Monday, October 14, 2024

On the Role of Ideology in University Holidays

I contend that the ideological war being waged in the United States by the 2010s over whether October 12th should be “Indigenous People’s” Day or Columbus Day became real in 2021 when President Biden issued a proclamation commemorating “Indigenous People’s” Day not coincidentally to fall on the same day as Columbus Day. Similarly, though only unofficially, the United American Indians of New England have labeled Thanksgiving Day as “The National Day of Mourning” since 1970. The de facto hegemony of ideology in changing official U.S. holidays, including in the refusal of some people and even businesses to say “Christmas” even on Christmas Eve Day, has proceeded without the premise that ideology should play such a role being debated in public discourse. Instead, the onslaught has been enabled by the vehemence of the conquerors in insisting that their decisions be recognized and not contradicted. Once I went to a Unitarian “church” on a Thanksgiving expecting a spirit of gratefulness, as per President Lincoln’s proclamation establishing the date of the holiday after two years of brutal war between the CSA and USA. The sermon was instead on the need for sorrow instead. I walked out, shaking my head in utter disbelief. Perhaps some Americans might one day insist that a similar mood be preached in churches on Christmas Day. Both the need and insistence come with a tone of passive aggression, and are indeed power-grabs based in resentment, which Nietzsche argued is a major indication of weakness rather than strength, and thus self-confidence. Perhaps the manufactured dialectics, such as the one centered on October 12th, can be transcended in a Hegelian rather than religious sense at a higher level.


The full essay is at "October 12th: Happy Vikings Day."

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Cancelled Classes: Harvard’s Far-Left Ideological Courses Take a Hit

I contend that the more courses that are heavily ideological and biased in advocating a particular ideology that a university has, the higher the chances that a university will eventually suffer from a lack of educational legitimacy and perhaps even have to close down for want of students. Even great American universities such as Harvard and Yale are not immune. Their huge endowments could even function as organizational slack enabling a particular ideological bent to percolate throughout the universities for a long time with impunity due to the sheer amount of money in the universities respective invested wealth. When I was a student at Yale, I worked part-time at the Development Office calling alumni to give to the already-wealthy university. I had no idea at the time that being rich could actually harm a university, or allow for educational decadence with impunity. At Harvard in 2024, there was some indication that the students’ freedom in selecting some of their courses was serving a good purpose in putting biased-ideological courses out of business for lack of sufficient enrollment. The student marketplace could substitute for compromised university administration in its educational oversight function. Adam Smith would be proud.

Early in the Fall 2024 semester, Harvard University cancelled over 30 courses, with the History and Literature departments especially being adversely affected. A Harvard administrator chalked this up to five lecturers who “either departed or chose to do something else.”[1] Even so, a clue to yet another reason unstated by Harvard lies in the fact that at St. Joseph University in Pennsylvania, multiple sections of the university’s diversity course, Inequality in American Society, were cancelled for the Spring 2022 term “due to under enrollment.”[2] That is to say, at least some of the cancelled classes at Harvard may have been cancelled because too few students had enrolled in the courses. Furthermore, it is possible that Harvard students in general were more interested in obtaining knowledge than an ideological platform at university. To be sure, overlap between the two exists especially in humanities courses, and professors are only human so their personal opinions do slip out from time to time even in the best, most academic circumstances. Such a limited extent is hardly blameworthy.

Those lecturers or professors who feel the instinctual urge to go further in promoting an ideology, however, are indeed culpable, for they misuse their educational platform to indoctrinate students. Speaking at Yale in 2024, a professor at Arizona State University unabashedly and without any sense of shame admitted that she used her courses to promote her ideology because its cause “is too important” to be left out. Every ideologue views one’s ideology as important; this is almost a truism. We want to be happy, moreover, so we like those things that make us happy. In other words, humans have wills.

The courses cancelled in September, 2024 at Harvard include “Marx at the Mall: Consumer Culture & Its Critics,” “Global Transgender Histories,” “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America,” “The Making of Race across Latin America,” and “Global Histories of Capitalism.” Had the last one been offered, I might have tried to audit it because my research then was on the ethical and theological status of self-interest, which stems teleologically from self-love, in Adam Smith’s theory of the competitive-market mechanism.

I would not have sat in on “Global Transgender Histories” because its syllabus indicated that students would “become familiar with some of the global vocabulary of gender identities beyond the binary and . . . the historical impacts of phenomena such as racism, imperialization, and [the] medicalization on gender identities.”[3] Knowing the vocabulary used in other countries may not be very important, especially given the opportunity cost in terms of other knowledge that is not being learned in taking another course, such as one on comparative cultures more fundamentally. Additionally, bringing racism and imperialism in can be said to be needlessly ideological, as resentment, and a stretch from the ostensible topic of the course: gender as a social identity. It may be that there was not yet enough knowledge on transgender identities to fill an entire course. If so, then social identities could be a topic in a sociology course rather than the topic of a stand-alone course.

Regarding the course on race in Latin America, the ideological temptation may be to castigate the Caucasian race as the reason for teaching the course. Similarly, the slant in the “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America” could have been to interpret the “foundations of settler colonialism” in terms hostile to the European settlers while ignoring the scalping of women and children by the American Indians.[4] Grasping  from texts “the anxieties, joys, and power that arise when Indigenous people embrace their bodies” is loaded with ideologically-tinged terms, such as indigenous and embracing their bodies, as if the mind cannot be wrong in deciding that its associated physical body is wrong rather than the mind itself. I would wager that this point is rarely if even made in teaching a course on gender as being apart from the biology, the distinction of which could itself be an ideologically assumption.

Courses that are repeatedly or widely taught in a one-sided way in terms of knowledge are, I submit, suspect academically. This realization is probably not lost on the intelligent people whom Harvard selects to study at that university. I experienced such a course on Christian ethics at Yale’s divinity school in 2024. The young professor told the class that monogamy “violates Christian ethics because [monogamy] oppresses other legitimate gay lifestyles.” After that class, a student bristled when I suggested to her that the professor should have included the other side. That student replied that the students had already heard the arguments in favor of monogamy and that hearing them again would be traumatizing for some students. My jaw dropped. Perhaps in not wanting to traumatize students of theology, the professor intentionally omitted the counterarguments that include why both Paul and Augustine would object to the claim that monogamy violates Christian ethics. The professor was not about to say that “other gay lifestyles” can be said to be ethically inferior to monogamy because emotional intimacy in a romantic relationship suffers when extramarital sex occurs.

Consider the emotions that naturally go with the realization that, he may be having sex with another man right now instead of with me. The fear and hurt that emotional intimacy might be a part of the “open” sex with another man, which could eventually result in being replaced by the other man can be argued to render the open relationship unethical, for there is harm resulting from it. I am not claiming that every open relationship, gay or straight, necessarily occasions the fear and hurt, but I do think that there is a loss of emotional intimacy between two people in a relationship if sex is occurring outside of the relationship because sex necessarily involves closeness, even if just in touching another person’s body.

In being so extreme ideologically, Yale’s divinity school could be said to be a cult rather than a school within a university. Because Yale was so prestigious as a university at the time, the lack of oversight of its administration over the divinity school is perplexing. In the 1990s, Yale’s President Levin wanted to move the school geographically to the center of the campus from a half-mile up Prospect St, and the Provost wanted to close the school because it was accepting 70 percent of those who apply (in 2023, that figure was 50 percent), but Levin said, “As a Jewish man, I’m not going to be the president who closes Yale’s Christian divinity school.” Meanwhile, some students at the divinity school were complaining that moving to the central campus would immerse them with relativists, and Hitler, they said, was a relativist. The school was able to stay put, with the rest of the university unaware, at least as of 2024, of the resulting cost to the university as a great university.  

To be fair, Harvard was not without its own ideologically limited courses in 2024. The course, “Queering Education” included studying the “’hidden curriculum’ in American schools which privileges heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and ‘gendered identities’.”[5] Besides making up ideologically-laced words such as heteronormativity and cisnormativity, the latter unilaterally imposing “cis” on “binary” (i.e., no transsexual) people, the charge that a curriculum is hidden, as if it could be found only in playing a song backwards with the word Satan being only then recognizable, is dubious as well as biased (given the added word, privileges) because of course in studying a culture or society in which the vast majority of people are heterosexual and “cis,” things done by those people are naturally going to make up a sizable component of the knowledge that is imparted in the classroom. A course on the influence of trans-gendered Founders of the United States is not going to run very long before it runs out of material. Furthermore, that most (or all) of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention were heterosexual is much less important than learning the political (and economic) substance of the debates as reported by James Madison in his Notes. Once again, there is an opportunity cost in terms of the knowledge that is foregone in focusing on tertiary matters.

When I was a student at Yale, I took a course called “American Schools” in the teacher-preparation program in Yale College; I had to spend one afternoon a week sitting in on classes at local high schools. At one, the civics (government) teacher bragged to me that the textbooks were in the school’s basement because his course consisted of a series of films on immigrants because he was an immigrant. “Once a semester I have Rosa Delorio [the Congresswoman] visit the class to talk about the American system of government.” That was it because the vast majority of the class time was devoted to the teacher promoting his own political ideology in favor of immigration. The knowledge that he minimized is in my view very important in a civics class, especially since one function of public education in Connecticut is to prepare the kids to be voters who at least understand the system of government in which they live. That an ideological agenda in teaching can be so blind as to the opportunity cost should be a warning, or “red flag,” to us concerning just how illegitimate (and dangerous, cognitively) having heavily (and biased) ideologically-oriented courses can be in a school. Political campaigning and teaching knowledge to students are distinct activities, so they should not be conflated or allowed to substitute for the each other.


1. Dave Huber, “Harvard Cancels over 30 Courses; Far-Left History & Literature Classes Hardest Hit,” The College Fix, September 28, 2024.
2. “Diversity Course Enrollment Drops After School Stops Ordering Students to Take It,” The College Fix, December 13, 2021.
3. Dave Huber, “Harvard Cancels over 30 Courses; Far-Left History & Literature Classes Hardest Hit,” The College Fix, September 28, 2024.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.