dead and brilliant scholars has happened in the Harvard Economics department’s portraits in the Littauer Center of Public Administration, and in Harvard’s Department of Psychology in William James Hall, where the powerful woke leaders felt students needed to be protected from looking at faces that were too Jewish and White, male, and straight. 

Yet, genius is by definition non-egalitarian, and The Universe doesn’t have a DEI department; there is no affirmative action for getting universe-shattering discoveries. Truth is a jealous god that inherently says no to most who want to wrestle away its secrets, no matter their immutable characteristics or ideology. 

True brilliance is so rare on this earth, and is as consequential as it is hard to find. Innovative discoveries are so impossible to uncover, and authentically world changing research so hard to fake. Framing a single portrait representing a lifetime of sacred dedication and discovery is the least Harvard can do to show respect for its rare scholarly gems that have changed the world through genuinely meritorious and life-changing discoveries, no matter what their representation is in the population, and no matter what are the nature of their melanin or gonads or sexual proclivities.

Instead, Harvard basically says, “Nevermind all that”. By fiat from on high – *POOF* – revisionist history wins; projectionary presentism wins; the lazy way to make us all the same wins; Kurt Vonnegut's "handicapper general" is in charge now. The radicals are not content with merely deplatforming the living and breathing heretics and apostates among us; even the dead have been canceled for being too White, too Jewish, too male, too heterosexual. 

This is not only racist and sexist and heterophobic to White/Jews/men/heterosexuals, etc., but it is demeaning to the minority scholars who replace the pale and male and straight visages: the process of cancellation suggests the portrait was not earned, but politically forced. What if Olympic medals were awarded in this manner to Asians/Whites/Jews to make them feel more welcome amidst the more athletic bodies of persons of African ancestry they see when they walk into the stadium to compete? Obviously, our potbellied gold medalist would know in their hyperlipidemic heart that the medal around their neck was political, not meritorious. The same is true in the admissions office, the graduate seminar, the faculty roster, and other iterations of the academic olympics.

Perhaps you are not concerned? You should be, because YOU will be next. If you are not Jewish, Asian, White, male, or heterosexual, perhaps you are something else considered “oppressive”, such as being attractive and guilty of lookism privilege. Non-infertile? You are guilty of fertility privilege. The list never ends.

If you don’t fight this ideology on campus today, know that you will be eaten by this ideology eventually. To keep churning, the Revolution needs to consume a continual supply of micro-aggression fodder. 

IV.

Diversity at Harvard is superficial and merely skin and gonads deep, as everyone looks different, but thinks alike.  

Look at any survey of Harvard’s faculty and students on their political beliefs and you will see a monoculture that makes the Mormon Church seem diverse in its viewpoints (this is what a Mormon colleague at Harvard told me). In 2023, 30% of 18-29 year olds in America say they are "very conservative or conservative" on social issues, at Harvard it is 6.4%, according to 2022 data. Only 3.4% of students have a favorable view of Donald Trump. 

Harvard Crimson

Among students, there are approximately 900% more very progressive vs. very conservative students (the approximate ratio of very conservative to very progressive is a whopping 10:1). 

There is data to support the stereotype that conservatives have on average lower IQs (and liberals are on average more neurotic/mentally ill), so we may expect non 1:1 representation in elite universities where an IQ of around 130 is the average. But a 900% difference is far from a non-echo chamber in intellectual discourse on any topics of social and moral concern.  

This imbalance explains why radical Left wing protestors disproportionately disrupt classrooms with screaming, occupy the Widener Library and harass people who are trying to study, and occupy university administrative buildings. 

If the causes these radicals were proselytizing on behalf of were right wing, what would happen? Imagine if a mob of Mormon or Orthodox Jewish students (if they even existed) started harassing everyone around him or her in classrooms and libraries and administrative buildings to start praying more and divesting from abortion clinics. Everyone would be arrested in a few minutes by the Harvard police, and probably involuntarily placed in a hospital for urgent psychiatric evaluation. But not if you are protesting for radical left wing causes, then deans will bring you food as you occupy university hall.

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How did this happen?

A primary cause of this identity-based neo-Marxist capture is the Harvard admissions office discriminating against non-progressive students. Ask any college counselor: it is beyond obvious that among equally qualified students, those with progressive stories are more likely to be accepted. In admissions reviews, “I worked on opening the Mexican border” gets bonus points, whereas, “I worked on securing the Mexican border” gets penalized. 

Student applicants obsessively researching schools know this better than us.  Akin to an aspiring pastor writing for admission to a seminary, Harvard applicants spin a self-hagiography congenial to the pedagogy of the oppressed, and fudge and nudge their salvific narratives and missionary-like extracurriculars towards left wing orthodoxy tales that rival the collected tales of the lives of saints of old. Again, this is not what should be happening in a real university, where truth seeking should be the telos, not cultivating foot soldiers for a missionary political ideology.

If you can believe it, the numbers among faculty are even more anomalous and eye-popping.  As former Dean of Harvard College, Harry Lewis, has written, “The political bias in our faculty is now widely accepted”.  Only 1.46% of Harvard faculty in a survey said they were “conservative” or “very conservative”, whereas 82.46% said they were “liberal” or “very liberal”. 

Harvard Crimson

That is a ratio of 56.4:1.  That means that among faculty, there are approximately 5540% more liberal than conservative faculty. 

These are the people teaching our next generation of elites. Imagine if nearly all our faculty were Mormons or Islamic fundamentalists; perhaps you would be OK with that? Mormons in general are exceptionally nice people with large and loving families, and Muslim radicals at least believe in truth as objective (but practice your drawing another time). Yet I doubt you would be OK with this state of affairs among university faculty educating your children. So why put up with the symmetrically opposite ideology doing the same? 

Beyond the protection of quantitative subjects, sit in on a few classes at Harvard and you will hear an echo-chamber so predictable you could guess most of the discussion topics and trajectory and conclusions before the class starts. A colleague who is an expert in Islamic intellectual history tells me that intellectual diversity and freedom of academic inquiry is more common in a modern Islamic madrasa than at Harvard, which resembles a neo-Marxist DEI seminary. Anyway, the comparison is an insult to madrasas, where rigorous disagreement and different legal and ethical positions are entertained as there are many competing and dissenting schools of Islamic law, and which are among the first institutions where systematic academic study emerged centuries ago.  

Beyond the progressive/liberal bubble, it is true that there are some minority of students at Harvard who are libertarians, economic conservatives. The fact that we have a substantial fraction of Harvard students who contribute to discourse with economically conservative/libertarian perspectives is promising. However, libertarian answers to social questions only represent a fraction of "conservatism". Social conservatism is actually quite opposed to libertarianism on many, many issues. In terms of their moral foundations, work by moral psychologists have shown that libertarianism is more similar to liberalism psychologically. A libertarian is just a liberal with a few more IQ points, a bit more disagreeableness, and an extra emphasis on freedom. 

So the disagreements at Harvard between what we call liberals and libertarian "conservatives" is more akin to a local skirmish between two cousins of liberalism. Whereas social conservatism – with its emphasis on flag, faith, and family – is much more unique. We become innovative within a narrow frame of reference and exclude actual social conservatives from most discussions, even as they are more representative of our nation and the world, and would actually provide true intellectual diversity to Harvard. 

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V.

In a totalitarian ideology — whether secular or sacred — everyone is a possible informant against everyone else, and people tend to walk on eggshells, lest they offend the dear leader or the ruling orthodoxy. Similarly, the majority of Harvard students cannot speak openly in class, and do not think the university protects free speech.

Students appear to have been either radicalized by each other, or brainwashed by their administrators and professors to internalize their soft totalitarianism, as an astounding number of students endorse the use of violence to silence dissent. 

Specifically, Harvard ranked last among over 250 universities in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) 2023 ranking of universities on freedom of expression, and had the singular distinction of being the only university in the “abysmal” category of ratings.  According to FIRE, “just over a quarter of Harvard students reported they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial political topic; only roughly a third think it is “very” or “extremely” clear the administration protects free speech on campus; and an alarming 30% think using violence to stop a campus speech is at least “rarely” acceptable”. 

Except for the hard sciences and cousin disciplines, Harvard does not employ meritocratic standards of assessing ideas and knowledge or practice. 

From top to bottom – from grading students to hiring faculty to funding grants to awarding degrees to creating departments and proposing courses – most ideas are judged and reviewed primarily by their social and political and ideological utility and coherence to the prevailing orthodox beliefs. Students know this when they write papers for the tenured radicals who grade them, and therefore cover their real views and arguments temporarily to get better grades.  

At the faculty level, one recent example is that two esteemed faculty from our Council on Academic Freedom with different viewpoints (Tarek Masoud, Flynn Cratty) collaborated and proposed a genuinely new general education course (“Hard Questions: Searching for Veritas Across Deep Divides”). The impressive course on heterodox thinking in the university aimed to encourage students to engage in civil discourse around ideologically and politically controversial questions, and aimed to teach “how to disagree honestly and productively in an open society”. This is exactly what a monocultural think tank needs to act like if it is trying to become a university. The professors met with the administration multiple times, and revised the syllabus after getting feedback. The final version was 13-pages – much longer than typical proposals – and was filled with extensive reading lists, pedagogical structure, and clear descriptions of educational goals and metrics for evaluation. 

For whatever reason, it was still rejected. Even if it was accepted, this course would be a rare example of intellectual diversity, free and open inquiry, and debate across deep social conservative-liberal differences. The examples of veritas betrayed are endless at Harvard. 

There are some exceptions in fields where there are limited ways to squeeze revolutionary fervor into equations. Yet in general, everyone needs to know that across Harvard’s many schools and departments academic conformity routinely supersedes scholarly excellence and independence of mind.  

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VI.

This is not just a problem of who has the podium and the microphone in the university; the problems are deeper and institutional.  Entire fields of knowledge and research have become unrecognizable, and have been gnarled more than grandma’s garlic knots.  

With a few exceptions, whole departments and fields of inquiry in research and teaching are distorted and disordered by the tiny slice of questions that are allowed to be asked in the first place.  What gets funded and published is an even smaller misinformed fraction. 

Especially with DEI loyalty oaths -- but even without them, given the ambient culture of orthodoxy -- scholars are hired in a manner that shows a clustering of select concerns predicted by the larger ethos and worldview that is quite particular, and crowds out the emergence of other lines of inquiry on empirical and normative issues germane to the preoccupations of dozens of other competing ideologies. Consider the space of all logically possible questions any department's scholars can entertain about the human condition; then examine what is actually asked, and how it is answered. You will observe an ideological sieve that filters out a large percentage of centrist liberal, conservative, and religious ideas and insights.  

As only one example, consider the ideas of African-American conservatives, who are relatively ignored at Harvard and other elite universities, when compared to their contributions at large. For instance, Thomas Sowell is arguably the most influential African-American intellectual of the last 100 years (or at least in the top 5). Yet, one will rarely find his writings on Harvard syllabi, or find Harvard students or professors who know Sowell’s name at all. If they have heard of his name, they will certainly know much more about the ideas of radical left-wing writers who are in comparison academic lightweights, who have published far fewer, and more mediocre, scholarly books and articles, such as Ibram Kendi or Cornel West. 

My concern is that we avert our eyes to that logically possible space of compelling concerns and questions in research and teaching, because a preoccupation with a few important topics colors out the rest. Again, we become innovative, and often self-congratulatory, within a narrow frame of reference.  As Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, noted, “the Harvard curriculum has become heavily slanted toward recent fashions of the progressive left”

VII.

Infected with progressive ideology, Harvard’s admissions processes for students is non-meritocratic, and the most obvious victims have been Asians, Jews, and White people, who are thought of as “overrepresented” and/or “oppressors”. Consistent with woke religion’s dogma, people at Harvard are not judged primarily as individuals, but as members of alleged socially privileged or alleged underprivileged groups. Therefore, according to woke social justice, Harvard is required to hold different racial groups to different standards for admission and promotion.

This is why the average Asian American freshman at Harvard scored over 100 points higher on the SAT than their African American peer. 

Harvard Crimson

And it is why, according to detailed statistical analysis used in the recent Supreme Court case against Harvard, an African American applicant with a 95% chance of admission would only have a 25% chance if he or she was Asian American. 

The Economist

How can two equally competitive applicants have a 280% (not 28%, which would be egregious enough) difference in chances of getting in, just because one person checked off a different box under the race question? Hundreds of Asian American and White students have been denied admission primarily because of DEI ideology. (And yes, I am also against all non-meritocratic biases in admissions: for legacy, affiliate's kids, donors kids, and athletes).

Now we are seeing the same logic applied to Jewish students, as their numbers have been decreasing at Harvard and across institutions like Harvard, as Jews become considered “oppressors” according to left wing thinking. According to the Tablet Magazine, “Harvard has gone from being 25% Jewish in the 1990s and 2000s to under 10% today.” and notes that among editors of the Harvard Law Review, Jewish representation has decreased by about 50% in the past 10 years.

This is obviously because progressive left-wing beliefs and metaphysics has an inherent antisemitic element. On Harvard’s antisemitism, Professor Harry Lewis of Harvard notes: “When complex social and political histories are oversimplified in our teachings as Manichaean struggles — between oppressed people and their oppressors, the powerless and the powerful, the just and the wicked — a veneer of academic respectability is applied to the ugly old stereotype of Jews as evil but deviously successful people.”

As an analogy, if the ruling religion on Harvard’s campus was Hinduism, then the relative representation of non-Hindus on campus would drop over time due to all the biases against non-Hindus, constant “inclusive Hindu excellence” training programs and pledges of allegiance, and the Vedic monoculture crowding out meritocracy and people being judged as individuals.

Similarly, if Harvard’s ruling ideology was theocratic rather than a secular ideology, and the above cited disparities in acceptance rates at similar academic levels of accomplishment were not concerning race (i.e., Asian, Black, White, Hispanic groups), but rather were about religion, (i.e., Christian vs. Jewish vs. Muslim vs. Atheist students), the whole apparatus would be shut down in a few weeks and everyone would be sued and shamed. 

Probably the whole university would be closed down by the federal government and turned into an amusement park with rides. However, because one never thinks of one’s religion as a religion, just as the obviously right worldview and set of norms, and because we are swimming in a progressive secular religion, many see DEI, affirmative action, inclusive excellence, and diversity initiatives as just obviously the right thing to do, or what is without question a good thing. 

Yet, any group based diversity program that fails to filter and treat students as individuals only – and not primarily as members of some intersectional ethnic or gender/sexual group – will necessarily exclude and discriminate against Whites, Jews, Asians, males, heterosexuals, etc. Just as salvation is the point of Christianity, discrimination on behalf of “oppressed” and “underrepresented” groups is the whole point of the DEI ideology.

This is immoral – and since the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action – we can also say illegal.  

If Harvard actually treated all students and faculty as individuals with dignity and with their unique historical trajectories through life — with varying amounts of luck and suffering — and promoted intellectual diversity and free inquiry without cancellations, then no diversity programming would be necessary. Meritocracy is the best source of diversity without immoral or illegal discrimination.

At Harvard or elsewhere, any diversity initiative that does not discriminate in an immoral manner, and truly includes all persons of all backgrounds, will intrinsically dissolve itself and its reason for being. This is because the irreplaceable individual with a life that is unrepeatable in the entire cosmos, is the ultimate minority.  When we consider and respect the multilayered complexity of being a unique individual in a complex world, and avoid all the group-based stereotyping inherent to diversity programming, we will find the entire discriminatory apparatus redundant and unnecessary, like a second trachea going into the lungs, or a separate program for “inclusive sprinting” on a track and field team.  

VIII.

This reverse racism, and reverse sexism, and reverse sexual-phobia we see in affirmative action/DEI preferences also connects to the suppression of free speech. 

Have you ever noticed that most cancellations are in one direction?

It is no coincidence that most of the things that trigger apoplectic fits of mob outrage and then result in the injustices of suppressing scholarly inquiry, cancellations, biases in hiring and admissions, and humiliating struggle sessions, are systematically predictable based on the content of the triggering ideas: they all threaten left-wing ideology.

It is no coincidence that all the things that trigger apoplectic fits of mob outrage and then result in the injustices of suppressing scholarly inquiry, cancellations, biases in hiring and admissions, and humiliating struggle sessions, are systematically predictable based on the content of the triggering ideas: they all threaten left-wing ideology.

Most of the challenges to free inquiry on campus today are coming from the the DEI ideology/critical theory/progressive left: on trans issues vs. biology (Carole Hooven; Devin Buckley), on the scientific but insufficiently woke analysis of policing (Kit Parker), on views of marriage and homosexuality (Tyler VanderWeele).  

We can't defend free speech without questioning that illiberal ideology as the default ethos and worldview on campus which all must bow down to. A secular non-sectarian university should not have a ruling ideology in the first place.  The DEI/critical theory pseudo-religion has little respect for objective evidence, and per Marxist and Foucauldian dogma, tends to see everything as ideology and mere political power plays (except for when using reason to make the argument for ideology and power!). It scoffs at aspirations of procedural neutrality.  It has little respect for the use reason to understand the world, and prefers to focus on “praxis” to change the world.  

This is what the whole world already knows about Harvard, but we are in denial about it.

This ruling ideology, Harvard’s current pseudo-religion, is Intersectional Marxist Manichaeism.  With the most invidious forms of stereotyping one could imagine – in student admissions yes, but also in faculty and staff hiring loyalty oaths, awarding of grants, promotions, grading students, and many other domains – people at Harvard are sorted and categorized along an identitarian, DEI hierarchy.  The allegedly most “oppressed” are at the top (non-Asian and non-Jewish ethnic minorities, LGBT individuals, etc), and the allegedly most privileged are at the bottom as “oppressors” (Jews, Asians, Whites, men, heterosexuals, etc.). 

Status depends on how many intersectional points one gets across different variables of the oppression olympics. The calculative assessment by revolutionaries of different groups as more vs. less oppressed is a temporary lapse in their commitment to praxis first, as one must use reason objectively to count oppression points. Also, ironically, the DEI true believers want to subvert all binaries, except the oppressor/oppressed binary which is a taboo beyond critical thinking and rebuke. But revolutionaries are not known for superlative reasoning skills, and anyway, these Range Rover Radicals think of logic as epiphenomena of power relations. 

This silly and singular Manichaeian lens blinds, binds, and biases the entire university in the most shameful way. In so doing, this catechism forces all who confess and conform to it to commit all the sins Harvard ostensibly is against, such as racism, sexism, etc. 

The irony is sad to see, and Harvard today resembles African American comedian Dave Chapelle’s famous skit about Clayton Bigsby, the congenitally blind black person, who tragically becomes a white supremacist. Today, Harvard is akin to Clayton Bigsby on the day he has his hood removed by others, and Clayton Bigsby realizes he is not who he thought he was.  

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SEVEN SUGGESTIONS

Since some people are starting to realize that the crimson emperor has no scholarly clothes, what should be done? 

1.

We need to ask whether Harvard merits federal funding?  I do not know. A woke university culture is as much a betrayal of the academic truth seeking telos of university as would be libertarian university, fascist university, MAGA nationalist university, communist university, Buddhist university, Hindu nationalist university, or Aztec university.

I doubt that taxpayers, if they really knew what happens at Harvard, would vote for their federal tax dollars going towards its thinly veiled, and often explicit, quasi-religious projects, discrimination against Jews, Asians, and Whites, and corruption of teaching, research, and the transmission of knowledge. It will be for Congress and other agencies to assess whether such an ideological institution claiming the values of a university meets criteria for federal funding. But the question needs to be asked.

2.

End DEI departments and sub-departments, and their intersectional trainings and orientations. They are ineffective, divisive, and demean and patronize minorities as perpetual victims, and programming tends to be racist towards Jews, Whites, and Asians, sexist towards males, and heterophobic.

3.

End mandatory DEI statements for students applying to Harvard, and for applicants to jobs at Harvard. These are just pseudo-religious loyalty oaths. They are inimical to a free, open university, just as would be mandatory theological statements about one’s commitment to the Gospel, or the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism.

4.

Reform the culture and policies of Harvard to prioritize free academic inquiry, intellectual diversity (which grows from intellectual freedom), institutional neutrality other than on issues that directly impact free academic inquiry, and civil discourse without hecklers. My former teacher and adviser Steven Pinker’s 5 point plan along these lines is the best yet articulation of this vision.

5.

Given the total saturation of wokeism at Harvard, and the millions of dollars and thousands of staff hired to implement the great woke commission, these changes will take decades to implement, if ever they come to pass.

Therefore, at this time, a first step, as with any problem -- from bad breath, to substance abuse, to institutional corruption -- is to admit one has a problem, and represent reality accurately. As such, I propose that Harvard should change its name to “The Harvard Institute”, so it matches the naming practices of other sectarian institutes, because that is what it is. For reasons discussed above, Harvard does not deserve the hallowed name “University”.

Even if measured as an “Institute”, Harvard would be among the more parochial, monocultural, and ideologically radical. This is because there are a number of partisan think tanks that have much more intellectual diversity and free expression than Harvard. The Harvard Institute – compared to other partisan Institutes – would be low-performing on metrics of intellectual honesty and robustness. For instance, scholars at the center-right leaning American Enterprise Institute under Arthur Brooks were encouraged to seek out collaborations with think tanks that disagreed with them, to have a counter-viewpoint when having panel discussions, and outside reviews of the Institute were regularly done by experts with politically contrary perspectives.  Compared to this, Harvard’s culture and policies resemble an DEI ideological church education and reeducation program, with an attached 50 billion dollar hedge fund. 

6.

Unlike the progressive/secular identity Marxists, I believe in forgiveness and redemption, and we need a pathway for Harvard back to being a university.  Everyone makes mistakes, and just like an individual, an institution can become brainwashed into an insular wilderness, and wander off into the forests of Guyana on the verge of left-wing revolutionary suicide.  

Therefore, if Harvard comes to resemble a University – perhaps in the twenty second or twenty third century – it may, after being on probation for some time, apply for a name change back to “University”.  

The judges would need to be outside the university. Adjudicating metrics would need to be objective and transparent. No shadowy internal committees without procedure or transparency, with independent consultation by experts without names. With a loss of trust, and a betrayal of a sacred duty – from a crime scene, to a broken marriage contract, to a corrupted truth seeking institution – one does not determine when one is trustworthy; that is for others to determine. Many decades of Veritas betrayed can not be fixed by quick self-congratulation. 

7.

Thwart conformity and cowardice, and commit to telling the truth, as you see it.

I want to say something to all my fellow professors: my friends, I am a conformist coward. I did not say or do anything when the neo-Marxist culture spread over the past decades, and when the DEI persecutions were happening, both at Harvard, and other universities like Yale (Nicholas Christakis) and Portland State University (Peter Boghossian). When shameful Department Chairs and Deans refused to defend Carole Hooven’s right to say what she believed to be true about sex, I said nothing. When Tyler VanderWeele was subjected to public shamings and struggle sessions for doing nothing but having a deeply considered view on marriage, I said nothing. I deeply regret that I cowered out of a selfish concern for myself, and a desire for stability and social acceptability. I watched with horrid amazement, waiting in disbelief for each example to be an anomaly. Then another example, and another, and another. And here we are.  

99.9% of you also did and said nothing.  Now is the time to speak up.  Now is when you too must stop being a conformist coward. That is what we – you as well as I – have been for too long. People who excel in the university setting commonly have this risk-averse personality structure. With honest self-examination, accept to yourself that in your heart you know that this is what you are too; and commit to making things better. Why did we spend decades of the best years of our lives stuck in a library if we didn’t care about truth, merit, fairness, and the preservation and transmission of true knowledge? You must believe that truth has an inherent luminosity, will set you free, and lead to your flourishing. Otherwise, what the heck are you doing in a university? Go become a political lobbyist and give up the charade. 

The truth is inherently offensive to those who primarily care about politics, whatever the direction of those politics. Now is the time we give up a few friends on Martha’s Vineyard and Aspen and Miami Beach and Napa Valley, and say what we believe to be true. Live not by lies. Use the security of your tenure and say what you think is right and wrong. Now is the time to defend the truth seeking institutions from the illiberal capture that has already become nearly complete. Perhaps it is already too late.  

America is the most free nation on earth. Universities are supposed to be the most free places to speak and pursue the truth in our most free nation on earth.  They are not.  One has more diversity of viewpoints, freedom of speech, and freedom from censure for wrongthink, on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, MA as compared to 10 feet away when one enters the Harvard Yard gate.  

When universities are corrupted, soon the rest of the nation will be too. Soon, it will be too late. Eventually, the revolution will come for you, you “oppressor”.  Hide while you can. You will be next.  

So speak up now. Stand up tall, shed the cowardice and conformity, and tell the truth now. 

In the words of Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” Social respectability is nothing, compared to what is at stake. It is better to fight for the truth-seeking values of our university and our civilization, than to acquiesce in the shade, but on our knees.  

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.