Harvard is dead

Roger Kimball’s New Criterion editorial on “DEI’s dangerous lies” is titled “Gay science,” in honor of sacked Harvard president Claudine Gay. Roger’s editorial lacks only some accompanying reference to Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, which I actually read under the tutelage of my political philosophy teacher last year.

It was in The Gay Science that Nietzsche announced “God is dead.” I thought Roger’s editorial might have announced that Harvard is dead. In each case, the assertion is a slight exaggeration, but it makes a point.

The eminent historian Dominic Green makes the Harvard point in the Wall Street Journal column “No Task Force Can Save Harvard” (behind the Journal’s paywall). Here is the opening passage:

Harvard is the Boeing 737 MAX of higher education. A great American brand is squandering the public’s trust. Failures of quality control are damaging its market dominance. Like any corporation, Harvard is looking for new management and working to burnish its image. Unlike most corporations, Harvard has no idea what it is doing. Boeing still has engineers; Harvard has only professors. When the wheels came off at Chrysler in 1978, the company brought in Lee Iacocca. Harvard has brought in Derek Penslar.

Mr. Penslar is a professor of Jewish history. He calls Israel a “settler colonial” state and compares the Jewish state’s establishment to France’s colonial takeover of Algeria. In August he signed an academic petition called “The Elephant in the Room.” It endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Netanyahu government’s proposals for judicial reform mask a plan to “ethnically cleanse all territories under Israeli rule of their Palestinian population.” It asserted that Israel imposes a “regime of apartheid” on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and accused the country of “Jewish supremacism.”

“Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question” is the name of a book by white supremacist David Duke. If you go far enough left, you go far right without knowing it. Mr. Penslar leads Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been named a co-chairman of the university’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. The latter appointment was an “unforced error,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, told the Journal Wednesday.

The spontaneous campus celebrations after Hamas’s massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7 meant that Harvard could no longer ignore its problem with Jews, and especially the Jewish state. Prodded by donors and shamed by the media, the university’s then-president, Claudine Gay, commissioned a committee.

Then Ms. Gay told lawmakers that calling for the genocide of Jews was sometimes acceptable at Harvard, depending on the “context.” The head of the advisory committee, Rabbi David Wolpe, resigned. He said Harvard was gripped by an ideology “that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil.” Like a real president sending in the Navy SEALs, temporary president Alan Garber launched the task force, jointly commanded by Mr. Penslar and a social scientist from Harvard Business School who researches driverless cars.

I’m an inmate of the open-air asylum that is Cambridge, Mass., and some of my best friends are professors. All of them are from the shrinking minority of classical liberals and liberal conservatives. We meet in private, lest their colleagues spot them. They know the battle of ideas is lost. The ship of fools was hijacked decades ago by the radical left. It floats down the River Charles on a tide of donor cash, dissenters thrown overboard.

The biographical tag identifies Dominic as “a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.” I would add that he is the author, most recently, of The Religious Revolution. Under the multiauthor Spectator pseudonym Cockburn — Dominic was editor of Spectator’s American edition at the time — he also wrote the 2019 column examining the evidence that Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother in 2009 (and remained married to him at the time she won her seat in Congress). The column is accessible online via the Daily Mail here.