I did not go to Harvard. This has never been an aim of mine. I never applied to it, never gave it a chance to reject me, not for college or grad school or continuing ed or lessons in Harvarding or whatever else Harvard may offer. Yet because I live and breathe, Harvard and its goings-on has been inescapable background in my life. Anything that happens at Harvard, the Iviest of Ivy League universities, is news—national or international.
And anyone who went to Harvard will, per tradition, either let you know (a reputation shared, fairly or not, with vegans and polyamorists) or be so evasive about it, so concerned that you will think them a snob, that they can speak about their hallowed alma mater only in euphemistic terms: they went to school somewhere near Boston.
But the Harvard-est thing of all is to write a think-piece about why Harvard doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t matter, or should maybe just go away entirely, and why you, a Harvard student or graduate or professor, are uniquely positioned to explain this. As a Harvardian, they begin, in a holding-forth about Harvard, one that assumes an audience of people as interested in Harvard as they are. (OK, fine, this is also a thing at Yale.)
Normally, my tolerance for this is nil. But the times are not normal. You can find Harvardian navel-gazing insufferable and still respect the institution as the collective endeavour of the very impressive. You can think, enough about Harvard already, and still think it’s chilling suppression of speech and knowledge and liberalism and whatnot for the Trump administration to effectively try to shut Harvard down.
And the reason I am here, in The Canadian Jewish News, bringing this up? Trump’s still on his anti-antisemitism crusade, so the nonsense about trying to prevent Harvard from taking international students is being done for us.
Aw, Trump, you shouldn’t have. I mean really, you shouldn’t have.
Steven Pinker—the Harvard of Canadian Jewish academics, maybe, at least until the ex-Yale-profs get settled—is a professor at a university somewhere near Boston. He has a gargantuan essay up in The New York Times about “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” his term for the Trump administration’s intense focus on diminishing that one university. Pinker notes that he himself has had his criticisms of Harvard (he links to a bunch), but makes the now-usual arguments about not getting rid of the baby along with the bathwater.
These arguments are familiar now, painfully so, but no less correct for it. Destroying knowledge-producing institutions because ‘woke’ got annoying is ridiculous, but here we are. Cue the debates about whether the Steven Pinkers of the world should be praised for speaking out against Trump, or blamed for having criticized social justice excesses to begin with. (I go with the former interpretation, but then again, I would.)
Where Harvard is concerned, however, Pinker’s phrasing is telling: “For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so.”
There’s a kind of dialectic in place, wherein Harvard’s detractors and defenders alike present the rest of higher education—as in, all that is not Harvard—as a kind of parenthetical. It is precisely because Harvard is so into its Harvardness that an administration wishing to take down American higher education would so disproportionately target that institution. Is Harvard especially antisemitic? Who knows, probably not. But it is especially Harvard.
The word “Harvard” appears 59 times in Pinker’s essay, not including the headline or bio. (I’m trying to think if I have typed “the University of Chicago” 59 times in my life, and my college job was at the campus alumni magazine.) But the most important part is buried low down, and not Harvard-specific:
“The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch.”
None of the pretexts are the point. It’s not about getting rid of left-wing antisemitism, as Pinker conveys, as one or two others (myself included) have pointed out, into the void. If it were—and this is me speculating, not Pinker—then the target would be random American-born college students who made Palestine their personalities on Oct. 8. It would not be foreign students.
Nor is it even about ideological diversity on campus. The entirely ideological diversity framework fails to get at the fact that for the ascendant Trumpist conservative movement, the aim is not to have a greater number of right-leaning centrists or libertarians or whatever teaching seminars. Rather, it’s to chuck ideological diversity entirely, in favour of the only thought leaders being far-right ones.
The point of squashing Harvard is to rid America of those fancy-schmancy experts. The brain drain underway—and no, I don’t just mean three Yale professors—is a feature, not a bug. The idea is not to remake higher ed in some more meritocratic, less ‘woke’ or activist incarnation. It is to remake the United States, turning it into a place that prioritizes manufacturing over a knowledge economy, and that pushes women out of the paid workforce entirely. The point is to turn the country into some sort of real-life version of the AI-generated images of idealized (if extra-digit-possessing) 1950s families one finds on X. It’s not about unplugging the universities so as to plug them back in again in the hopes that they work. It’s about removing the electrical connection from the house.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. Subscribe to her podcast, The Jewish Angle wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll have more updates on Substack and The CJN’s own daily newsletter.
