In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco
companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not
addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable
claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak
plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part
of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with
such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.

Last week, something similar happened. Thirty years from now, Americans
will likely recall a witness table of presidents�representing not top
corporations in one single sector, but the nation�s most powerful
educational institutions�refusing to speak plainly, defiantly rejecting
any sense that they are part of a �we,� and exhibiting smug moralistic
certainty even as they embraced bizarrely immoral positions about anti-
Semitism and genocide.

Graeme Wood: Harvard�s president should resign

Despite the stylistic similarity of these two images, they had a
substantive distinction. Yes, both sets of presidents sat atop sectors
experiencing a collapse of public trust. Higher education commanded the
confidence of 57 percent of Americans a mere eight years ago, but only 36
percent of Americans by this summer, and a steeper decline is likely
coming as a consequence of the grotesqueries of the past two months. And
yes, both sets of testimonies�of the tobacco executives, and the elite-
education executives�revealed a deep moral decline inside their respective
cultures. But here�s a difference: The tobacco executives were lying, and
subsequent legal discovery showed how extensive their understanding of
nicotine was. The three university presidents, however�with their moral
confusion on naked display�were likely not lying; instead, we saw a set of
true believers in a new kind of religion.

It is important to note that the three presidents who testified before
Congress�Liz Magill, who subsequently resigned as president of the
University of Pennsylvania; Sally Kornbluth, of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology; and Claudine Gay, of Harvard University�didn�t
open themselves up to perjury charges. Instead, they revealed themselves
as having drunk the Kool-Aid of a new and cultlike worldview. Along with
so much of higher education, especially outside the hardest of sciences,
they have become acolytes of a shallow new theology called
�intersectionality.� This is neither a passing fad nor something that
normies can roll our eyes at and ignore. As Andrew Sullivan presciently
predicted a mere six years ago, the tenets of this all-encompassing
ideology have quickly spilled beyond trendy humanities departments at top-
30 universities, and its self-appointed priestly class tried tirelessly to
enforce its ideology.

At root, intersectionality teaches that the relative victim status of
various groups is the deepest truth, and this framework must drive our
interpretation of both natural and built reality. Truth, moral claims,
beauty, dignity, the explanatory value of a research insight�all of these
must be subjugated to a prior determination of the historical power or
powerlessness of certain sociological categories. This victimology decrees
that the world, and every institution therein, must be divided by the
awakened into categories of oppressors and oppressed. Immutable group
identities, rather than the qualities, hopes, and yearnings of
individuals, are the keys to unlocking the power structures behind any
given moment: All the sheep and goats must be sorted.

The bullying certainty of this belief system is indeed boring, but that is
not to say that every move is predictable. For instance, depending on
their skin tone, sexual orientation, or religious views, tenured Ivy
Leaguers earning five times the median American income may be categorized
as oppressed. Conversely, depending on their skin tone, sexual
orientation, or religious views, janitors at Walmart may be considered,
within the intersectionality matrix, to be irredeemable oppressors.

By way of disclosure: I am a university president turned United States
senator turned university president again. The institution I now lead, the
University of Florida, faces all sorts of challenges, and Florida is the
site of important battles about the responsibilities of academia to our
society. As a public university, our incredibly talented and dedicated
faculty aim to provide an elite education that promotes resilience and
strength in our students so that they are tough enough, smart enough, and
compassionate enough to engage big ideas in a world where people will
always disagree.

Growing up, I idolized Martin Luther King Jr., who championed universal
human dignity with clear-cut moral authority. From memory, writing in a
jail cell in Birmingham, he synthesized, refined, and applied the Western
canon�s greatest philosophers, from Socrates to Abraham Lincoln, to
America�s predicament. While damning the original sin of white supremacy,
he consistently offered hope that our country could overcome injustice
with love. It�s gut-wrenching to think that America�s greatest civil-
rights leader�one of the greatest Americans in the country�s entire
history�would have his �Letter From Birmingham Jail� criticized and
dismissed for citing only dead white males if it were written today. Too
much of elite academia cares little for universal human dignity, leaves no
space for forgiveness, and exhibits no interest in shared progress.

Today, free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal improvement,
and healthy cultural cross-pollination are all obliterated by omnipotent
determinisms. This is why academics at the Smithsonian created a graphic
for children that portrayed America as an irredeemably racist society,
asserting that �rugged individualism,� �the nuclear family,� and �hard
work� are �internalized � aspects of white culture.� The message is clear:
Success is always a privilege given, never the result of hard work;
virtues such as self-reliance are unattainable for minorities.

These elites believe that the world must be remade. Since the beginning of
time, oppressors�the �privileged��ran roughshod over the oppressed or
marginalized. Now oppressors must be brought low to atone for history�s
sins. It is a faith without guardrails, without grace, and certainly
without reconciliation. It requires a life of moral struggle against the
devil and the world, but with no eschatology of hope. There is no heaven
coming here.

This religiosity has colonized humanities departments across supposedly
secular higher education. Institutions ostensibly dedicated to the search
for truth, to the exploration of ideas, and to the advancement of human
flourishing have, instead, devoted themselves to inquisitions and struggle
sessions.

Students catalog microaggressions and conflate comfort with safety.
Faculty who dare to treat students like adults with a bit of grit face
professional consequences. Administrators police language. Hiring
committees compel DEI statements. Academic conferences provide safe spaces
instead of thought-provoking forums. Admissions officers devise formulas
to rank students based on race, class, and gender. Universities respond
haplessly to mobs wielding the heckler�s veto to shut down thoughtful
deliberation.

The moral confusion on too many campuses after the October 7 massacre
of 1,200 Israelis fits a familiar pattern. The acceptability of the speech
depends on the speaker. Individuals from oppressed groups are given leeway
to target oppressor groups through disruptions and threats. This
victimology allows Palestinians and their supporters (the oppressed) to
target, intimidate, and harass Jews (the oppressors).

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false

In the morally backward universe of American campuses: The terrified
Jewish students at Cooper Union, locked in the library while a mob banged
on doors and spat anti-Semitic chants, are the bad guys. A group of
Harvard students who surrounded and harassed a Jewish student are the good
guys. It�s not hard to see why the Harvard students who occupied
University Hall in a pro-Palestinian demonstration were offered food
instead of being arrested.

Three fundamental tenets of a free society are that beliefs are not
necessarily true merely because they are held by a majority, or wrong
because only a minority agree; that while we seek to eliminate violence,
we do not seek to suppress diversity of views; and that souls cannot be
compelled. The reigning orthodoxy on supposedly elite campuses is that the
first two theses are retrograde, and the third is naive because souls
don�t even exist.

In this upside-down system, an oppressor�s speech is violence. Sometimes
an oppressor�s silence is violence. But for the oppressed, even violence
is just speech.

The university presidents who testified before Congress were not wrong
that the line beyond protected speech is action�this is the well-
established American tradition. But having so selectively applied that
standard in the institutions they wield, they forfeited any claim to be
motivated by protecting speech; they are simply in the business of
choosing allies and outcasts based on a dogma of victimology. Harvard�s
freshman orientation specifically instructs students that failing to
adhere to new dogmatic linguistic constructions that didn�t exist a few
years ago is abuse, and students anticipate consequences.