The real reasons the GOP suddenly pretended to care about Harvard

For the last couple of weeks, it’s seemed like the New York Times has decided to reinvent itself as the Manhattan edition of the Harvard Crimson. Dozens of articles and opinion essays about the controversies swirling around the first Black president of America’s most prestigious university competed for space in America’s most prestigious news org with stories about mass death in Gaza, in a newsroom overpopulated with Harvard alums.

To be fair, the fracas over the university’s first-year president Claudine Gay — who faced ire over her handling of antisemitism allegations at the Cambridge, Mass., campus that somehow morphed into a mid-grade plagiarism case that forced her resignation — is an important story.

But the conservatives who drove the frenzy over Gay care about proper citations in obscure dissertations as much as the misogynistic dudes behind Gamergate pretended their orgy of harassment was actually about ethics in video-game journalism. This was a proxy war over something much, much bigger: Who controls the narrow pipelines into America’s elites, and how to preserve ancient hierarchies around race, gender, economic class, and social status.

The true meaning of Claudine Gay’s ouster can be seen in a story that’s gotten zero coverage in the New York Times or the rest of the mainstream media. At Louisiana State University, whose undergraduate enrollment of just under 29,000 is exactly four times that of Harvard, the looming arrival of a new right-wing GOP governor across town in Baton Rouge has sparked a quiet but significant effort to dismantle diversity efforts and kill anti-racism education in a state that was a cornerstone of first slavery and then Jim Crow segregation.

The Louisiana Illuminator reports that ahead of governor-elect Jeff Landry’s inauguration, LSU has already scrubbed a diversity statement from the university website, renamed its office dedicated to bolstering racial equity on campus to remove the word “Inclusion” and replace it with “Engagement,” and — in the most Orwellian move — deleted all links to a campus lecture series that was called “Racism: Dismantling the System,” tossing all of it down the memory hole.

Trust me, Harvard is going to be just fine, but the true goal of a bomb-throwers like Chris Rufo or the amorally ambitious Rep. Elise Stefanik is preventing what right wingers see as the rot of diversity, and real learning about American democracy on campuses like LSU or West Virginia University or Youngstown State. These schools educate far more students than the Ivy League (just 0.4% of all collegians) and are the potential growth engines for a thriving, multiracial middle class.

» READ MORE: Why Youngstown State matters more than Harvard | Will Bunch Newsletter

The citation errors made by Gay in her obscure academic writings have already become the launching pad for a new wave of McCarthyism potentially more dangerous than the original one, aimed at creating a climate of collegiate fear. The new “Red scare” looks to chill campus protests against the excesses of American oligarchy or the military-industrial complex, intimidate professors away from anything that questions white supremacy or the patriarchy or the hedge-fund billionaires profiting from all this, and to ultimately make sure “the right people” are choosing who gets in “the right schools” to perpetuate all this.

Indeed, Congress has made its intentions clear. The New York Times reported Friday that House Republicans behind the December hearing over incidents of campus antisemitism during the Israel-Hamas war, which triggered the downfall of both Gay and University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, are widening their probe to investigate academia in general. It said the House Education and Workforce Committee is adding staff and might issue subpoenas to delve into what its chair Rep. Virginia Foxx “has described as a ‘hostile takeover’ of higher education by partisan administrators and political activists.” The toxic spirit of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy is very much alive.

The chaos that this conservative crusade has unleashed on Harvard is symbolically a big deal. The crown jewel of the Ivies, which has a nearly $51 billion endowment and has granted degrees to eight U.S. presidents, is viewed by the right as the cradle of liberal ideology, despite the reality that it generates far more investment bankers than revolutionaries. But its enemies are right to think that what happens at Harvard — like the high-tuition model that over decades would spark a student-loan crisis — often trickles down through American higher education.

And since 2020′s massive Black Lives Matter marches that brought millions into the streets after the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, a band of counter-revolutionaries that combines right-wing culture warriors, the billionaire class, and cynical politicians has had American universities in the cross-hairs. I believe there are three reasons:

First, there’s no denying that college campuses, with masses of young people and ivory-tower idealism, have been incubators for social unrest going back centuries. In the United States, the first really big inflection point came into the 1960s, when students heavily steeped in the liberal arts lashed out against American hypocrisy from the segregated South to Vietnam. As I chronicled in my 2022 book After the Ivory Tower Falls, the backlash against 1960s’ campus protest led to today’s climate of outrageous tuition, student debt, and the end of affirmative action.

Today’s reactionaries are echoing what Ronald Reagan and other started. That movement’s “thought leader, Rufo, now claims there is a connection between the 2020 George Floyd protests and other actions like this year’s Middle East demonstrations, that left-wing protests are “a tactic that can be repurposed for any cause.”

Looking at things from the opposite perspective, Jenna Leventoff of the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in an op-ed that “if we learned anything from the experiences of our country’s universities during the McCarthy era and more recently in the years since 9/11, it’s that viewpoint-based efforts to police speech on campuses destroy the foundations on which academic communities are built.”

The second reason is preserving a conservative social order. Rufo and his allies like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have launched a series of broadsides — curtailing tenure, changes in college accreditation, replacing academic-minded university presidents with GOP politicians or hedge-funders, passing laws that can limit what’s taught about race or LGBTQ issues — that share the same goal of crimping college as a place where big ideas, let alone the truth of American history, can be taught.

Again, the events of 2020 only hardened the conviction on the right that the classroom — not just universities but beginning as early as kindergarten — is where today’s young people were introduced to ideas like tolerance for the LGBTQ community, demands for racial equity, opposition to the warrior-cop mode of policing, or the growing acceptance of socialism. It’s that last item in particular — the questioning by Millennials or Gen Z of the massive income inequality of the last 40-plus years — that has prompted billionaires donors like Penn Wharton School trustee Marc Rowan or Harvard’s chief gadfly Bill Ackman to get off the sidelines.

Finally, the elites want to make sure that the social and economic benefits that flow from the tiny number of coveted diplomas from top-shelf universities like Harvard or Penn stay within their communities ― especially their children and grandchildren. A hidden message from elite degree-holders like Stefanik (Harvard), DeSantis (Yale), newly minted Ivy League basher Sen. John Fetterman (Harvard), or Rufo (who overplays his degree from the Harvard Extension program) is that diversity and inclusion somehow dilutes their own self-promoted achievements. As an adviser to Reagan said in 1970, signaling the end to low public tuition that once made college accessible to many, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective...”

In a recent American Prospect article, writer Maureen Tkacik noted that Penn’s fights over antisemitism and a recent pro-Palestinian literary festival may have been heightened by anxiety from parents and alums that the number of Jewish students on campus has plunged from more than one-third to just 16%. In a world where knowledge is power, the wars over U.S. higher education always boils down to who has access to these golden tickets and who remains locked out.

We don’t really have to wonder about what the post-Claudine Gay, post-Harvard world of American college would look like. We can simply look south to the New College of Florida, the small public liberal-arts college in Sarasota that was once highly rated for its innovative academic programs and its iconoclastic student body, with a large LGBTQ component. Early last year, DeSantis all but handed the keys to his friend Rufo, now trustee and architect of its extreme right-wing makeover.

In its first full year under the regime of DeSantis, Rufo, and the college’s new president Richard Corcoran — a former top GOP lawmaker whose salary and perks of $1 million-plus are more than triple his predecessor — New College has seen a drop in the test scores of incoming students. Enrollment has grown, but only because of aggressive recruiting and generous scholarships to athletes for new or expanded sports teams, with many coming from conservative Christian schools. Scores of existing students have left and about half the faculty has quit or taken an extended leave.

Renegades like Rufo, DeSantis, and Stefanik don’t want to completely destroy the U.S. university, as long as the system validates them or people who look like them. But they don’t want college to raise “out groups” to their “in” status. They want higher education as a narrow stream of future capitalists and not a wide river of informed citizens trained in critical thinking, who might use their knowledge to upend an unjust system. In the end, Claudine Gay was just a speed bump on the conservatives’ road to controlling the future by controlling the present on America’s college campuses.

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