This is not about reforming higher education; it’s about destroying it out of spite.

The modern conservative movement in America began with an attack on the Ivy League.

God and Man at Yale — William F Buckley Jr’s first broadside against the stifling left-liberal establishment of the 1940s and 50s — kickstarted an intra-elite revolt in 1951. Calling out liberal hypocrisy — open-minded about everything but conservatism — began its long and storied career in American culture and politics:

Sonorous pretensions notwithstanding, Yale, (and my guess is most other colleges and universities) does subscribe to an orthodoxy: there are limits within which its faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be tolerated.

Nothing much has changed, has it? (For more reflections on that, check out the Dishcast’s riveting interview with Buckley’s new biographer, Sam Tanenhaus, this week.) Except that after several generations of conservative complaint about the Ivy League, and mistreatment within it, the last decade saw an ever-more extreme and dogmatic leftism take over, with liberalism itself now deemed just an emanation of “white supremacy.”

I witnessed my own generation’s experience with this when Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind came out in 1987. Siloed at Harvard as some right-wing weirdo who liked Aristotle and went to Mass, I found in Bloom’s text a sweet relief — a brilliant, erudite evisceration of the postmodern, exhausted nihilism of the liberal intelligentsia. Yes, in that familiar phrase, the leftists’ minds were so open their brains fell out:

The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

I loathed this smug presentism wrapped in moral superiority. But it’s still true that I also thrived at Harvard, as Buckley did at Yale, even as I was morally and intellectually condescended to by most of my peers. It’s an oppressive place for a non-leftist, but for me, as with Buckley, that was more a challenge than a fate.

I responded with a determination to fight back intellectually, to expose the flaws of liberal intolerance and smugness, to pierce its reflexive atheism, and to focus on detonating even worse currents in critical theory that were then emerging from the neo-Marxist swamp. You can see Ross Douthat’s emergence as a public intellectual in a very similar context; his first book was Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. And Buckley, of course, insisted in a speech at a Yale Daily News function when he was at the college:

Believe it or not, I do not intend to prescribe here for faculty members the precise limits to tolerable opinion consistent with the basic aims of proper education.

The conservative tradition, properly understood, defends the independence of universities from political control. My own Oxford College, Magdalen, for example, has an annual event which I was able to attend each October as a special scholar called a “demy”. It’s called the Restoration Dinner and commemorates the college’s refusal in 1687 to go along with King James II’s attempt to impose on the fellows a president they had not selected themselves. The culture war back then was a sectarian one, and James was trying to rein in Magdalen’s protestantism. He expelled 42 scholars and demies for resisting him, appointed a Catholic president; but after public outrage at his interference, he was forced to relent in October 1688, weeks before he was deposed from the throne entirely.

That was how I found myself three centuries later: a young, devout Catholic, passing a huge loving cup to and from my fellows and reciting “Ius Suum Cuique” (“To Everyone, Their Rights”) celebrating Protestant resistance. And I was happy to. The independence of the university as a sanctuary for liberal learning is a foundational basis for a free society — as modern conservatives, Oakeshott above all, argued. No government should be able to intervene. That was the line between a free and an unfree society.

Harvard in recent years has betrayed that liberal calling, of course, effectively sacrificing the idea of a liberal university in favor of an illiberal machine for systematic discrimination and neo-Marxist indoctrination. This is not true of all of it, of course. For a defense of the freedoms Harvard still maintains, and the excellence of a lot of the scholarship it still produces, check out Steven Pinker’s op-ed today. But it proudly selects students and faculty by race, sex, and ideology — and seems to have largely ignored the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. And when a public university breaks civil rights laws, suppresses free debate, allows intimidation of Jews, and chills dissent within, it should be held to account.

So let me say upfront, I have no problem with suing Harvard for its discrimination, and penalizing it for allowing the physical and psychological intimidation of Jewish students — or indeed of any students not wedded to the maxims of critical theory. I don’t have a problem raising taxes on university endowments either. They have a lot of money and charge exorbitant fees. But there is a clear line between demanding a university abide by the law and pay its taxes and dictating what it can teach, how it conducts its own affairs, and whom it can hire. Harvard is as right to resist King Donald I in this respect as Magdalen was in defying King James II.

And this administration’s assault is quite obviously not an attempt to reform higher education because nothing this administration does is about serving a common good — a concept literally meaningless for Trump. He cannot conceive of a society where everyone wins by the open expression of competing ideas. He is, rather, of the view that every human relationship and society is zero-sum — that there are only winners and losers, and the entire point of power is to win, not lose, and to target and punish your enemies. Harvard is the enemy. Ergo Harvard Delenda Est.

Stripping Harvard of hundreds of millions of dollars for scientific research in order to punish queer theorists in the English Department is capricious, idiotic, and malevolent. But the blunt withdrawal of certification so that Harvard has to lose a quarter of its student body immediately, along with an even greater percentage of its tuition income, is clearly an attempt to destroy the place. It’s spite and vengeance.

This is not about ending wokeness; it’s about extending wokeness to correct what DHS calls, in classic woke terminology, “an unsafe campus environment.” It’s not about expanding free speech; it’s about more surveillance, restriction, and sanctions on free expression, as the case of Rümeysa Öztürk proves. The DHS secretary — who graduated from South Dakota State University at the age of 41, and who has no idea what habeas corpus is — wants Harvard to provide “any and all video footage, in the possession of Harvard University, of any protest activity involving a nonimmigrant student on a Harvard University campus in the last five years.”

Not violence, not criminal action, just “protest activity.” What is this, the Soviet Union? We already know Rubio is surveilling and targeting foreign students purely for their speech in a blatant assault on the First Amendment. And this assault on Harvard is merely an extension of the administration’s attempt to control and censor political debate.

In all this destruction, the damage this administration is doing to this country’s investment in scientific and medical research is profound, irreparable, and moronic. Targeting smart foreign students the US should be eager to attract is another act of egregious self-harm. Forcing a quarter of a university’s students to leave the country almost at once is malice, not policy. The persecution of foreign students — I was once one of them — makes no sense, except as cheap jingoism, xenophobia, and the crudest nativism.

I’ve lamented Harvard’s steep decline, illiberalism, intolerance, and racism. I find its leftist faculty terrifyingly illiberal and its liberal faculty, for the most part, spineless cowards. (There are effectively almost no conservative faculty left.) But when an administration is pursuing policies not for reform but destruction, when it is focused on targeting every institution in society that does not echo its own ideology, when it is motivated by revenge and malice and not the common good, and when it is run by know-nothing demagogues like Noem, I will rally behind Harvard as doggedly as Magdalen’s 17th century dons fought back against King James. This is the West.

Ius suum cuique!

New On The Dishcast: Sam Tanenhaus

Sam is a biographer, historian, and journalist. He used to be the editor of the New York Times Book Review, a features writer for Vanity Fair, and a writer for Prospect magazine. He’s currently a contributing writer for the Washington Post. His many books include The Death of Conservatism and Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, and his new one is Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America.

It’s a huge tome — almost 1,000 pages! — but fascinating, with new and startling revelations, and a breeze to read. It’s crack to me, of course, and we went long — a Rogan-worthy three hours. But I loved it, and hope you do too. It’s not just about Buckley; it’s about now, and how Buckleyism is more similar to Trumpism than I initially understood. It’s about American conservatism as a whole.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find three clips of our convo — on Buckley as a humane segregationist, his isolationism even after Pearl Harbor, and getting gay-baited by Gore Vidal. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s episode with David Graham on Project 2025. We also hear from readers on Pope Leo and a smattering of other subjects.

Money Quotes For The Week

“And then they rigged the election, and then I said, ‘You know what I’ll do? I’ll run again and I’ll shove it up their ass,’” – Donald Trump addressing board members of the Kennedy Center.

“That’s why I and so many other people have cancer,” – Joe Biden, July 2022.

“We are conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed … We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally,” – Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister.

“Mentally, he’s quite acute,” – Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor, on Biden, September 2023.

“What did y’all think ‘globalize the intifada’ meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays? It meant this sweet young couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, gunned down at an American Jewish Committee event at the Jewish Museum by radicalized monster Elias Rodriguez, chanting ‘Free, free Palestine,’” – Saul Sadka.

“Charged, investigated or threatened with investigation by Trump or his team just in recent days: Letitia James, Andrew Cuomo, LaMonica McIver, Kamala Harris, Bruce Springsteen, Beyonce, Bono, Oprah Winfrey, James Comey, Unnamed “treasonous” Biden aides, City of Chicago, Kennedy Center,” – Peter Baker.

“In a sense the real ‘original sin’ was Obama tapping a VP who he didn’t want to have as a successor,” – Matt Yglesias.

“If [Noem] just whiffed on the definition [of habeas corpus], I wouldn’t mind. But she says it’s the president’s ‘constitutional right’ to remove someone, and that ‘Lincoln used it.’ Like saying the First Amendment is the government’s constitutional right to control the thoughts of citizens,” – Jason Willick.

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” – Scott Bessent to Elon Musk — who has finally fucked off.

“Another mind blowing statistic: of the 3.59 million migrants from outside Europe who arrived in Britain since 2021, just 571,000 did so as workers on work visas. That’s 16 percent. One of the biggest policy failures in British history. Thanks Boris,” – Matt Goodwin.

“If nothing else it’s a helpful distillation of priorities that the one ‘genocide’ the Admin is eager to take aggressive action on is South African White Farmers (approx. 50 homicides per year) whereas the annihilation of Gaza (100s killed in just the past week) may proceed apace,” – Michael Tracey.

“All of the Zoomers that work for me are bisexual, and all of them have long covid. I’ll believe long covid is real when someone who is not bisexual has it,” – Sean McElwee, April 2023.

“Taking testosterone has weakened my bones, so I’m in quite a bit of pain a lot of the time. Low estrogen levels in females (without supplementation) increases the risk of osteoporosis, similar to postmenopausal women. It started in my 20s. My 20s. They didn’t tell me,” – Sinéad Watson.

The View From Your Window

Krün, Germany, 7.27 am

Yglesias Award Nominee

“Being exclusively attracted to men is incredibly lonely, and it gets worse the older I become. It seems almost everyone just wants to fuck and suck and then move on to the next thrill after fulfilling their fantasy and the novelty has worn off. There’s always the next conquest, the next exciting experience. No desire to meaningfully connect with another being, to build a life together — just to find someone else to use as a living sex toy. … And talking with the ‘gay community’ (which isn’t really a thing) about this leads to derision and ridicule for having such feelings,” – Daniel de la Fé.

Corrections Of The Week

We didn’t get any substantive dissents over my column on Pope Leo and Trump, but a reader has a “tiny nit to pick”:

Pope Leo is not from the “South Side of Chicago”; he’s from a south suburb called Dolton. My cousin and her family lived about six blocks away from him and would never say they lived in any part of Chicago. Folks who live in the suburbs of Chicago are very proud of their towns. Just FYI.

Another nit:

Trump drinks Diet Coke, not Coke Zero — which is a million times better than Diet Coke. Just something else that dipshit gets wrong.

My bad. I love Coke Zero. Please keep the corrections, and dissents, coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

Selling Jesus to Gen Z, from one of the most hilarious shows on television:

In The ‘Stacks

• Price hikes and interest rates are bearing down on Trump.
• Tim Noah explains how Medicaid became a “third rail” — even among GOP voters.
• Bari Weiss reacts to the ghastly murder of a DC couple by a pro-Gaza fanatic.
• A Turkish scholar sees Trump as “Erdoğan on steroids.”
• John Aziz characterizes Qatar as “Futuristic City, Medieval Morals.”
• Fukuyama: “Why Liberals Must Not Give Up Hope.”
• David Lat writes, “Class actions might be the surprise fix for problems with universal injunctions.”
• An ominous prediction: “The internet will soon be 95% AI-written.”
• Have you heard of the “fentanyl fold”? It’s grim.
• Joe Klein, who grew up on Jane Jacobs, warms to the abundance agenda. Missing from the debate is cheap energy, says Josh Barro.
• Three cheers to Germany for finally reversing course on nuclear.
• Ed West covers “the troubling case of Lucy Connolly, jailed for a tweet” — a 31-month sentence.
• Helen Pluckrose fisks David Klion for claiming the Harper’s letter led to Trump’s assault on free speech. She also responds to dissent over the “woke right.”
• Woodhouse goes another round with Taibbi over free speech and audience capture.
• The great Matt Ridley posts a paper on lab leak that no scientific journal would publish.
• James Nuzzo tackles “the queering of physical therapy.”
• Dissenting from Douthat, Noah Millman insists, “Ideology is bad for art.”
• Tina Brown reviews the “propulsive memoir” by Barry Diller.

The View From Your Window Contest

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell