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).

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and
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.

These academic leaders did not arrive at this dogma of victimology
recently. They built their careers on it, funded it, celebrated it openly.
When the rape of Israeli women cannot be unequivocally condemned because
of their status as Jews, when calls for genocide require additional
�context,� it is clear that many of country�s putatively best minds are
unable to make basic moral judgments.

A 2019 conversation with some highly degreed Ivy Leaguers still rings in
my ears. A number of white academic advocates of the term Latinx told me,
when I still represented Nebraska in the Senate, that it would be �racist�
not to teach newly arrived El Salvadoran immigrants to rural Nebraska to
refer to themselves by this newly invented word. To recall the aphorism
attributed�probably apocryphally�to George Orwell: �Some ideas are so
stupid that only intellectuals believe them.�

Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were originally founded as seminaries. They
are seminaries once again. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and
oppressive in its prohibition of insiders and outsiders from pursuing free
inquiry. Rather than wrestle with hard questions about human dignity,
individual agency, and speech, many in the Ivy League seem poised to
double down on fanaticism.

Cults tend to excuse their failures: The world is ending, but our mystic
math was a little off. As this crisis unfolds, America�s elite academics
are tinkering with their doctrinal formulas. Rather than abandon their
theology, they�re attempting to rejigger the charts and reweight the
numerology.

We cannot heal these declining institutions simply by recalculating the
grid so that Jewish people are moved from the �powerful� square to a
�powerless� slot. The problem is the tyranny of the power grid itself, and
its disinterest in both ideas and universal human dignity.

Changing one president here or there isn�t enough. Intersectionality is a
religious cult that�s dominated higher education for nearly a decade with
the shallow but certain idea that power structures are everything, the
Neanderthal view that blunt force trumps human dignity.

The nonsense we�ve seen seeping off campuses this fall is jarring but not
surprising, given that the absurdities inside this worldview have not been
pressure-tested. This is because its adherents, those who wield the power
of some of our society�s most prominent institutions, have prohibited
anyone from asking questions, demanding that their religion remain immune
to challenge.

Rebellion against this arrogant worldview was inevitable. Many of us have
long expected a correction against the certainties of this campus creed,
and I suspect that the public�s They can�t say what? reaction to
Kornbluth, Gay, and Magill might prove to be a breaking point. While
populists have always found the bashing of elites fashionable, this moment
calls for something more constructive. It also calls for something deeper
than free speech for free speech�s sake.

We ought to dispense with the laughably absurd notion that these
university presidents are somehow steadfast champions of free speech.
Where was this commitment when MIT canceled a speech from a climate
scientist who voiced opposition to affirmative action? Where was this
obligation when a lecturer said she felt pushed out of Harvard for
suggesting that sex is a biological fact? Where was this duty when Penn
tried to fire a law-school professor who made odious comments about
minority groups and immigration policy? These elite institutions make the
rules up as they go and stack the deck against disfavored groups. Ask
conservative students how many loopholes they have to jump through to
reserve spaces or invite speakers. Ask the students who report holding
back their views in class or paper-topic selection for fear of facing
consequences. For that matter, ask anyone who has been paying attention
for the past 20 years. These universities aren�t doggedly committed to
free speech; they�re desperately trying to find some cover. The expensive
public-relations firms they�ve hired for crisis management are grasping at
straws.

This is not merely�or primarily�a free-speech issue. Yes, of course,
universities ought to be informed by speech. At the University of
Florida�where, despite the Ivy League�s hegemony of the national
conversation, we award twice as many bachelor�s degrees each year to
extraordinary students as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined �we are
proud to uphold the First Amendment rights of all our students. America�s
First Amendment gives everyone the right to make an abject idiot of
themselves, and we will defend that right as we also defend our students
from violence, vandalism, and harassment. But this is deeper than those
speech issues. What�s at stake is nothing less than the mission of a
university. Our campuses are meant to be communities of scholars pursuing
truth together, in a community built to discover, teach, share, and
refine. A foundational commitment to human dignity is essential to the
very purpose of education.

Unfortunately, the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn abandoned that
commitment in front of Congress last week. At a perilous moment, they
failed the test.

Higher education is facing a crisis of public trust. The simple fact of
the matter is, fewer and fewer Americans believe that universities are
committed to the pursuit of truth. Understanding why isn�t hard at a time
when elite institutions make excuses for illiberal mobs. The perception
that ideologues and fanatics are running the show on campus is, sadly,
based in reality. The public sees it. Donors see it. Boards see it. Alumni
see it. We recognize callousness and indifference�we saw it from Big
Tobacco in 1994 and we�re seeing it from the Ivy League now. The public is
not about to forget it.

As administrators, donors, faculty, and trustees of institutions around
the country, this is our moment. It is up to us to rebuild trust in higher
education. It is our responsibility to speak plainly, defend our students,
defend pluralism, and tend to the high calling of educating.

The only way forward is for universities to embrace classical
liberalism�with its values of freedom, tolerance, and pluralism, all
grounded in human dignity. Recasting oppressors and oppressed is a dead
end. As the cult of intersectionality implodes before our eyes, it is time
for higher education to commit itself to earnestly engaging new ideas and
respectfully participating in big debates on a whole host of issues.
Universities must reject victimology, celebrate individual agency, and
engage the truth with epistemological modesty. Institutions ought to
embrace open inquiry. Education done rightly should be defined by big-
hearted debates about important issues.

More curiosity, less orthodoxy. Explore everything with humility,
including views of sex and gender that were standard until the previous
decade, classical traditions, America�s promise and progress, and the
concept of universal human dignity�the very thing that Hamas and its
apologists reject. Engage the ideas. Pull apart the best arguments with
the best questions. Do it again and again and again. Build communities
that take ideas seriously, so that scholars and students can grow in both
understanding and empathy.

David Frum: There is no right to bully and harrass

Self-government makes high demands of its citizens. Today�s students will
be called to lead in a complicated world where not everyone will agree,
where trade-offs will be necessary, where basic values inform the work of
navigating complex realities. The current illiberal climate on campuses is
the kind of tragedy that could doom a republic. We cannot let that happen.

To keep America�s universities the envy of the world, we need to make our
institutions welcoming homes for those who are passionate about the
glorious mission of education and the communities of free thought it
requires. If you entered academia because you share that joy, find
institutions that are serious about renewing higher education and are
serious about stewarding this incredible calling. Those of us�left, right,
or center�who value human dignity, pluralism, and genuine progress and who
want to make sure that we pass these blessings to the next generation
cannot abandon institutions to post-liberals on the left who would destroy
them from within or post-liberals on the right who would tear them to the
ground. At our best, the academy promotes human flourishing in ways that
no other sector can. If we commit ourselves to the work of creating,
discovering, and serving�not enforcing impersonal hierarchies of power or
stifling inquiry�we�ll rebuild public trust.

Those of us called to higher education�members of boards, presidents,
administrators, professors, and donors�owe it to future generations to
build something better.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/interesectionality-
american-college/676350/