What is it that they want?

On the Harvard-letter, "Viewpoint Diversity" and the Usefulness of Idiots

The letter that Harvard University received from the federal government (Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the General Services Administration) last week was something like a controlled demolition, with each demand a charge to knock out another pillar of academic freedom. The letter, like much of the current onslaught on higher ed, seems to have originated from the Task-Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which the Wall Street Journal explored here and whose remit seems to have mysteriously expanded to cover a slew of MAGA pre-occupations, including, dismantling what they call “DEI”, “ending racial preferences in admissions and hiring” and … forcing more MAGA profs and students into American academia (which will be the main focus of my post). Harvard announced on Monday that it would not comply with what was demanded in the letter, as well they had to. It’s hard to imagine Harvard surviving as a university if it had.

Among the demands the letter made of Harvard:

— Harvard was supposed to restructure its governance system. As at Columbia, this seemingly would have involved ceding a lot of faculty governance to the top of the university. It also would have involved “empowering … from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter.” Just in case that part was unclear, it would also involve “reducing the power held by faculty … and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship”. In case you don’t notice the dog whistle here — this is about scholars of race, gender, and anything else conservatives don’t like. I keep getting asked whether comparing these letters to the policy of Gleichschaltung isn’t excessive — this is literally telling Harvard only to promote people in line with MAGA preferences and policies.

— Harvard was to “cease all preference based on race, color, religion sex, or national origin” in hiring. The university was supposed to submit all its hiring data to the feds for “a comprehensive audit”. Most ominously, “such adoption and implementation must be durable and demonstrated through structural and personnel changes.” Which I think means: hire more MAGA and do it now. As with many of these, the timeline here is breathtaking: academic hiring takes a long time, changing the demographics of a discipline practically forever. These would need to do almost random rush appointments on the say-so of powerful politicians and conservative donors — it would amount to academic suicide by clientilism.

— Harvard was told to stop using race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in college admissions and submit all relevant data to the feds. What is more, “statistical information regarding admissions shall be made available to the public, including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests.” If you’re thinking: hey, is this just about putting an asterisk behind any non-white person attending Harvard, you’d be 100% right.

— Next is the “no Arabs”-clause: Harvard is told to institute an ideological screening of “international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values”. There were a bunch of bullet points about student discipline that all read like conservative (and anti-Muslim) special pleading: apparently student discipline wasn’t previously applied “with consistency and impartiality, without double standards based on identity or ideology”. Apparently, “deplatforming” is a massive problem that requires the feds to get involved.

— Harvard was to commit to an “audit” (the feds’ words) of “the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Several programs/departments/centers were even up for full “reform” directed by outside auditors. And when I say “several”, I might need to take a deep breath, because “the programs, schools, and centers of concern include but are not limited to the Divinity School, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Medical School, Religion and Public Life Program, FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Carr Center for Human Rights at the Harvard Kennedy School, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.”

Three things that I want to mention about the letter before I move on to the thing I really want to talk about:

(1) Those who have humored conservative talking points — those over “deplatforming” and “identity politics”, for instance — might ask themselves whether they are surprised by this letter, and, if they are surprised, whether they should perhaps have their heads examined. The conservative assault on higher education has known many idiots, and now they’re finding out how useful they were. For this letter is a laundry list of right wing campus grievances, but reformulated not as handwringing concern-pieces with nary a peep on how this is supposed to be implement, i.e. the way you used to present these books in The Atlantic or the way your talked about these issues in your Wall Street Journal column. No, they now present as what they in truth always were — a deeply punitive and authoritarian demand for access to one of the few arenas in American life that is not dominated by white conservative men.

(2) As readers of this newsletter will recall, there are four aspects of the University’s functioning that the Supreme Court singled out as centrally protected by academic freedom: “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study”. Try to figure out how many of those would be left standing once the catalogue of demands were to have been implemented. I’d say it’s literally none of them. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that SCOTUS said “on academic grounds” — what the Trump administration demanded from Harvard would be a hiring scheme that would have nothing to do with academic grounds, but with maintaining its federal financial support. That actually contravenes academic freedom as outlined by the Supreme Court in 1957 twice over.

(3) Finally: many on social media celebrated Harvard’s reaction, and it’s indeed nice to see one of the big Ivies put up resistance (a bunch of less prominent schools have resisted earlier, which weirdly enough seems to have escaped notice — go figure). But when you read the letter Harvard was responding to, it feels like they could not have possibly acceded to the demands — not just on intellectual or ethical grounds, or even prudential ones; but rather on purely financial ones. Acceding to these demands would have been ruinously expensive and completely impractical. So I sort of suspect that this is just a funding cut with some extra steps. This is meant to drain Harvard’s resources, possibly to set up another assault later.

There are law professors and historians who will be able to sort through the wreckage here much better than I will be able to — I’m pretty excited for Lauren Lassabe Shepherd’s podcast American Campus to do an episode on this standoff. But I feel like I am well positioned to speak to the campus fantasies that seem to animate the Task-Force’s letter and its demands. Because these kinds of letters are by now a small genre, and they always are at base two things: (1) brutal assaults on higher education and academic freedom, and (2) expressions of a bizarre fever dream of the campus that has become integral to the right’s self-understanding over the last few decades. The reason to focus on both of these is simple: many who condemn the current assault have paved the way for it by peddling these campus fantasies; yes, a lot of peddlers of campus panics maintain these fantasies while claiming to want to defend the university.

Last week, I was part of a radio debate in Germany with a university rector from Germany and a journalist who had written a book about (as per the subtitle) “how a left-wing movement from the United States threatens our freedoms”. The rector was really good and well-informed — most centrally, you could tell that while she was not familiar with every aspect of how a US university is run, she could fall back on a shared sense that universities are complex systems and that simplistic understandings of how they work were probably wrong. No such luck with the journalist. He managed the truly jaw-dropping feat to excoriate Trump’s attempted takeover of the universities, while then granting most of its premises. The universities were too woke, they were echo chambers captured by a dangerous left-wing ideology that destroyed all dissent. At which point you wanted to ask: then why do you disagree with the remedy these people are proposing?

We recorded that conversation on Tuesday, I wish we could have spoken again after the letter Harvard received on Friday. Because it makes clear why it is such a fool’s errand to seek to give intellectual heft to gripes that objectively lack them. Not because the campus these people are attacking is different from what they say. But because that campus simply doesn’t exist. Let me pick out one of the demands made of Harvard, the old canard about “viewpoint diversity”. My interlocutor in the German radio debate echoed this concern, saying that universities had become dominated by “this ideology” (he didn’t say “wokeness”, but … it was “wokeness”) and did not represent the ideological breadth of the wider public. I replied that this was neither the point of a university, nor at all feasible. I think the letter Harvard received gives us a good idea why.

Here’s how the letter proposes to bring about more “viewpoint diversity” at Harvard:

“Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests. Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.”

To quote a slightly tired internet meme: that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works. But I get why each of these sounds reasonable to the uninitiated, which is why these kinds of talking points would do well with a German journalist who moved to the US in 2021, decided wokeness was out of control, talked to Chris Rufo and Francis Fukuyama about it and then wrote a book about it in 2022. These are the kinds of claims where to lodge objections gets the response that “surely it can’t be a bad thing to…”. And no, in the absolutely pristine realm of abstraction, untouched by real existing institutions and grown structures, surely it cannot be a bad thing to have viewpoint diversity. But get concrete even in the slightest, and this soufflé of high principles collapses.

So you don’t want “ideological litmus tests”? “Ideological litmus tests” sound terrible, who’d want any of those? But this is the kind of thing where either the remedy presumes problems not actually in evidence, or it runs into logical problems in the few places where it does apply. What do I mean by that? Scroll through the departments of a university and you will quickly realize that most of them cannot possibly have “litmus tests”. If the assumption is that, say, the math department asks you who you voted for or how you feel about tax rates, then that’s just calumny. Who would do that, how would it even come up? If this were brought to a Dean’s attention, a search would be immediately shut down. I’m guessing this is ultimately a cavil about diversity statements, which right wingers have been freaking out about forever, even though (a) honestly most people don’t read those, I fear; and (b) the question of how, on a diverse, international and multicultural campus, you will engage with a broad range of students is a part of doing business, not “ideology”. If I were hiring a Brahms-specialist in 2025, I’d want to make sure this colleague can teach and reach out to students with no previous experience with classical music — so I’d want some kind of statement of how the instructor attracts — gasp! — a broad range of students to their classes. Not because I’m a leftie cuck, but because I want students in my classrooms.

Speaking of Brahms-specialists: If we expand what constitutes a “litmus test” (as we would sort of have to, since literal litmus tests don’t exist), we get to the departments or programs these people are really upset about. Yes, after fifty years of right wing assaults on gender and sexual minorities, after twenty years on the discipline of gender studies, there may not exactly be parity within gender studies when it comes to party affiliation. At the same time: people self-select into these fields, sub-fields, and even specific questions and methods — and while I don’t think it’s totally contiguous with one’s ideology, it easily could be. There are assumptions and priors built into the disciplines, which, yes, can in the aggregate align with the ideology of the practitioner of those disciplines. Sociology is fascinated with inequality, and addressing it, and tends to dislike simplistic answers like that people ought to buck up — so people who think that the government should not ameliorate inequality might find sociology less interesting than, say, studying criminal justice or the law. Psychology tends to gravitate towards methods that suggest people are not fully in control of their own decisions, which might in the aggregate select for a more misanthropic group of scholars than, say, art practice.

These priors cut both ways politically: my university does not have a department of gender studies, you cannot get hired into gender studies at all. What it does have is a vast business school with 119 faculties at last count, a school that quite naturally has a bunch of priors about capitalism, free enterprise, business structure, profit-making, about the uses of a university education. I imagine if you don’t share those, you’ll have a hard time getting a job there. This doesn’t seem to be the kind of “litmus test” the Harvard letter has in mind. More to the point: given that it’s a professional school and is supposed to prepare students for the business world, it’s not an unfortunate side effect that it is pro-business and skeptical of government intervention. It is central to its effectiveness as what it is. I wouldn’t want those people to hire me, if I’m honest. It would make them objectively worse at what they’re supposed to be doing.

Notice, however, that if we were to truly apply what the Harvard-letter seems to be advocating equitably, i.e. not just to fields these people hate, the Stanford School of Business soon might be forced to hire me! If everyone at the Harvard business school were too — gasp! — pro-business, then they’d have to hire dirtbag leftists from Brooklyn until they had at last attained parity. Of course, their graduates would be showing up to interviews asking what it’s all for, man, and calling for world revolution and the interviewers would say, sir, this is a Deloitte’s. The business school is an extreme case, but to some extent this is true for many departments: we call them “disciplines” for a reason; they encode certain implicit values and hierarchies into their status as disciplines; and those values and hierarchies might well translate into the ideology of the practitioners of that discipline. Musicology thinks classical music is worth studying, classics thinks we should heed the wisdom of the Greeks … these are not neutral propositions, nor can they be!

The letter Harvard received disregards all of this. The reason why is simple: it notices ideological prerequisites and premises only where it doesn’t agree with them. Ideology is for other people. Given their hatred for “DEI”, we might well say that ideology for them is other people. But the Harvard-letter gets even more fantastical when it demands remedies: “hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity” is another thing that sounds good in principle. Until you think about it for a microsecond. The joke that this is “affirmative action for MAGA” is snappy and not altogether wrong, but it occludes one central point: applicants do check a box that identifies them demographically. We don’t tend to ask applicants questionnaires about their political leanings, and I’d imagine there would be a (justified) outcry if we did! So where on earth would an applicant indicate whom they voted for, or what their feelings were about January 6, or about tariffs, etc.?

Years ago I was on a hiring committee at Stanford (not in my department), where one of the top candidates wrote on, let’s say, conservative-coded topics. War, masculinity, etc. As I recall, several members of the search committees made a strong push for this scholar, arguing essentially intellectual diversity. Here was someone doing big conservative topics, it would be a good counterbalance to what most of the department did. The rest of us were persuaded: he indeed covered things the department in question didn’t, he had an interesting way of talking about them, he seemed steeped in a different archive than most other applicants. We offered him the job, he ended up taking a job elsewhere. But during his campus visit two things emerged: first, he was absolutely brilliant and lovely, and we’d made a very wise decision. Second, he was a dyed-in-the-wool radical who, when talking about his topic not as a scholar, but just as a citizen and human being, was such a firebrand it made my jaw drop. The reasons one shouldn’t seek to discover an applicant’s ideological leanings are multiple, but one of them surely is the following: at a certain level of sophistication, it’s damn near impossible to guess how those leanings interact with their work. I have colleagues who I agree with politically on everything, and every time we talk literature we get into a massive fight. I have colleagues who are, essentially, MAGA in exactly the way the Harvard-letter seems to imagine, but who every time they talk about our shared field make perfect sense to me!

The idea that universities somehow screen out conservative scholars is fantastical. What’s even more fantastical is that they could. When I applied for my job at Stanford, my colleagues knew three things about me: I had written a dissertation on metaphysical theories of marriage at the turn of the nineteenth century — I believe my job talk was on the Catholic Romantic (and friend of F.W.J. Schelling) Franz von Baader. It was all about binary gender and the way certain Romantics based their conservative politics on it post-1815. Was I pro, was I anti? Not the question I asked, I was trying to explain late Romanticism’s corporate nationalism. My other job talk (yes, they made me do two) was on Richard Wagner’s opera Siegfried. The other thing they would have known is that I had just completed a German-language book on four-hand piano playing in nineteenth-century Europe. Which, sure, quoted a lot of Adorno, but it also quoted a lot of Nietzsche. Readers of this newsletter know my positions on many political issues, but — and that’s my point — what part of my CV would have given my colleagues any indication of my political leanings? Now imagine if I’d been a specialist in the Baroque, or the spice trade, or Korean politics, or ammonites.

The reason to dwell on this is simply that “hire more conservatives” says something far more than what it claims to say. Many conservative (and many liberal) commentators like to claim that the academy has become overly “politicized”; but the truth is that in some central respects it’s deeply depoliticized, except conservatives would like to change that. I have taught alongside deeply conservative colleagues of whom I didn’t realize they were deeply conservative until they said something on our way to or out of class. I have taught alongside leftist colleagues who I assumed were centrists or even Republicans. This person studies operas about ancient gods and knights and is upset that their students no longer study the classics? Sounds conservative, but in practice that person could be an impassioned reader of Roger Scruton who thinks multiculturalism has destroyed the West’s belief in transcendent art; or they could be an Adorno-student who thinks that pop culture is capitalist trash meant to sap the working class of its revolutionary zeal. That’s not to say that there aren’t lines to be drawn between our work and our opinions — it would be psychotic if there weren’t. But at a certain level of complexity, and once one’s field of study is sufficiently remote from day-to-day politics (outside, say, the Department of Political Science or the School of Sustainability), those lines are not straightforward or altogether predictable.

I’ve written before about the fact that conservative and liberal critics of “the university” really always pick out certain subsections of it and hold them up as stand-ins for the whole. That’s because they’re trying to get away from the fact I just pointed out: that in the normal day-to-day operation of the university, decisions are made for all sorts of reasons, all of which could be understood on some level as ideological, but importantly not in the sense that these people mean it. These critics like focusing on those fields where the general ideology of the university (evidence is good, we can solve social and technological problems, more education is good, etc.) is paired with a more overt political positioning. These exist of course, but public discourse also tends to only fixate on a select few of them. To go back to my earlier example, I’ve found that the level of groupthink and orthodoxy among business school faculty can be pretty shocking. But sure, let’s keep talking about the department of gender studies we don’t have.

And that’s to say nothing of the kinds of institutions that were created just to offer conservatives comfy sinecures on campus. Think of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, which has an explicit political and ideological program, and which specifically caters to Republicans and other conservatives. My interlocutor during the aforementioned radio debate pointed out that Francis Fukuyama agreed with him that universities were ideological echo chambers, or some such. I don’t grant that. But I also think it’s super rich coming from Frank Fukuyama who was making that pronouncement from within an institution explicitly designed as an ideological echo chamber. As are the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, the Buckley Institute at Yale, etc. etc.

This by the way is the answer to a question I asked rhetorically a little earlier: “So where on earth would an applicant indicate whom they voted for, or what their feelings were about January 6, or about tariffs, etc.?” This is your answer: this isn’t about hiring people who happen to think conservative thoughts. It is about hiring people who run in conservative circles, who have come up through conservative think tanks, who are friends with conservative donors and politicians. “Intellectual diversity” may sound good, but it really is not intellectual at all. It would be about the placement of people in academia based on affinity networks — and while that’s of course something that already happens for both conservatives and non-conservatives, it’s also something we fight like hell because it destroys the legitimacy the university. The fantasy that drives something like the letter to Harvard is a hiring committee that just appoints a random person because they’re Black or trans. This isn’t the world we live in, but it’s a confession of what they’d like to see happen in the form of projection. For the very real world something like the letter to Harvard wants to see is one where a hiring committee just appoints a random person because the right rich right-wing psychos happen to know who they are.

Finally, let me get to the most hilarious part of the entire letter: “every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” Yes, you read that right: if your majors tend too far to the left, you have to keep admitting students until you’re at parity. There are just so many things wrong here, it’s hard to know in what order to take them: first off, the idea that we can determine our students’ viewpoints — how would we do this? Why would Harvard want to? It feels incredibly creepy! Second off, they do realize these people are 19, right? People can change their minds, people can evolve, people can nuance. Heck, during a good college education they’ll probably do all of these things on many issues. If a student who entered as a free-market absolutist decides that, no, actually, some intervention is necessary, will they have to notify the Chief Ideology Officer of their change of heart, so that a new Rand-ian can be admitted?

Third, “every teaching unit” is doing a lot of work here: I’m guessing they’re hedging here because if you say “department” the absurdity becomes plain. Simply put: we don’t have ideological litmus tests for our students, if for no other reason that we are desperate for more students. Does the Trump-administration seriously think a department with like eight majors, would turn away a prospective major because they know he’s in the Young Republicans? Finally, it’s worth noting that very few of the units the letter seems most upset about can admit their own students. If the department of African and African American Studies doesn’t have enough white students, it’s because too few white people have signed up to be majors. You could table harder at the major’s fair, you could hand out lollypops or have t-shirts made or whatever. But no one gets admitted to college into a major. You’d think these people would know that.

At this point, you might ask: if this is so fantastical, Adrian, why do people believe this? Well, for a very simple reason: what you’re witnessing is not an accurate picture being painted of our universities. What you’re witnessing is their self-portrait. These are people who haven’t changed their mind since college, people who hated being the one conservative in that one history class, the ones who are convinced they didn’t get that essay prize because they wrote for the Dartmouth Review. These are the people who are convinced they would have gotten into Harvard and wouldn’t have to go to Duke, if it weren’t for their white skin. These are the people who invited Dinesh D’Souza to speak on campus, and when someone shouted at him during Q&A got to go on Tucker to talk about it in their beigest suit. When it comes to DOGE we are all living in the nightmarish hellscape of an aging tech nerd’s failing self-image; when it comes to the government and the universities, we’re living inside the neuroses and biographical hangups of guys who never got over having been deeply, deeply uncool in college.