Some years ago, I was in Boston on business, and invited a European friend to lunch. The man was finishing a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, and was about to head back to Europe. Over a spread of delicious New England raw oysters, I asked my friend what the most important lesson he learned from his year at America’s most prestigious university.
He thought for a moment, then said, “How fragile the American elites are.”
The European explained how shocked he and his fellow Europeans on the program were to see so many American students unable to confront ideas that gave them anxiety—and how eager professors were to accommodate their intellectual and emotional fragility. This expressed itself as an ideological phenomenon—the students were all on the left, and coughed up the usual woke hairballs (e.g., “Transphobia is triggering”) told me that when he read in the Harvard student newspaper that more than three-quarters of the university’s student population was taking anti-depressants, he understood that their intellectual fragility was tied to their mental fragility.
The Harvard students do not consider themselves to be weak, he said. To the contrary, “they are absolutely certain that it is their destiny to rule the world.”
And they will, too. There can be no doubt that graduates of America’s prestige universities—in particular, the Ivy League schools like Harvard, Penn, Yale, and Princeton—are in a prime position to pivot from their college experiences and slingshot into positions of power and influence throughout American institutions. What my European friend, who arrived at Harvard dazzled by its global brand, discovered in his time there was the real secret to the most elite university in the world: that it is less about scholarship than it is about networking and credentialing its students to thrive within a system of power.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every society has elites, and needs them to keep things running. What my European friend saw was that America’s elites are not fit for purpose. Last week in Washington, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT (the country’s top technological university), testified in front of a Congressional hearing about the ugly outbursts of antisemitism on their campuses this past autumn.
The presidents—Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, and Penn’s Liz Magill—beclowned themselves with their inability to straightforwardly condemn anti-Jewish hatred on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in Israel. They hemmed, they hawed, they tried to ‘contextualize’ the outbursts from left-wing students, so that they could stay on the right side of the woke narrative.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” a Congresswoman asked Magill.
“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied.
So: according to the president of the University of Pennsylvania, it’s only against her university’s rules to call publicly for the genocide of the Jewish people if you try to kill Jews—and even then, it “can be” harassment. It all depends, you see.
A couple of days later, facing pressure from university donors, one of whom withdrew a $100 million gift in protest, Magill resigned.
How to account for these disgraceful performances by the leaders of three of America’s most prestigious universities? What the world saw in that Congressional testimony was that these academic leaders live in the same country as their fellow Americans, but in different worlds.
The world of the elite academy in the Age of Wokeness is one that operates under the Leninist principle of “who, whom”: that is, the rightness and wrongness of words or deeds depend entirely on who says or does them, and against whom are they said and done. It was hard for these women to condemn the antisemitic campus protesters because—incredibly and insanely—the people who raped, tortured, and murdered over 1,000 Jewish civilians on October 7 have been coded as ‘oppressed’ by the woke.
This malignant and bankrupt standard has become common in academia, and, under the reign of wokeness, throughout elite institutions. Its ideological instruction and enforcement arm are DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, both within universities and corporations. The name is perfectly Orwellian, for these programs are about the opposite of what they claim to support; DEI is about imposing an illiberal leftist ideology that, to achieve crude egalitarian goals, excludes all who don’t fit into its rigid categories.
That imposition includes silencing dissenters. According to FIRE, a research and activism group that monitors and ranks the free-speech climate within American university life, Harvard is the worst campus in America for suppression of free speech; Penn is next-to-last.
As Harvard alumnus Andrew Sullivan pointed out last week in a scathing denunciation of his alma mater:
The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point. These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”
He added that antisemitism seen of late at these universities is not like old-school Jew-hatred.
“The new anti-Semitism,” Sullivan said, “is simply a subsidiary of the entire rubric of anti-Whiteness’ that is taught as the supreme principle of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.’”
It is a wonder to consider how the United States, in only sixty years, overcame American apartheid and stigmatized anti-black racism, in part by making Martin Luther King Jr.’s color-blindness a core principle of the American civic creed, only to succumb in this century to a new racism that extols the racialized hatred of white people as the pinnacle of progressive consciousness. But that is where we are, in nearly every institution governed by the norms of American elites.
This DEI creed is like a fundamentalist religion, one that cannot be falsified. Nearly twenty years ago, at a journalism conference, I argued with a colleague about the new push to “diversify” newsrooms by hiring people of color who had significantly fewer qualifications than white competitors. There’s no way to produce journalism under these circumstances without its quality suffering, I contended. To the contrary, said my colleague, “diversity is a component of quality.”
For that senior journalist, diversification with no loss of expertise was possible if you manipulated the definition of “quality.” Easy as that. No wonder Claudine Gay, a black woman, managed to ascend to the presidency of the world’s most prestigious university, despite a miserly scholarly record that cannot boast of a single academic book. (By contrast, Lawrence Summers, who served as Harvard president from 2001-2006, published more academically in the year 1987 alone than Gay has in her entire career.)
When you elevate leaders based not on actual accomplishment, but rather on how well they fulfill ideological preferences, you should not be surprised by humiliating events like last week’s debacle before Congress. I’ll give you an example of how this works from outside the world of academia.
Two decades ago, covering the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I expressed shock to clerical friends over the utter incompetence and cowardice of bishops—not just one or two bishops, but of most of them. These priests, who were also angry over it, explained to me that the institutional church selects bishops not for holiness or administrative capability, but for a capacity to keep the system moving along. All was well until the disastrous 2002 Boston trial of child molester priest John Geoghan resulted in a wealth of damning church documents entering the public square, and revealed to the entire world the cozy, corrupt standards of the Catholic hierarchy.
With any luck, the same thing will now happen to elite academia. Did you know that at Yale, nearly 80% of grades are As—that is, the top grade possible in the American system? Numbers are similar at Harvard. We have no way now to measure the quality of work done by the students who will move from their privileged perches at elite schools into leadership-track positions throughout the U.S. system.
It’s not only elite schools by any means. Last weekend, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin system refused $800 million from the state legislature, in exchange for freezing DEI hiring, and the repurposing of DEI workers within the universities. DEI is a political religion for these fanatics; this is a hill that they will die on, even as they devalue the image of U.S. higher education around the world.
What we saw on Capitol Hill last week is a condensed symbol of American decay. Walter Russell Mead, himself an elite academic of the center-right, tweeted in response to the Congressional testimony scandal:
He’s right about that. Who can believe in these people anymore? As horrible and as pervasive as it is, it’s not just the wokeness, which destroys both justice and competence, and opens the door to racial strife. It’s the failure of elites, both in the U.S. and in Europe, to execute the fundamental duties of leadership: protect the country’s borders. It’s their dishonest handling of the Covid crisis, including the fraudulent testimony of many scientists, and their deployment of their authority to manipulate the public.
This didn’t start yesterday. It’s also the baseless Iraq War, which the U.S. dragged its European allies into, and which ultimately opened the floodgates of migration into Europe. It’s the economic mismanagement that caused the 2008 global crash. It’s the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that toppled the dictator Qaddafi, but also turned that country into a failed state and exporter of migrants to Europe.
And it’s the Washington-led NATO proxy war on Russia, which has now dead-ended in what looks like Russian victory. It now appears that the war could have ended shortly after it started, as both Russia and Ukraine had reached a settlement—only to have it torpedoed by Washington and London, which wanted to fight Vladimir Putin down to the last Ukrainian. Result: an estimated 200,000 Ukrainians dead and countless maimed, plus around 300,000 Russians. The leadership class in both the U.S. and Europe—including the media—refused to discuss facts and logic that did not serve the belligerent narrative. When Western leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán brought up inconvenient facts about the unlikeliness that NATO-backed Ukraine would prevail, they all denounced him as a Russian stooge—just like they denounced Americans who, in 2002, questioned the wisdom of the coming Iraq War as ‘unpatriotic.’
Now, with much of its ammunition stockpile depleted on the battlefront of eastern Ukraine, the United States faces rising aggression from China, and a profound lack of manufacturing capacity to replace what we have lost in Ukraine. What’s more, confidence in the U.S. military among Americans is at a twenty-year low, and the all-volunteer armed forces faces a chronic recruitment shortage. Anecdotal accounts of military families discouraging their service-age children from joining the armed forces because of wokeness and other forms of politicization are common. As one now-retired officer told me, the senior leadership class in the U.S. military is well attuned to the fact that if you want to advance your military career, you had better salute woke ideology, even if you believe it hurts America’s ability to wage war.
To repeat: what we saw with the elite university presidents’ testimony in Washington is but a single manifestation of the rot throughout the establishment of what was once the mightiest nation on earth, and a beacon to the world. The termites have been feasting for a long time.
What cannot continue, won’t. In fewer than thirty years, the combined effects of government incompetence in dealing with a natural disaster (the 1891-92 famine), the loss of wars, and the arrogant refusal of the leadership class to reform, took Russia from a country where Marxists were on the fringe to leading a successful revolution. What the Bolsheviks replaced Tsarism with was far worse, as we now know, but they could not have taken power had the Tsarist elites not been so demonstrably unfit for rule.
There’s a lesson in that for us. Accountability and reform will either be welcomed, as hard as it is, or it will be thrust upon a failed, hidebound system. The legendary investor Warren Buffett meant his most famous line—“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s swimming naked”—to refer to the way crisis, and only crisis, reveals the fundamental strength of a company. It’s true for countries as well. The Capitol Hill clown show with the elite college presidents deflecting moral responsibility for campus antisemitism offers a clear opportunity for bold leaders to challenge the corrupt system, before some future crisis causes general collapse.
My European friend concluded our Boston lunch a few years back by saying that he would soon be returning home, and would be free of the woke madhouse called Harvard. But he could not un-see what he had seen in his time at the proving ground for the leadership class of the West’s essential nation.
“My country is weak. We depend on a strong America,” he said. “After what I just saw at Harvard, how can I not fear for the future?”
America’s Elites Are Not Fit for Purpose
(L-R) Dr. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, Liz Magill, president of University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Photo by Kevin Dietsch / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP
Some years ago, I was in Boston on business, and invited a European friend to lunch. The man was finishing a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, and was about to head back to Europe. Over a spread of delicious New England raw oysters, I asked my friend what the most important lesson he learned from his year at America’s most prestigious university.
He thought for a moment, then said, “How fragile the American elites are.”
The European explained how shocked he and his fellow Europeans on the program were to see so many American students unable to confront ideas that gave them anxiety—and how eager professors were to accommodate their intellectual and emotional fragility. This expressed itself as an ideological phenomenon—the students were all on the left, and coughed up the usual woke hairballs (e.g., “Transphobia is triggering”) told me that when he read in the Harvard student newspaper that more than three-quarters of the university’s student population was taking anti-depressants, he understood that their intellectual fragility was tied to their mental fragility.
The Harvard students do not consider themselves to be weak, he said. To the contrary, “they are absolutely certain that it is their destiny to rule the world.”
And they will, too. There can be no doubt that graduates of America’s prestige universities—in particular, the Ivy League schools like Harvard, Penn, Yale, and Princeton—are in a prime position to pivot from their college experiences and slingshot into positions of power and influence throughout American institutions. What my European friend, who arrived at Harvard dazzled by its global brand, discovered in his time there was the real secret to the most elite university in the world: that it is less about scholarship than it is about networking and credentialing its students to thrive within a system of power.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Every society has elites, and needs them to keep things running. What my European friend saw was that America’s elites are not fit for purpose. Last week in Washington, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT (the country’s top technological university), testified in front of a Congressional hearing about the ugly outbursts of antisemitism on their campuses this past autumn.
The presidents—Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, and Penn’s Liz Magill—beclowned themselves with their inability to straightforwardly condemn anti-Jewish hatred on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in Israel. They hemmed, they hawed, they tried to ‘contextualize’ the outbursts from left-wing students, so that they could stay on the right side of the woke narrative.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” a Congresswoman asked Magill.
“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied.
So: according to the president of the University of Pennsylvania, it’s only against her university’s rules to call publicly for the genocide of the Jewish people if you try to kill Jews—and even then, it “can be” harassment. It all depends, you see.
A couple of days later, facing pressure from university donors, one of whom withdrew a $100 million gift in protest, Magill resigned.
How to account for these disgraceful performances by the leaders of three of America’s most prestigious universities? What the world saw in that Congressional testimony was that these academic leaders live in the same country as their fellow Americans, but in different worlds.
The world of the elite academy in the Age of Wokeness is one that operates under the Leninist principle of “who, whom”: that is, the rightness and wrongness of words or deeds depend entirely on who says or does them, and against whom are they said and done. It was hard for these women to condemn the antisemitic campus protesters because—incredibly and insanely—the people who raped, tortured, and murdered over 1,000 Jewish civilians on October 7 have been coded as ‘oppressed’ by the woke.
This malignant and bankrupt standard has become common in academia, and, under the reign of wokeness, throughout elite institutions. Its ideological instruction and enforcement arm are DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, both within universities and corporations. The name is perfectly Orwellian, for these programs are about the opposite of what they claim to support; DEI is about imposing an illiberal leftist ideology that, to achieve crude egalitarian goals, excludes all who don’t fit into its rigid categories.
That imposition includes silencing dissenters. According to FIRE, a research and activism group that monitors and ranks the free-speech climate within American university life, Harvard is the worst campus in America for suppression of free speech; Penn is next-to-last.
As Harvard alumnus Andrew Sullivan pointed out last week in a scathing denunciation of his alma mater:
He added that antisemitism seen of late at these universities is not like old-school Jew-hatred.
“The new anti-Semitism,” Sullivan said, “is simply a subsidiary of the entire rubric of anti-Whiteness’ that is taught as the supreme principle of ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.’”
It is a wonder to consider how the United States, in only sixty years, overcame American apartheid and stigmatized anti-black racism, in part by making Martin Luther King Jr.’s color-blindness a core principle of the American civic creed, only to succumb in this century to a new racism that extols the racialized hatred of white people as the pinnacle of progressive consciousness. But that is where we are, in nearly every institution governed by the norms of American elites.
This DEI creed is like a fundamentalist religion, one that cannot be falsified. Nearly twenty years ago, at a journalism conference, I argued with a colleague about the new push to “diversify” newsrooms by hiring people of color who had significantly fewer qualifications than white competitors. There’s no way to produce journalism under these circumstances without its quality suffering, I contended. To the contrary, said my colleague, “diversity is a component of quality.”
For that senior journalist, diversification with no loss of expertise was possible if you manipulated the definition of “quality.” Easy as that. No wonder Claudine Gay, a black woman, managed to ascend to the presidency of the world’s most prestigious university, despite a miserly scholarly record that cannot boast of a single academic book. (By contrast, Lawrence Summers, who served as Harvard president from 2001-2006, published more academically in the year 1987 alone than Gay has in her entire career.)
When you elevate leaders based not on actual accomplishment, but rather on how well they fulfill ideological preferences, you should not be surprised by humiliating events like last week’s debacle before Congress. I’ll give you an example of how this works from outside the world of academia.
Two decades ago, covering the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I expressed shock to clerical friends over the utter incompetence and cowardice of bishops—not just one or two bishops, but of most of them. These priests, who were also angry over it, explained to me that the institutional church selects bishops not for holiness or administrative capability, but for a capacity to keep the system moving along. All was well until the disastrous 2002 Boston trial of child molester priest John Geoghan resulted in a wealth of damning church documents entering the public square, and revealed to the entire world the cozy, corrupt standards of the Catholic hierarchy.
With any luck, the same thing will now happen to elite academia. Did you know that at Yale, nearly 80% of grades are As—that is, the top grade possible in the American system? Numbers are similar at Harvard. We have no way now to measure the quality of work done by the students who will move from their privileged perches at elite schools into leadership-track positions throughout the U.S. system.
It’s not only elite schools by any means. Last weekend, the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin system refused $800 million from the state legislature, in exchange for freezing DEI hiring, and the repurposing of DEI workers within the universities. DEI is a political religion for these fanatics; this is a hill that they will die on, even as they devalue the image of U.S. higher education around the world.
What we saw on Capitol Hill last week is a condensed symbol of American decay. Walter Russell Mead, himself an elite academic of the center-right, tweeted in response to the Congressional testimony scandal:
He’s right about that. Who can believe in these people anymore? As horrible and as pervasive as it is, it’s not just the wokeness, which destroys both justice and competence, and opens the door to racial strife. It’s the failure of elites, both in the U.S. and in Europe, to execute the fundamental duties of leadership: protect the country’s borders. It’s their dishonest handling of the Covid crisis, including the fraudulent testimony of many scientists, and their deployment of their authority to manipulate the public.
This didn’t start yesterday. It’s also the baseless Iraq War, which the U.S. dragged its European allies into, and which ultimately opened the floodgates of migration into Europe. It’s the economic mismanagement that caused the 2008 global crash. It’s the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that toppled the dictator Qaddafi, but also turned that country into a failed state and exporter of migrants to Europe.
And it’s the Washington-led NATO proxy war on Russia, which has now dead-ended in what looks like Russian victory. It now appears that the war could have ended shortly after it started, as both Russia and Ukraine had reached a settlement—only to have it torpedoed by Washington and London, which wanted to fight Vladimir Putin down to the last Ukrainian. Result: an estimated 200,000 Ukrainians dead and countless maimed, plus around 300,000 Russians. The leadership class in both the U.S. and Europe—including the media—refused to discuss facts and logic that did not serve the belligerent narrative. When Western leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán brought up inconvenient facts about the unlikeliness that NATO-backed Ukraine would prevail, they all denounced him as a Russian stooge—just like they denounced Americans who, in 2002, questioned the wisdom of the coming Iraq War as ‘unpatriotic.’
Now, with much of its ammunition stockpile depleted on the battlefront of eastern Ukraine, the United States faces rising aggression from China, and a profound lack of manufacturing capacity to replace what we have lost in Ukraine. What’s more, confidence in the U.S. military among Americans is at a twenty-year low, and the all-volunteer armed forces faces a chronic recruitment shortage. Anecdotal accounts of military families discouraging their service-age children from joining the armed forces because of wokeness and other forms of politicization are common. As one now-retired officer told me, the senior leadership class in the U.S. military is well attuned to the fact that if you want to advance your military career, you had better salute woke ideology, even if you believe it hurts America’s ability to wage war.
To repeat: what we saw with the elite university presidents’ testimony in Washington is but a single manifestation of the rot throughout the establishment of what was once the mightiest nation on earth, and a beacon to the world. The termites have been feasting for a long time.
What cannot continue, won’t. In fewer than thirty years, the combined effects of government incompetence in dealing with a natural disaster (the 1891-92 famine), the loss of wars, and the arrogant refusal of the leadership class to reform, took Russia from a country where Marxists were on the fringe to leading a successful revolution. What the Bolsheviks replaced Tsarism with was far worse, as we now know, but they could not have taken power had the Tsarist elites not been so demonstrably unfit for rule.
There’s a lesson in that for us. Accountability and reform will either be welcomed, as hard as it is, or it will be thrust upon a failed, hidebound system. The legendary investor Warren Buffett meant his most famous line—“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s swimming naked”—to refer to the way crisis, and only crisis, reveals the fundamental strength of a company. It’s true for countries as well. The Capitol Hill clown show with the elite college presidents deflecting moral responsibility for campus antisemitism offers a clear opportunity for bold leaders to challenge the corrupt system, before some future crisis causes general collapse.
My European friend concluded our Boston lunch a few years back by saying that he would soon be returning home, and would be free of the woke madhouse called Harvard. But he could not un-see what he had seen in his time at the proving ground for the leadership class of the West’s essential nation.
“My country is weak. We depend on a strong America,” he said. “After what I just saw at Harvard, how can I not fear for the future?”
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