In a post last week I marveled at the sudden discovery by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT of the importance of freedom of speech when it involves demonstrators favoring elimination of Israel and slaughter of Jews. Yet somehow, at the same institutions, comparable principles just don’t seem to apply in the case of basic dissent from leftist political orthodoxy. When the official party line gets questioned, all the elite universities have multiple tactics to diminish and banish the deviators, whether that be by demanding loyalty oaths (e.g., “diversity statements”) in hiring or admissions, holding mandatory “diversity” or “sensitivity” training sessions, disinviting speakers, conducting pretextual investigations of dissenters, funding the favored and denying tenure to the disfavored, and many other such methods.

So how bad is it out there on elite campuses, really? It’s not so easy to find out. Mostly, the schools keep the worst of the rot fairly well hidden from the public, and for that matter from alumni. The publications sent to alumni (I get several of them) wildly play down the extent of the left wing political orthodoxy enforcement.

But the controversy following the Congressional testimony of the three Presidents had caused the curtain to get somewhat pulled back. The past couple of weeks have seen a few enterprising commenters putting together some collections of very revealing university materials for students, and of statements by university officials.

My first example comes from an unlikely source, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times named Pamela Paul. Ms. Paul is a relatively recent addition to the Times’s stable of regular columnists, having come off a stint as editor of their Book Review. Many commenters at the Times seem to think Ms. Paul is a “conservative,” although I would say that is far overstating things. (For example, here is a November 30 column about the possibility of a second Trump presidency (“[W]e know there’s a bomb under the table — the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency . . . [C]rippling destruction . . . will ensue.”), and another from September 21 defending President Biden against a potential impeachment (“The impeachment inquiry is just the latest twisted Republican abuse of Democratic precedent.”))

Wherever you may place Ms. Paul on the political spectrum, her latest piece for the Times is quite eye-opening. The piece appeared in the print edition on December 18 with the headline “What Is Happening at the Columbia School of Social Work?” (The online version has a date of December 7; I cannot explain the time lag before it got into print.). Ms. Paul starts slowly, but the piece gets cranked up as it continues. First, a few definitions from a glossary of terms handed out to entering students at their orientation:

• Among the A’s: “agent and target of oppression” (“members of the dominant social groups privileged by birth or acquisition, who consciously or unconsciously abuse power against the members or targets of oppressed groups”) and “Ashkenormativity” (“a system of oppression that favors white Jewish folx, based on the assumption that all Jewish folx are Ashkenazi, or from Western Europe”).

• The C’s define “capitalism” as “a system of economic oppression based on class, private property, competition and individual profit. See also: carceral system, class, inequality, racism.” “Colonization” is “a system of oppression based on invasion and control that results in institutionalized inequality between the colonizer and the colonized. See also: Eurocentric, genocide, Indigeneity, oppression.”

Midway through the piece, we get to a new “framework” for study introduced at the school in 2017, centered around “power, race, oppression and privilege,” aka “PROP.” According to Paul, the PROP framework then got applied to the entire curriculum, and students were also required to take a mandatory PROP course. This is from the syllabus of the PROP course:

According to the course’s current syllabus, work “will be centered on an anti-Black racism framework” and “will also involve examinations of the intersectionality of issues concerning L.B.G.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, Indigenous people/First Nations people and land rights, Latinx representation, xenophobia, Islamophobia, undocumented immigrants, Japanese internment camps, indigent white communities (Appalachia) and antisemitism with particular attention given to the influence of anti-Black racism on all previously mentioned systems.”

Do you think you could attend this school and possibly fail to go along 100% with this propaganda? Forget about that:

As part of their coursework, students are required to give a presentation in which they share part of their “personal process of understanding anti-Black racism, intersectionality and uprooting systems of oppression.” They are asked to explain their presentation “as it relates to decolonizing social work, healing, critical self-awareness and self-reflection.” Teachings include “The Enduring, Invisible and Ubiquitous Centrality of Whiteness,” “Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People” and “What It Means to Be a Revolutionary,” a 1972 speech by Angela Davis.

And on and on from there. This is a “school”? Incidentally, Ms. Paul notes that the large majority of the students at the Columbia School of Social Work are intending to use their degree to become personal therapists in private practice. Does this training offer anything relevant to that line of work? If you were seeking a therapist, would you have any interest in hiring someone who had just been trained in the propaganda as described?

My second sample for today comes from a piece from Heather Mac Donald in the City Journal on December 14, title “The Academy at the Crossroads, Part Two.” Ms. Mac Donald’s piece is also part of a continuing response to the Congressional testimony of the three Presidents, and the fallout from that.

As you probably know, one of the consequences of the Congressional testimony was that the President of the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, got fired. But do you know who replaced her? Mac Donald:

[As] Penn’s temporary replacement for ousted president Magill . . . Penn’s trustees chose J. Larry Jameson, now dean of Penn’s medical school. . . .  As soon as Jameson took over the medical school in 2011, he placed diversity hiring and indoctrination at the core of his administration. He created the school’s first vice dean for Inclusion and Diversity and first associate dean for Diversity and Inclusion. Naturally, an Office of Inclusion and Diversity followed, which rolled out endless diversity initiatives and mandates, including Health Equity Weeks, the Transgender Patient Advocate program, and the LGBT Student-Trainee-Faculty Mentorship program. In 2021, Jameson initiated what the Penn press office called a “new institution-wide program aimed at eliminating structural racism.” 

Mac Donald continues with other examples. From Yale:

In 2015, Yale president Peter Salovey promised to pour even more funding into Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program. This largesse was part of Salovey’s personal crusade against Yale’s alleged racism. The ERM program is emblematic of every such “ethnic” and “postcolonial studies” program across the U.S. According to its course-catalogue description, it “draws from the long-standing fields of U.S. ethnic and Native studies, postcolonial, and subaltern studies but also represents emergent areas like queer of color critique, comparative diaspora studies, critical Muslim and critical refugee studies, race and media studies, feminist science studies, and the environmental humanities.” . . . Yale professor Zareena Grewal, a documentary filmmaker who teaches in the ERM program, is an embodiment of the ethnic- and post-colonial studies establishment. Grewal’s second film for television, Swahili Fighting Words, “traces the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and diasporic identity politics” through Tanzanian rap music. Predictably, she defended the October 7 attacks since, as she put it, “settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” She added: “My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity #FreePalestine.”

Mac Donald’s conclusion: “[U]niversities are waging a war on the West.” And essentially all dissenters have been excluded from their midst.

Is there any reason for optimism? Perhaps the current donor revolt will have some results. For myself, I don’t see a lot of reason for optimism at the moment.