Let’s Seize This Opportunity to Destroy Harvard!

The entrance to Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Mass., on Jan. 2, 2024.
Photo: David L. Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

Should Claudine Gay have resigned as president of Harvard? Are conservatives right that a rabidly pro-Hamas left has captured Harvard? Are liberals correct that the fascistic right has launched an all-out assault on academic freedom, at Harvard? The New York Times has explored these questions (about Harvard) over the course of almost 17,000 articles.

These are indeed fascinating topics. However, they ignore a key issue: That for anyone with a progressive perspective, Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.

Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.

Let's start with a story that explains why I'm so personally committed to this cause. Then we can move on to a more rational explanation of why you should be too.

On January 16, 1991, I was a senior at Yale. That night at 9 p.m., George H.W. Bush, president of the United States and Yale alumnus, announced the commencement of the first Gulf War.

This was a time of such barbarism that there was no internet. Almost no students had a television in their room. So the only way I could find out what was happening was to go to my dorm's common room, which did have a big TV.

When I got there that night, there was a single person there. She was not a Yale student, and she was not a Yale professor. She was a woman who worked in the dining hall. Anyone familiar with Yale and New Haven, Connecticut, will know this means she was likely either Italian American or African American; she was African American.

She was watching CNN with fervent concentration. I soon learned this was because her son was in the Marines and was stationed in Saudi Arabia on the border with Kuwait, and she was (she did not say this) terrified that he was about to die. I had never before seen a human being whose every atom was vibrating with fear.

It was impossible for me not to think about the debate about the coming war I'd already had with Yale friends. Some supported it; some didn't. But we all wanted to talk about whether we would be willing to fight in it if the draft was reinstated. I finally said: This is all moot. If things go so badly that they have to draft people out of Yale, the U.S. government will wrap it up. The people who run America don't care about this so much that they'd risk their own children.

This sounds like a nice tale about how sensitive and wise I was as a young man. There's more to it, though. As I watched Baghdad being bombed, and untold numbers of humans being converted into wet, red scraps of flesh, a tide of emotion swept over me unbidden. It was exultation.

I had no idea before that moment that this potential existed inside of me. I knew nothing at all of the history of the Middle East or the specifics of that war. So this didn't emerge from my cerebrum, the part of our brains that thinks. It was from my amygdala, the part of our brains that probably hasn't changed much since we were Homo erectus a million years ago. I had unknowingly absorbed a vague sense that there were these dusky foreigners out there, led by a two-bit dictator who'd gotten too big for his britches, who thought that they could defy us, and were being taught that they could not.

The us" part was key. Us didn't mean America, but rather the small group of people in charge of America. And I had unconsciously come to believe that, as a Yale student, I was a member of this group's junior varsity.

I find this excruciating to think about today. But I'm glad I experienced it, because it gave me a visceral sense of how the world feels to the people who ultimately run places like Harvard and Yale.

So that's my personal animus. But it should be shared by everyone who'd like the U.S. to be a real democracy.

Here's a measure of the stranglehold the Ivy League has over the commanding heights of the U.S. political system: From 1989 to 2021, a period covering 32 years, five presidents, and eight presidential terms, every U.S. president went to an Ivy League school as an undergraduate or graduate. Even more incredibly, for 28 straight years from 1989 to 2017,the president went to either Harvard or Yale - or, in the case of George W. Bush, both. Then the Harvard/Yale streak was broken by Donald Trump, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. Joe Biden went to the non-Ivy University of Delaware.

Over this time, Americans rarely had the option to vote against the Ivy League. It's not just that all of the candidates who won the elections between 1988 and 2016 went to Ivy League schools: Six of the eight candidates who lost went to Harvard or Yale. The two exceptions were Bob Dole in 1996 (Washburn University) and John McCain in 2008 (U.S. Naval Academy).

Then look at the Supreme Court. Eight of the current nine justices went to law school at either Harvard or Yale. The one exception, Amy Coney Barrett, replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who went to Harvard Law.

On its face, our era of Ivy dominance is the sign of a society that's calcified. You need access to America's networks of money and power to rise to the tippy top, and going to an Ivy League school is now a requirement for that access.

This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools - or anyone - could reliably measure some type of merit." People change all their lives, and we shouldn't have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22.

But of course Ivy League colleges don't actually admit students based on anything recognizable as merit. Anyone who's attended one knows they look for young people who are 1) extremely good at figuring out what the rules are and then faithfully following them, and 2) clubbable and ingenuous with their elders.

I don't agree with Reihan Salam, the head of the conservative Manhattan Institute, about much. (Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist instrumental in bringing down Claudine Gay, is senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race" there.) But Salam - Harvard '01 - once argued, Kids who attend elite schools are a mixed bag, and the vast majority are crashing bores. The admissions process tends to select for crashing bores." He was correct.

Harkness Tower stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn.
Photo: Craig Warga/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This doesn't mean progressives should join in the current conservative crusade against Harvard. The right opposes education in general, because they realize that people thinking for themselves is the only thing that could make their greatest fear - a democratization of the U.S. - come to pass. And they recognize that even at Ivy League schools there is a danger this kind of thinking can occasionally happen.

Progressives should not defend Harvard. We could defend the concept of academic insulation from donor pressure, but this is a concept much more than a reality. Harvard's $50 billion-plus endowment makes it one of the 10 largest hedge funds in the U.S. Above all, we have to understand Harvard will never defend us; it will always be on the side of the money.

However, our program of destroying Harvard and its brethren should be in service to a larger, positive agenda. What we want is a country of education for everyone: high-quality public universities open to people of all ages and incomes, beautiful public schools for everyone before that, and enormous libraries in every American neighborhood.

If you went to an Ivy League school, you know enough to nod knowingly when anyone mentions this famous James Madison quote: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

But what's not taught in class is that this was from a letter Madison wrote to a friend about the importance of public education of all forms everywhere, including in Kentucky specifically. Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty & dangerous encroachments on the public liberty," he wrote. They multiply the educated individuals from among whom the people may elect a due portion of their public Agents of every description."

What Madison didn't say was, Let's just have a few colleges like the place I went, Princeton, and choose every president from them." We can recover Madison's vision, but first we need to bulldoze the institutions in its way.

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