Harvard vs. Trump: Yale Doesn’t Matter

Less than a week before Harvard’s graduation ceremony in May, 2025, and about a month after Trump had frozen $2.2 billion in federal funding that would have gone to Harvard and then threatened to remove the university’s tax-exempt status, an Obama-appointed U.S. district judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration’s order that foreign students at Harvard must either transfer to other universities or leave the United States, effective immediately. In its complaint filed with the district court, Harvard argues that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem violated the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law. It requires that a rational basis be given by the federal government, which must take administrative-law steps before such an order can be definitively executed against a university. Even then, a university can appeal the last administrative-law decision to federal district court. At the very least, a university must be provided with the alleged violation of visa law and given the chance to make corrections or defend itself rather than be caught off-guard by a fait accompli by fiat. Less noticeable in the midst of the brawl, it is no small matter that a director of the federal security agency so brazenly and obviously violated administrative-procedure law. At the very least, it is duplicitous and hypocritical for a government official tasked with enforcing law against criminals to knowingly violate law to which she herself is subject in her official capacity. At the very least, Noem’s conduct should raise concerns regarding the need for greater oversight over DHS by Congress and whether it should be easier for Congress to remove a Cabinet-level political appointee. Perhaps it should be within the purview of a federal judge to suspend and even dismiss a Cabinet secretary judged to have violated federal law in an official capacity. In the context of an increasingly imperial presidency, more checks are arguably necessary. This is not, however, the topic at hand; instead, my thesis here is that even though Harvard should indeed pursue its case in federal court against the Trump Administration, and the university’s values are superior to the way in which Yale has capitulated to that government, Harvard’s administration could improve the university by exercising the sort of maturity that recognizes the kernels of truth in the otherwise spurious claims. Such maturity would be two degrees of separation from the mentality of Yale’s administration with respect to spying on student with the help of the FBI.

As the wealthiest university in the U.S., if Harvard could not push back against such a breach of administrative law, then other universities in the U.S. could be in real trouble should they allow their students and faculty to exercise the constitutional right of free-speech in a way that the Trump Administration does not appreciate. Within the Ivy League, is notable that Harvard’s response to pressure from the Administration stands in stark contrast to those of Yale and Columbia, the latter two taking the route of capitulation albeit by different means. When I was a student at Yale, some fellow Yalies used to tease Princeton students at home hockey and basketball games by saying, “It’s Yale and Harvard, not Harvard-Yale, and Princeton doesn’t matter.” For my analysis here, Columbia doesn’t matter, and Harvard deserves to come before my alma mater, Yale.

Whereas the Yale administration had internalized Trump’s authoritarianism by turning that university into a police-state of two police departments (one being local) and a department of security, quasi-police, employees, Harvard’s administration was pushing against tyranny. Although the students at both universities were paying the price, they were doing so in different ways. Whereas at Yale the security apparatus had gone into overdrive at the expense of the comfort of students on the campus from being perpetually spied on, Harvard’s foreign students feared that they might be kicked out of the U.S., though claims by some Harvard undergraduate foreign students that they were in “pure panic” and being disrespected by the Trump Administration may be hyperbolic. Trump’s argument has been with Harvard’s administration; just because people are affected by a conflict does not necessarily mean that they are direct parties. Let’s reserve pure panic to students facing immediate deportation or arrest without any restraining order on the government by a judge.

In any public dispute, moreover, it is wise and prudent for one of the combatants or even a third party who could be adversely affected not to exaggerate or vilify one of the two sides. There could even be a kernel of truth behind the irrational and excessively hostile behavior of one of the two main combatants. Although the charge of antisemitism at Harvard is utterly false, as if protests against Israel committing crimes against humanity and war crimes were synonymous with attacking Jews as an ethnic group that extends beyond Israel, a kernel of truth may be in Trump’s view that Harvard has been too accommodating both to 1) the “woke” racist and anti-man ideology, whose believers can easily blow things out of proportion cognitively and emotively out of sheer, prejudicial spite, and 2) the Chinese Communist Party. In the heat of battle, kernels can be easily overlooked as mud is being thrown.

A month or two prior to its demand that Harvard’s foreign students either transfer or leave the U.S. immediately, the Trump administration had demanded information from Harvard University on the political activities of foreigners there, including whether they had taken part in protests for human-rights in Gaza, as if valuing human rights were a sordid enterprise and thus to be discouraged rather than applauded. To Trump, taking a stand for human rights in Gaza was tantamount to being antisemitic. Harvard claimed to have provided the requested information, but the Trump administration demurred without explanation, and widened its accusation to Harvard being supportive of China’s Communist Party. Harvard’s school of government may have accepted money from China’s communist government. Also, Prof. Fairbanks of Harvard’s Chinese studies supported that government, whereas scholars on China at Yale such as Prof. Spence, under whom I was a teaching assistant, tended to favor the Republic of China. To the extent that Trump was right about Harvard’s connection with China’s autocratic regime, the charge of antisemitism against Harvard made by both Summers and Trump may thus be a red herring unintentionally diverting attention away from real lapses at Harvard.

Furthermore, the Trump Administration claimed that Harvard’s affirmative-action and related diversity programs were racist because Caucasian people were not included and may even have been subject even just to “soft” discrimination in admissions’ decision-making that looks for clues of ethnic or racial identity in application essays, as if a person’s background were synonymous with having different ideas.

Speaking of ideas, President Trump was also against a university receiving so much money from the federal government encouraging (or looking the other way) as the closed-minded, excessively sensitive and yet intolerant “woke” ideology dominated at Harvard to such an intensity that students having ideas running afoul of that ideology felt pressure not to share such ideas even in class. Trump’s argument was that the hegemony of that ideology at Harvard made students and faculty holding opposing ideologies or simply matching the physical description of past societal oppressors rendered that university unfit to receive taxpayer-funded research funds from the federal government. Aside from ideological politics, to the extent that Harvard’s administration stood by for years, knowing that a one-sided and virulently intolerant ideology was increasingly gripping the campus, academic freedom in terms of the exchange of a breadth of ideas was knowingly compromised rather than promoted by admitted more on the basis of ideas than group-identification and ideology.

Yale too could take a lesson here. Visiting a Christian ethics course at Yale’s divinity school in early 2024, I was stunned when the instructor declared that monogamy violates Christian ethics because fidelity because sexual fidelity to another person, whether of the same or opposite sex, “violates other legitimate gay lifestyles.” After class, I asked a young student whether the instructor’s statement wasn’t biased and even incorrect. I also asked whether the contrary position, which can be found in Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, as well as Calvin and Luther, should have been covered in class. The firm answer was a NO to both questions.  “It would be traumatic to hear the other side,” she said. This is precisely how the “woke” ideology suffocates ideas, and thus learning even at an elite university. It is not difficult to grasp why many American taxpayers would not want their taxes going to universities in which ideology is preached as knowledge to the exclusion of ideas that the ideology deems “traumatic.” Just to set the record straight, monogamy does not violate Christian ethics even if certain gay couples want to vilify it in order to feel better about having open-relationships or even cheating. This is not an anti-gay statement, as plenty of monogamous gay couples would agree that monogamy is not squalid. I had a fiancée once who thought that monogamy is not natural; I didn’t marry her. The antagonists of monogamy are obviously not necessarily gay, and yet the “woke” ideology could find my position offensive and thus inadmissible even in discussing Christian ethics at a university. My point is that both Harvard and Yale could benefit with more ideological diversity, and thus with a broader exchange of ideas, even if a bully in the Oval Office is making the complaint against the hegemony of one very narrow and intolerant ideology at elite American universities.

That Harvard could indeed benefit both ideationally and in terms of academic-freedom from achieving ideological diversity as a secondary desideratum below that of ideas is more accurate than the claim that Harvard should be less antisemitic, for standing up for human rights in Gaza is not antisemitic. In fact, universities, and even the U.S. Government, should encourage college students (and faculty), whether American citizens or foreigners, to value human rights, given the impunity that governments enjoyed in 2024 and well into 2025 in decimating populations, whether in Ukraine or Gaza. Put another way, given the institutional impotence of the United Nations, human rights could use some help at the grass-roots level. Stating that the Israeli government had a lot to answer for by May, 2025, both ethically and in terms of international law, is not antisemitic in nature. Overreactive zealotry in judging and executing “collective justice” against an entire people can easily be on the other side of human rights and yet be oblivious to the duplicity and hypocrisy.

During a protest for human rights in Gaza that went through Yale’s campus in late 2023, Jewish students from a local community college walked to New Haven’s central park, or Green, with ease. When one of the students said, “Just so you know, we’re Jewish.” I replied with a shrug, “We are all human beings, so of course we are all standing up for human rights; where we come from doesn’t matter.” I wish Larry Summers of Harvard had been with us. One of my mother’s cousins, a Quaker, and thus a man strongly for religious toleration, had been Larry’s first economics teacher. Although Summers, a past president of Harvard and a Jewish man, stated publicly in May, 2025 that Harvard was too tolerant of antisemitism, he nonetheless firmly supported Harvard’s decision to sue the U.S. Government in order to be able to retain foreign students and post-doctoral researchers. Moreover, his claims that Harvard should stand up to the willful tyranny of government and that such a position of opposition has broader implications for the standing of the rule of law in the U.S. going forward are indeed important points. Even in holding, wrongly I believe, that Harvard was too antisemitic, the former president of the university publicly affirmed his strong support for the current president of the university. Even finding kernels of truth come from the university’s true antagonist is not disloyal, and in fact may improve the university. That’s the point.

Already at Yale, its head of that private school’s own police force had wasted no time in accepting the offer of the FBI to train Yale police in counter-terrorism tactics that would be used on students. Moreover, that campus had become a virtual police-state of surveillance on students and faculty. Yale police had already arrested 48 students for exercising the right to protest, though living in tents on campus for that purpose was admittedly over the top. Even so, Yale’s heavy-handed, authoritarian approach to pro-human-rights protesters, whether students or faculty, evinces capitulation to Trump to keep the federal dollars coming and Trump off the university’s back. The federal president would be unlikely to threaten Yale as he had been threatening Harvard. In fact, the capitulation of not only Yale, but also Columbia, means that Harvard’s decision to act on principle would be all the more important, and laudable, to the entire system of higher education in America.

For in Harvard’s written request to the district judge for a temporary restraining order, Harvard states that the Trump Administration, in a letter dated April 11, 2025 to Harvard’s President, had “demanded (among other things) that Harvard hire a third-party to ‘audit’ the viewpoints of its students, faculty, and staff; depending on the results of the audit, hire and admit a ‘critical mass’ of people to achieve the governments’ preferred level of ‘viewpoint diversity’ in ‘each department, field, or teaching unit; refuse admission to international students ‘hostile to [] American values’; ‘exclusively’ ‘empower’ faculty supportive of the government’s action and ‘reduce [] the power’ of those opposed; allow the government to review its faculty hires; expel or suspend specific sets of students; disband disfavored student clubs; and establish mechanisms for Harvard community members to report on one another and send these reports to the government.”[1] This last part is particularly revealing, as it is ironically similar to the tactics used by the secret police in the U.S.S.R. and within the Warsaw Pact (e.g., East Germany) in the twentieth century. Also, the infusion of pro-government professors was done by the Nazi Party in Germany. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, for instance, was a member of the Nazi Party and thus was able to be elected as rector at the University of Freiburg.

Although Larry Summers tarnished his credibility by making the unfortunate and errant imputation of antisemitism at Harvard, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and past president of Harvard hit the proverbial nail on its head, though not with Heidegger’s hammer of Dasein in Being and Time, in telling Bloomberg TV, “Harvard must start by resisting; this is he stuff of tyranny.” It was indeed. Trump had already succeeded in getting the Yale administration to internalize it such that that academic campus had become a grounds (Latin: campus) of constant and multiple surveillance of Yalies by three jurisdictions consisting of security and police, none of whom are members of the Yale community. Even teenage students, freshmen and sophomores, had to walk by manned police cars and security cars sporting red, blue, and bright yellow lights even during the day because the cars were stationed on campus sidewalks and streets on a daily basis, even as security guards were standing throughout as if an imminent attack were perpetually thought to occur.  Such an atmosphere is antipodal to that of academia and yet Yale’s “academic” administration was in the mix. 

A Yale security employee spying on students. To evesdrop, another employee was sneaking up behind people walking on a nearby walkway.

Yale students trying to relax on a lawn before finals week were being watched by Yale police and Yale security. Notice that the overhead lights of the police car were on even though there was no incident (or protest).

Yale security employees are suspicious of alumni (hint: age-profiling isn't good for fundraising).

Imagine being a student who is still a teenager having to navigate close to guards and manned police cars that are so needlessly close-up in order to intimidate. Yale hires (and gives power to) too many townies who resent Yalies. Power-trip 101 (Yale would never let me teach that course!)

When a Palestinian flag was draped on a Jewish monument at New Haven’s Green, Yale’s head of police presumptuously decided that his department would investigate the matter even though it was not at Yale and thus was properly under the purview of New Haven’s police department. A Jewish associate dean at Yale defended the decision by stating that Yale had an obligation to embrace and even impose its truth locally, even at the expense of the democratic legitimacy of police powers under the U.S. Constitution. This presumably included Yale police employees arresting local residents far beyond campus without any direct or even indirect relation to Yale. A Connecticut government official, who, as of 2025, advised prosecutors and police departments, including Yale’s, told me in a coffee shop near Yale during my final visit there as an alumnus, “Yale students feel intimidated by [constant New Haven and Yale police and Yale security presence on campus] because those students are at a liberal university.” The official obviously did not feel the need to separate his ideological antipathy from his state job. It is no wonder that the head of Yale’s police unit referred to student protesters as “losers and criminals” when he accepted the offer of the FBI to train Yale police employees on how to use counter-terrorism tactics on students, and presumably on researchers and faculty too. Even though the Yale student body may indeed have been overwhelmingly liberal at the time, which shows bias in the admissions process there, the university’s top administrators, who preferred totalitarianism to maintaining an academic atmosphere on campus, were anything but liberal; in point of fact, they had the mentality that Trump relished, and thus would not likely face his ire.  Therefore, I contend that Yale capitulated while Harvard stood on principle against totalitarianism by standing up to the Trump administration. Yale may have won “The Game” in 2024 at Harvard’s football stadium, but Harvard was winning a game that dwarfs sports in importance. As Harvard’s Larry Summers stated in May, 2025, much more was riding on Harvard’s case than American higher education.

Literally sticking out at Harvard so to intimidate: a sordid, anti-academic mentality.

Harvard policemen standing outside their car, which could have been parked outside Harvard Yard: Willfully trampling on academic atmosphere on a daily basis in order to intimidate students and faculty. 

Rather than internalize totalitarianism (though admittedly the 2024-2025 school-year witnessed an increasing presence of Harvard police cars prominently manned in Harvard Yard rather than parked just outside the grassy area, as if employees needed the stark presence of intimidation in order to feel safe), Harvard’s president pushed back on Trump, writing in a letter just after having been threatened by the Trump Administration with the expulsion of the university’s foreign students, “We condemn this unlawful and unwarranted action. The revocation continues a series of government actions to retaliate against Harvard for our refusal to surrender our academic independence and to submit to the federal government’s illegal assertion of control over our curriculum, our faculty, and our student body.”[2] He also cited the free-speech rights of students, which at Yale had already been so subject to police and security hostility on campus that the right could be considered as de facto extirpated there. At Harvard, Trump himself was going after the right in the incorrect assumption that standing up for starving Palestinians were somehow being in favor of killing and bombing when obviously the opposite is so.

Universities, especially those that are so very devoted to academic study in the progress of our species in knowledge, must have ideational freedom, which is admittedly difficult to separate from ideologies. It is difficult indeed to perform chemical qualitative analysis on ideology to get pure knowledge as the precipitate. Even so, universities should strive such that ideology does not overcome or even direct the pursuit of knowledge. Having a variety of ideological standpoints in a sort of balance rather than being dominated by one is thus important. This is not to say that government is able or proficient in correcting for an imbalance, for the salience of an ideology in a government administration likely means that one ideology would come to dominate. Nor does spy or police-surveillance belong on a campus if it is to maintain an academic atmosphere conducive to the free expression of ideas.

To be sure, universities are not public squares on which political activity should be centered, but governmental or university-police strong-arming and especially arrests of students can quickly eviscerate the academic atmosphere that a campus should have, given the educational mission of a university. Freedom of ideas, as well as the mission itself, can also be thwarted by the non-academic attention that political encampments on a campus can attract. This is not to say that student or faculty protests of a university administrative policy are exogenous and thus without educational legitimacy.

Moreover, universities compromise their academic raison d’être by looking the other way as exogenous forces interlard campus atmosphere. Had America’s elite universities done a better job at protecting and thus valuing a distinctly academic environment on campus rather than pushing or tolerating the onslaught of a particular, dominating ideology or allowing political protests writ large with even local residents attending as if a university were a town’s square for political debate and restlessness, then perhaps the Trump Administration would have had less motivation to go after the most elite American universities. I suspect that European universities have done a much better job of sticking to the academic knitting, and thus of admitting students on academic merit rather than race or indications of “woke” ideology. Governmental indifference naturally follows when university administrations focus on and protect the distinctiveness of academe.

As Peters and Waterman wrote in the 1980s popular business text, In Search of Excellence, organizational practitioners do well to “stick to the knitting.” In academia, the knitting does not include turning a campus into a police-state, politicalizing campus, or promoting a particular ideology that could come to choke off unacceptable perspectives and even language. Ironically, President Trump gave Harvard an opportunity to honestly self-assess and reaffirm its distinctively academic mission by counter-balancing the prevalence of the angry “woke” ideology on campus, the temptation to make the university a situs for political protest on issues not including educational policies of the university, and easy trajectory towards a police-state on campus. Rather than on politically charged criteria such as race and a preferred ideology, admissions decisions are best (and safest) made on the basis of academic merit, complemented by indications of student leadership potential. It takes a high level of maturity to see the kernel of truth in an adversary’s accusations while pushing back nonetheless against governmental tyranny. Having such maturity, which has been wanting in Yale’s administration as evinced by the arrest of 48 Yale students for supporting human rights in Gaza, can be a sustainable competitive advantage for Harvard. It is possible, in other words, to make sweet lemonade out of tart lemons.

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1. Harvard’s Complaint, U.S. District Court, case 1:25-cv-11472, Document 1, Filed 05/23/2025, 4-5.
2. Mike Wendling, “Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump Plan to Stop Harvard Enrolling Foreign Students,” BBC.com, May 23, 2025.

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 12^th 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 12^th, can be transcended in a Hegelian rather than religious sense at a higher level.

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

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.

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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.

Yale Police Arrest 47 Students: A Symptom

A university is not an inner city, and thus should not be policed as such, as if students were hostile gang members in need of constant surveillance. On April 22, 2024, I was not a bit surprised in reading that Yale, which I had hitherto described as a private police-state on steroids, ordered its own private police to arrest 47 students that morning on charges of criminal trespassing on campus for having brought and set up tents days earlier. Even though temporary housing goes beyond political protest per se and the students could have returned day after day to Beinecke Plaza to protest—venting off stream that could be justified by the U.S. Government’s continued financial, military, and political enabling of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza—that Yale’s administration put the plaza under police guard after employees had removed the tents is indicative of a police-state mentality that is not conducive to academic pursuits. Furthermore, arresting students for criminal trespassing rather than simply removing the tents demonstrates an inner-city policing mentality that is out of place on a prestigious university's campus.

Alternatively, the university could have sent security employees rather than its private police force—and notice that both Columbia and NYU used municipal rather than private police! Rather than charging students with trespassing, Yale could have used its on-campus security to tell the students to pack up their tents as cleaning crews cleaned the plaza. “You can come back to protest, but tents are not allowed and right now we are cleaning the plaza from the weekend.” Some students had even brought tall wooden bookshelves with which to promote books on the topic. How Yalie! Boola Boola!

April 22, 2024 at Yale as Yale's private police force arrests students for trespassing (YDN)

Nevertheless, erecting tents and bookshelves is not political protesting. Had particular students refused to pack up, then the university could have called the New Haven police, whose legitimacy is solid from a democratic standpoint, to respond in a per person way. At the very least, the local police should have handled any local residents having tents there. It is entirely reasonable for a university to tell students (and especially local residents!) to remove furniture and tents from campus. Regarding New Haven residents who came to Yale's campus to "set up shop," Yale is not a state university. It would be highly presumptuous for a townie to refuse to pack up, but students should be handled differently, for they are neither locals nor even customers as their university status is academic in nature andthey should thus be dealt thusly. Deans rather than handcuffs, unless the latter are absolutely necessary as a last resort, should do the heavy lifting.

Such a draconian measure as saturating Beinecke Plaza with university police to do a mass arrest as if students on their own campus constitutes trespassing might fit an inner-city mentality, but on a college campus, the trust and stability of students at their school undoubtedly could only take a hit. Put another way, I doubt that Yale students looked at Yale police employees (and their ubiquitous vehicles on campus) the same way for the rest of the 2024 spring term. Certainly, claims by the police employees that they are there to protect the students would fall on deaf ears, as it should.

When Yale graduate students who were teaching assistants had been on strike sometime in the 1990s, while I was a student there, some of them had tents in Beinecke Plaza. I used to walk past them after eating breakfast at Commons (sadly, along with the advent of Yale’s police presence on campus at least as of 2023, breakfast was no longer served at Commons when I returned in September, 2023 as an alumni scholar in residence). Back in the 1990s, there was no hint of possible arrest for trespassing. Of course, Yale was not a campus saturated with security guards and Yale police employees back then; Sterling library did not have its own security force making rounds every 20 minutes or so, disturbing students who study in the stacks. Tents were fine (though not my preference).  A double-standard surfaces, however, 25 years later, now that Israel was being criticized. At the very least, the president of Yale had a personal conflict of interest that inadvertently played into the double standard. 

I contend that Yale students should protest the police-state mentality itself at Yale, and the resulting saturation of security and university police personnel and cars on and even off campus. A local resident told me in December, 2023 that Yale police regularly arrest locals leaving bars at night OFF-CAMPUS, and yet The Yale Daily News reported on April 22, 2024 that Yale police have no jurisdiction off Yale’s property—even on the local streets themselves that border or even run through campus, such as those that intersect at Grove and Prospect, where the sit-down protest resumed on April 22^nd after the arrests. Yale police self-entitlement hardly stops at the edges of Yale's campus. It’s no wonder that Yale students walked into an intersection owned by the city just beyond Beinecke Plaza in preferring to be subject to a police force of an inner city to Yale’s private police state. Arresting young-adult students—many undergraduates still being teenagers!—for trespassing on campus for having set up tents is in my view unnecessary and thus indicative of a mentality of domination and even aggression of easy targets. It is not as if an Ivy League university is at all like an inner city, or populated as such.

The chief of Yale's department of police at the time had been the chief of the New Haven police department for more than a decade, and he participated in an Israel-led program for police as reported by The Yale Daily News on April 22, 2024. To be sure, he did graduate from Yale College, and more than a decade later, he received a degree from Yale’s divinity school, ironically a Christian divinity school. Even so, I contend that his policing at Yale did not reflect his having been a member of the Yale community, but, rather, his time as head of New Haven’s police department. I contend that Yale should not be policed at all like an inner city, and even hiring retired inner-city police employees risks having students treated very unfittingly. For one thing, Yale students (and thus alumni), employees, and faculty are vetted, whereas the residents of crime-ridden urban areas are obviously not.

Nevertheless, at Yale during the fall of 2023, a thug security employee stalked me three times on campus. The local creeper even hid behind a car to take pictures of me one night as I was walking down Prospect Street. Why does Yale hire local creepers who are too weakly constituted to know the difference between a university like Yale and an inner city? I had complained twice with photo evidence, but I soon discovered that a dean at Yale refused to get the bully fired. Get the thugs off the payroll! Where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire. Simply put, Yale is not New Haven. The other school is much better situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As far as the wildly excessive police presence on Yale’s campus on a daily basis, and even AFTER the tents were cleared on April 22, 2024 at Beinecke Plaza and then on the following day, I’m not the only Yalie to have left. A lawyer who studied at Yale and went on to teach there told me after he and I both had left, “It has gotten really bad there.” I knew he meant it in terms of the sheer meanness, but all I had to do was mention the constant police and security presence everywhere on campus and the guy was firmly nodding his head in agreement. Its certainly ironic when being so "in control" evinces things being out of control. Try squeezing jello in your hand if you don't believe me. Tightness gone too far.   

I submit that something has gone very wrong when an academic campus looks like a police-zone even after an incident has been ended. On April 23, 2024, the day after, CNN reported that Beineke Plaza “was closed and under police guard.”[1] If tents had really been the problem, the university would have allowed students to hold protests there as long as they were not setting up camp. For their part, the students should have given in on the tents in order to stay in the plaza on April 22nd. 

That “50 to 60 Yale police” employees had been at the plaza on the morning of the arrests, along with 15 police from New Haven just shows the over-extent of police presence at Yale and the underlying mentality.[2] Why have the second jurisdiction there?  To intimidate? Only Yale’s police “were involved in arresting protesters.”[3] From a democratic standpoint, it should have been the reverse; like Columbia, Yale should have called the local police department like anyone else. Fifty to sixty Yale police, doubtless with an overwhelming show of their vehicles with lights flashing, is not only excessive, but it pensively baits violance and at the very least stubbornness, which is exactly what they got. 

Even on the following evening, there were five Yale police employees standing in front of the main library, and several security cars stationary on a nearby walkway between the library and the law school, and doubtlessly more Yale police and security in the plaza while a protest was going on nearby, on Cross-Campus lawn until 10 pm. Why all the fear? The protesters had moved from the street intersection at 5pm as New Haven police had asked. Paranoia and an aggressive bent are in my view the underlying causes, and the resulting visuals doubtlessly cause student and faculty discomfort and impede studying. That this was presumably not a concern to Yale’s police and security departments should be something Yale Corporation's board might want to reflect on. 

I had seen such an over-reactive, passive-aggressive, and even paranoid mentality on a daily basis at Yale during the 2023-2024 academic year that I was not at all surprised to read that the reaction to the tents was draconian as well and went on well after the tents had been taken down. Was a full-frontal militaristic assault by some Yale students really likely even after all the arrests?  Why have the plaza then under “police guard?” Why have it closed at all, if the tents were really the problem? I’m sure that even on the day after, that part of the campus looked even more like a police zone than the campus typically looked in 2023-2024. The Rambo mentality has no place at a university like Yale. Students and alumni can unite to defend academia from such interlarding encroachments that do not respect academia. Oil and water do not mix. A university is not an inner city. Where is Yale's board of directors in all this? Silence itself can be enabling.

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1. Devon Sayers et al, “Protesters Remain at Yale University a Day after 45 pro-Palestinian Activists Were Arrested on Campus,” CNN.Com, April 23, 2024.
2. “Yale Police Arrest 47 student protesters for Trespassing on Beinecke Plaza,” Yale Daily News, April 22, 2024.
3. Devon Sayers et al, “Protesters Remain at Yale University a Day after 45 pro-Palestinian Activists Were Arrested on Campus,” CNN.Com, April 23, 2024.

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common.  

The full essay is at "The University of California." 

Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 

The full essay is at "Yale Vipers."

On Universities Cancelling Classes on Some Minor Holidays for Ideological Purposes

Higher education is not valued equally in the various American states. Where academia is not particularly valued, other things can intercede as priorities even at the universities themselves at the expense of academics. In such places, even the universities themselves may value being academic institutions too little by allowing other societal agendas to eclipse the distinctly academic mission. Indeed, even academic administrators may be infected with an ideology currently in fashion societally, and insufficiently academically minded to thwart the interlarded non-academic values that seek hegemony even on academic campuses.

The value that a university places on its academic classes as a priority can be gauged by whether classes meet on minor holidays. Even if the length of the semester is not shorted as a result, breaking up contiguous class days may have negative academic effects. My point here, however, is that cancelling classes for minor reasons demonstrates a lack of respect for the academic functioning of universities as regards teaching and learning course material.

In 2019 at Yale, classes met on Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and Presidents Day even if administrative offices were closed. Harvard’s academic calendar explicitly stated that classes would meet on Veterans Day and President’s Day (Columbus Day being the exception among the minor holidays for the academic year). Classes are different; they are too important to be interrupted for every minor holiday. Yet those very academic universities have not been above cancelling classes on a minor holiday, and for ideological reasons. Martin Luther King's day is a case in point. 

Out in the provinces, Arizona’s major universities cancel classes for Veteran’s Day, perhaps out of deference to the military-industrial presence in the state. The privileging of that holiday is all the more conspicuous because Columbus Day is practically ignored, perhaps owing to the numbr of American Indians in Arizona. In fact, no mention was made of that holiday in the 2019-2020 academic calendars of the University of Arizona and Arizona State University—the latter having Fall Break instead on the Monday and Tuesday.

 

The cultural differentials between New England and Arizona cannot be ignored; they are essentially different countries. In 2017, Arizona teachers came in last in the U.S., and, moreover, K-12 (pre-college education) had consistently came in at 48^th or 49^th out of the 50 States for years. In an analysis by WalletHub, Arizona’s pre-college education came in at 49^th out of the 50 States, whereas Massachusetts and Connecticut came in at first and third, respectively.[1] Including standardized tests such as the SAT gave the interstate comparison particular credence. Besides having a high drop-out rate at the high-school level, Arizona had a high drop-out rate at ASU and likely at the University of Arizona too given the low standardized entrance exam scores. We can conclude that education was valued much more in New England than in Arizona. 

I contend that ideology had come to play an outsided role not only in the creation of new national holidays in the U.S., but also in how much in a given state closes for a holiday. For example, not allowing classes to meet even at the public universities on Veterans Day in Arizona is a way of instilling the value of a military to young adults, many of whom could be expected to vote in line with what they believe is important. Businesses and the government of Arizona there doubtlessly benefitted by more money for military contractors. 

Of course, cancelling classes for minor holidays has a drawback. As cited above, Arizona has ranked 49 out of the 50 states on the quality of education, and that state has been known to be notoriously low in having a college-educated citizenry. The low value placed on education in Arizona has been exacerbated by the predominant politically conservative bent there. Even if the state was becoming competitive for both of the major parties, the extreme nature of the conservatism has been well documented. Enough of Arizona’s tax-payers have referred to taxes as theft (by the government) that the lack of K-12 funding per pupil and the high pupil-teacher ratio relative to the other States can be understood. Beyond the conservative politics, the sheer aggressive prejudice on the streets (i.e., low and perhaps middle-income residents) against ASU students and even highly educated people belies any suggestion that the locals respect higher education. The attitude obviously excluded respect for the academic functions of universities. Accordingly, the few major universities (ASU and AU) there strove for legitimacy in financial rather than academic terms. Students at ASU regularly referred to their university as being primarily about money. As a business, the university would follow the banks and close for the minor federal holidays. In effect, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University morphed into something more familiar to, and valued by the typical Arizona citizen. 

The role of ideology in deciding which minor holidays on which to cancel classes also infects the Ivy League universities. Even though the value of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln far surpasses that of Martin King for the U.S., the elite schools have not have classes on King's day but have had classes on President's Day (and Veterans Day). The picking and choosing among holidays that are all minor rather than one of the majors, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Independence Day, points to the involvement of ideology. I would expect all of the minor holidays to be insufficient in cancelling classes. The privileging of some such holidays over others is just not fair. I contend that interrupting the rhythem of a semester and sending the message that academics is not the highest value at a university, especially if the university is a citidel in protecting the value of academic knowledge, are not wise.  

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1, Adam McCann, “States with the Best & Worst School Systems,” Wallethub.com, July 29, 2019.

On Calls for a Genocide of the Jews: Harvard vs Yale

A university administration can be susceptible to creating an unlevel playing field in the name of truth but with political ideology in the driver’s seat.  Amid controversial political disputes wherein ideology is salient and tempers are flaring, free speech can be arbitrarily and prejudiciously delimited as academic freedom is eclipsed by ideological intolerance. More abstractly put, the ideology of an organization’s dominant coalition can be stultifying. During the fall 2023 semester at Yale, for example, I attended a lecture at which the lecturer, a faculty member, held his own topic hostage by deviating to an unfounded ideological presumption of systemic racism in Hollywood. The leap in his assumption evinced an ideological agenda capable of blocking even his intellectual reasoning, and the resulting irrational intolerance easily impaired the academic freedom of the students to even question the unfounded assumption or ask what had happened to the advertised topic. Whether the label is systemic racism or antisemitism, the highly-charged application thereof into a political dispute can be act as a weapon to weaken or block outright an unliked political position and thus unfairly limit free speech and even academic freedom. I have in mind here calls for a genocide of the Jews as Gaza ceasefire rallies were occurring on college campuses. Which is more fitting: university codes of conduct against hate-speech or the protection of free speech, which is vital to academic freedom and a university’s academic atmosphere? In other words, are such calls more accurately classified as hate-speech or political speech?

The question is one that university administrations should not avoid in private or public settings even though getting to an answer is admittedly very difficult and the matter was intensely controversial at the time.[1] Of course, a university administration can put up a legalistic smokescreen of bureaucratic-speak terminology wherein the proverbial forest is lost sight of for the sake of specifying the branches of individual trees. When asked at a Congressional hearing on December 5, 2023 “whether ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ amounts to bullying and harassment on a campus, the leaders of Harvard, MIT, and Penn equivocated. Each one offered lawyerly answers—‘it depends on the context.’”[2] The dominance of legalistic fears in university governance does come at a cost in terms of protecting the distinctly academic culture of a university, which includes not only academic freedom, which in turn assumes that free speech is protected. The three presidents were right, though, that the contemporary context was extremely relevant on whether calls for a genocide of the Jews constitute antisemitic hate speech. Unfortunately, this was lost after the hearing in the irrational exuberance being fomented by the press.

The Israeli army had already destroyed nearly 98,000 buildings in Gaza, with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. By December 12, 2023, Israel’s military had “already brought unprecedented death and destruction to the impoverished enclave, with much of northern Gaza obliterated, more than 18,000 Palestinians killed, and over 80% of the population of 2.3 million pushed from their homes.”[3] Meanwhile, the official death toll in Israel stood at only about 1,200.[4] Accordingly, the UN’s General Assembly voted by 153 to 10 for an immediate stop to the Israeli attack in Gaza on humanitarian grounds alone.[5] The U.S. had vetoed a binding resolution in the Security Council, and any resolution of the General Assembly is not binding, but the verdict speaks volumes on the horrific nature of Israel’s reaction to Hamas’ admittedly brutal attack and hostage-taking on October 7, 2023.

That context, reflecting Israel’s belief in even disproportionate collective “justice” and Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s claim that “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,”[6] had ironically already entered the term genocide into the political lexicon of the debate. Jews were being accused of perpetuating rather than being victims of a genocide-scale atrocity. Already on November 2, 2023, UN experts were “convinced that the Palestinian people [were] at grave risk of genocide.”[7] By November 14^th, Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, referred to the Israeli military attack as a “textbook case of genocide.”[8] Admittedly, other experts disagreed, but my point is that the term was in play. Would calls for a corresponding genocide to right the scales of justice based ironically on the Biblical theory of an eye for an eye be qualitatively different—antisemitic hate speech—rather that part of the give and take that takes place in any political dispute? As one Penn student said on Fox News on December 11, 2023, I’m not going to get into it about the genocides. In other words, the student viewed the use of the term by both sides as fodder in a political dispute in which the student did not want to take sides.

The context did indeed matter, as it had “normalized” the use of the term in the political sphere with respect to the war in Israel even though calling for (and especially perpetuating) any genocide was nonetheless still, in the words of Harvard’s governing board, “despicable and contrary to fundamental human values.”[9] That is to say, that a genocide may have already been in progress rendered calls for a counter-genocide fair-game in the sense of being part of a political dispute, rather than as something free-standing akin to the Nazi extermination of Jews. Had the Jews in Europe already commenced a genocide ridding the world of Germans, then the Nazi’s Final Solution would have been placed in a very different context than what it has been.

Crucially, after the disastrous Congressional testimony of its president, Harvard condemned political statements advocating genocide “while balancing the critical principals of free thought and free speech,” according to the executive committee of Harvard’s Alumni Association.[10] Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, not only apologized for having gotten “caught up” in a “combative exchange about policies and procedures” at the Congressional hearing, but also narrowed the exception to free speech on campus to “calls for violence against our Jewish community—threats to our Jewish students.”[11] More than 700 faculty at Harvard signed a petition urging Harvard’s board to “defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”[12] By specifying how calls for a Jewish genocide would not enjoy free-speech and academic freedom protections and thus violate the university’s code of conduct, the university’s governance displayed an aptitude for measured balance of competing values (and interests). For it is one thing for a university to condemn certain political positions and yet specify more narrowly circumstances in which they are proscribed on campus, and quite another thin to use university regulations to effectively take sides in hampering one in the course of an ongoing political dispute. After all, a university’s administration would not want to be left with the implication that only certain genocides are political, whereas advocating others, even if in the heat of the moment in the midst of mass, disproportionate carnage, constitutes hate speech. Fortunately, there is a way to avoid this quagmire. I submit that a university administration ought to concentrate on protecting the actual safety of people on university property, rather than overreaching by taking political positions and blocking others at the expense of academic freedom and political free-speech.

Understanding the role of university administrations as the makers of “markets” of ideas is crucial to grasping why ideological activism should be avoided. Similar to how Goldman Sachs and other investment banks make (i.e., construct) markets wherein financial securities can be bought and sold, universities in the U.S. provide a space for academic freedom where even controversial political positions can be aired under the protection of free speech. If an investment bank enters one of its own markets with its proprietary position (i.e., trading with its own securities), a conflict of interest exists even if it is not exploited. Given human nature, institutional and personal conflicts of interests are so likely to be exploited that the conflictual structure itself can be declared to be unethical and deconstructed or prohibited.[13] Goldman exploited its market-making and market-participant dual roles with regard to its subprime-mortgage derivative securities by not telling even the bank’s best clients that the bonds were “crap” because so many of the underlying mortgages were not performing. The clients were not amused, and the bank’s dual role contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. In congressional testimony in 2010, the bank’s director, Lloyd Blankfein, later cited the bank’s role as a “market-maker” as the reason why the bankers hid their valuations from the clients. The truth was almost certainly more complicated, and of course self-serving.

Similarly, presidents of countries who sacrifice their reputational capital in presiding (i.e., above politics) by advocating partisan positions operate at a conflict of interest. The rancorous behavior of U.S. House members of the party opposed to a U.S. president’s party during a State of the Union speech delivered by presidents to a joint session of Congress demonstrates just how much presidents squander their credibility as standing for the country above partisan politics. The temptation to invent and fortify truth in convenient political-ideological terms is often too tempting for most occupants of the White House. Even good intentions can have squalid undertones that gradually and subtly undo the very office.

University presidents, too, can be tempted to use their top office to leverage a cherished truth even though it is inherently tainted with political ideology. I contend that university administrations should be oriented to protecting academic freedom and free speech rather than taking partisan political positions, especially on controversial matters.

To be sure, free-speech protection is not absolute, but because of the importance of academic freedom on a college campus, and the tendency of great minds to think “outside the box”—Nietzsche wrote that a philosopher is not a person of one’s time—even despicable political positions should not be prohibited.  While it is extremely unlikely that the concept of genocide will ever be associated with the good of the species, it is also true that the ideas that the Earth is spherical and not at the center of the solar system, much less the galaxy, were once unpopular at European universities. Einstein’s theories of relativity were controversial, and he never received a Nobel prize for them, because they were so different and not immediately testable empirically. Universities perform a great service for mankind even just in being open to, and thus creative nebulae of, ideas that could revolutionize even our primitive political systems. With political development so far lagging behind technological developments, there is great value in having universities with administrations as “market makers” constructing and protecting the free exchange of political ideas.

Rather than separating the wheat from the chaff in going through political statements as if from an objective fount of fortified truth, university administrators can protect academic freedom, which even a society hostile to higher education benefits from in terms of new potential ideas that could potentially revolutionize even such a society, by focusing instead on protecting people on campus from harassment, bullying, and outright threats of violence. Hate speech, which is rightfully excluded from the protection of free speech, can be determined in action: as outright and targeted attempts to intimidate, bully, and or threaten violence against specific persons on university property.

Overreaching, whether in excluding reprehensible political speech or imposing university regulations off campus, is, I submit, squalidly selfish and preposterously presumptuous. A university administration that presumptuously claims the mantle of fortifying truth and prohibits any political stance that violates that truth-construction even off campus can do a lot of damage to a university’s own mission. Ideologues who seek to dominate under the camouflage of bureaucracy (and enforced by their own private police departments) resemble Nietzsche’s notion of the weak who seek nonetheless to dominate out of sheer resentment of the strong. For “truth” can be used as a weapon ideologically, such as by interpreting safety so broadly that it is deemed to be violated merely because someone’s controversial political speech is disliked and even makes people angry. Put another way, to be angry at someone else’s political position and even to want to rid the world of it, as if by being the world’s monarch appointed for life, does not in itself justify a claim to being unsafe. In contrast, to be personally intimidated or bullied, especially if accompanied by threats of actual, physical violence, definitely puts a person in an unsafe position, and university administrations clearly have a responsibility to protect people on the university campuses from being in such a position.

In their Congressional testimony, the three university presidents should have distinguished between political speech and speech that is directed specifically at particular persons at a university who are not public figures (e.g., students). For example, to say that the Arab countries should invade Israel to uproot and decimate its majority population because of the Israeli government’s disproportionate uprooting and even decimation of the Palestinian population in Gaza is not to bully or threaten Jewish students at Penn with violence or even to bully them. Even calling for the genocide of Jews in general, which also suffers from the erroneous theory of collective, disproportionate justice, is political in nature, rather than being directed at specific individuals who might then fear for their lives. Someone shouting, “Death to the Imperialists!” on a college campus is not threatening to kill the students there who have wealthy parents. For bullying and harassment on a campus to apply, threats of violence (or intimidation) targeted at people on the campus must be made. Such aggression against individuals on a college campus is distinct from the policy suggestions that are made in general political statements, which are typically oriented to societal or international groups and public figures. Donald Trump was not arrested for saying that Hilary Clinton should be arrested, but he would have been had he shouted at her in a room that he was going to push her against a wall before a debate. To criminalize what political figures say about each other risks creating a slippery slope towards autocracy in which truth is defined and fortified by might rather than right.

The three presidents might also have distinguished political speech on the Israeli War from antisemitic hate-speech. Now we have arrived at the definitive question. To be sure, calling for a genocide of the Jews is heinous on its face, given the Holocaust in the 20^th century committed in Nazi Germany. Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania wrote after her Congressional testimony to emphasize “the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetuate.”[14] So even as “normalized” in the context of the Israeli War against the Palestinians in Gaza, the political position that the Jewish people should be killed to redress the hugely disproportional killing of Palestinians in Gaza is a low blow (i.e., underhanded). Furthermore, a genocide of Jews, rather than more narrowly of Jewish Israelis, overgeneralizes because some Jews opposed the military attacks. In fact, I met three Jewish young men in November, 2023 who were on the way to a pro-Ceasefire rally, and my reaction was as nonchalant as them telling me; in the face of the unstoppable carnage going beyond that of the Hamas attack, it didn’t matter. Unless consumed by hatred, the human reaction to such lopsided harm is to recoil in frustrated angst that naturally spurs action even if in mere protest. Therefore, calls for a genocide of the Jews are problematic.  

Even so—and this is where I admittedly climb out on a controversial limb (no saws please!)—the overgeneralization can be viewed nevertheless as part of the political dispute on the conflict. In the context of a war, especially if the harm is heavily lopsided, political barbs do not stay within the limits of reason. The perception and emotions even of onlookers continents away naturally become exaggerated, such that hyperbole is used. Indeed, officials in a government at war can enact policies that are fueled by the use of hyperbole in political speech. The Japanese internment camps in California during World War II furnish us with a good example of overgeneralization in the context of war.  From an innate (though resistible) urge for vengeance, given the flawed, inherently unfair theory of collective justice and the Israeli president’s claim that every resident in Gaza was responsible for the Hamas attack—as if the fact that Hamas had been elected in Gaza implies that every Palestinian must therefore have supported the attack of October 7, 2023—Palestinian calls for a genocide of the Jews can be treated as political speech in the context of that war. Put another way, for so much destruction to fall on one side in a war with no means of answering the harm with the infliction of proportionate harm, the human sentiment of disapprobation, which David Hume saw as furnishing moral judgment itself, quite naturally is aroused. Opposition to the extent to which Israeli government inflicted damage on Gaza can thus be understood to include calls for a counter-attack on the same scale and even including hyperbole without such calls being exogenous to the conflict and to political discourse more generally. Had the loss of housing and lives not been so disproportionate, then I believe there would not have been calls for a Jewish genocide. As the saying goes, vengeance should be served cold, for otherwise you don’t know what might come of it.[15]  

Situating calls for a genocide even though overgeneralized within the rubric of political speech, and thus protected as such even on college campuses, is not to claim that such calls are ethical. Even calls for a genocide more specifically of Jews in Israel to match that (arguably) being committed by the Israeli government against Palestinians in Gaza must reckon with the ethical point that two wrongs do not make a right. Notice that this point implies a prior ethical judgment against the Israeli government’s disproportionate killing and destruction of homes, food, and hospitals without ensuring replacements. Nevertheless, the motive for justice based on equality of harm is not problem-free, ethically.

Watching students at Penn being asked on Fox News whether calls for a genocide of the Jews is antisemitic hate-speech a week after the three university presidents equivocated before Congress, I was initially stunned by the refusal of (at least) one student to take a position in the political dispute on the war, but then I realized that she had had no lived experience in the century of the Holocaust, and, furthermore, that the political dispute had turned even such calls partisan—and thus as fodder in the fight. Agreeing that the calls were antisemitic hate-speech would be to take a side. This in itself means the calls are political speech rather than exogenous to it.   

By implication, neither is it antisemitic to drape a Palestinian flag on a Jewish menorah, as was done in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, in December, 2023. Rather, the act is a political statement against Israel as a combatant in the war. I contend that Yale overreacted on more than one level—both in how the administration characterized the act and in how far the university presumed its authority went locally, off university property. The hyperbole and encroachment on the purview of the city government of New Haven provide a stark contrast to Harvard’s measured and balanced reaction in the wake of the testimony of that president a week or so earlier. Hence, I declare Harvard the actual winner over Yale even though Yale had won The Game just weeks before Harvard’s D- Congressional testimony.

Even though a Palestine flag was draped on a menorah was off Yale’s campus, literally on a public square, Yale’s administration felt the need to become involved, even notifying the New Haven police as if the mayor’s office could not handle that task. That Yale contacted the New Haven police department is ironic because Yale’s private police cars regularly patrolled beyond the university’s property, even regularly arresting local residents for offensives unrelated to the university. One local resident who worked at a local hospital told me that Yale’s private police force regularly arrests local residents coming out of bars. That they might be drunk and hit Yale students is not a sufficient (contingent, indirect) connection to justify giving the Yale Corporation police power in a city. I submit that the overreach is in need of a court challenge on constitutional grounds, as the U.S. Constitution gives police powers to the state governments rather than to private companies and private non-profit organizations. Astonishingly, even Yale’s security guards felt entitled to patrol local streets not bordering campus as if an organization’s security guards were police. 

Several city blocks from the campus, a Yale security-guard car has its overhead patrol lights on.  If the car were merely en route to campus, then the yellow overhead lights should have been off so not to give the wrong impression that the city is Yale's property. 

 

In over-extending (or hyper-extending), and thus maximizing, its power locally, Yale was being like a private, profit-maximizing company, and thus in need of being regulated.  In contrast, Harvard’s balancing of its disdain for calls for a genocide of the Jews and the value of free speech on a university campus evinces the more general homoeostatic self-regulation that does not trigger the need for external government regulation.

Yale police patrolling off campus, duplicating New Haven police (left); A manned Yale police car and three Yale security guards patrolling off campus (right).

The ubiquitous surveillance by Yale police of a shopping area off campus. 

A Yale police car with overhead patrol lights on making a loop around a city block off campus. 

I turn now to a detailed critique of Yale’s stated position made on December 10, 2023 on the draping of the political flag on a Jewish symbol. “Yale condemns in the strongest possible terms the desecration of a menorah on the New Haven Green,” which is a small park in downtown New Haven. The university opines that the “placement of a Palestinian flag on the menorah conveys a deeply antisemitic message to Jewish residents of New Haven, including members of the Yale community.”[16] I contend that both desecration and antisemitic overstate the effect of a political flag drooping on a menorah. It is a political rather than an anti-religious statement, and thus desecration is not incurred. Nevertheless, Yale felt the need to involve itself in a local matter, off campus, in claiming a role pertaining to local residents not affiliated with Yale. The university even stated that its “regulations reach conduct occurring on or off campus that imperils the integrity and values of the Yale community.”[17] This is an open door, for values is a vague term that can mean practically anything, for a university to assume the power of a city government. For example, Yale presumptuously took on the role of the city in asking “the New Haven police to investigate this incident.”[18] In fact, “Yale may conduct its own investigation”[19] Was the local police department not to be trusted? Were there any grounds to suppose that the local police department’s personnel were incompetent?  As Yale’s own police department was literally over-stepping beyond Yale’s territory, these questions could be asked about Yale’s hired guns, especially as they had handed pathological scare-tactic fliers to freshmen when they were moving in at the beginning of the school year in the midst of a contract dispute with the university.

Even though the problems inherent in Yale’s police-state mentality are tertiary to the question being investigated here concerning pro-Palestinian political reactions, a slippery slope exists between such power-aggrandizement and that of the Nazis in Germany that resulted in a genocide of the Jews. Viewed in this wider perspective, Yale's heavy-handed threat of police power in reacting to the Palestinian flag on a menorah has an undercutting dark side. 

Presuming to fortify truth with a partisan ideology is also something Yale had in common with Nazi Germany. In characterizing a drooping political flag during the Israeli war as a “deeply antisemitic” and a “desecration,” Yale was bringing in truth consisting of ideology, rather than focusing on maintaining a market for ideas and protecting individuals on campus directly (rather than indirectly). Defending Yale, an associate dean at Yale’s School of Management, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld—a nice man and very good teacher who had been mistreated at Emery University before coming to Yale in the 1990s when I was a student at Yale—claimed that university administrations have “an elevated duty to fortify the truth” in regard to the safety of students in fending off what he labels as “hate, threats, and violence.”[20] Like “values,” “truth” is like an open door, giving a university administration dangerous latitude to impose an ideology and expunging other, antipodal political positions. Yale imposed its “truth” locally in declaring that draping a political flag on a menorah is “deeply antisemitic” rather than representing a politically partisan position in a war. What if someone had drooped a Ukrainian flag on the menorah? Would the menorah still be desecrated? Should a ritual artifact of a religion even be on city property?[21]

In conclusion, I have argued that the Israeli war in Gaza politicized what in the previous century had been antisemitic hate-speech in the context of the Holocaust. The disproportionate military aggression of Israel in Gaza unintentionally turned what had been antisemitic hate-speech into fodder in a political dispute. Hence Harvard’s governing board, the Harvard Corporation, intelligently turned its attention to the actual safety of people on the campus—and being angry at a political position does not count as being unsafe—as a way both the oppose calls for a genocide of Jews and embrace the value of protecting free speech where the exchange even of unpopular political speech should be valued, given a university’s “commit to academic freedom.” Yale’s “duty to fortify truth,” which presumably includes declaring as hate any statement that conflicts with that “truth,” is not as consistent with such freedom and represents a slippery slope to totalitarian autocracy in which guns, on as well as off campus, enforce truth from the evil of hate.

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1 The number of painstaking revisions I have made in re-thinking and clarifying my argument testifies to both the difficulty and the intensity involved. Easily among the most significant events of the 20^th century (although dwarfed by the Nazi genocide of 19 million Slavs in Eastern Europe, including the U.S.S.R., outside of battle), the Holocaust in Nazi Germany was still etched in stone as the epitome of human evil—the banality of evil in bureaucratic yet even so chilling terms—in America even after the Vietnam War. For mind that came of age in the last quarter of the 20^th century, it is surreal just to hear the term genocide bandied about in 2023 in the context of Israel’s war by either side.
2. Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
3. Najib Jobain, Wafaa Shurafa, and Samy Magdy, “Israel Strikes Across Gaza as Offensive Leaves Both It and U.S. Increasingly Isolated,” AP News, December 12, 2023.
4. Caitlin Hu, “United Nations General Assembly Votes to Demand Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza,” CNN.com, December 12, 2023.
5. Ibid.
6.  Paul Blumenthal, “Israeli President Suggests That Civilians In Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” The Huffington Post, October 16, 2023.
7. “Gaza Is ‘Running Out of Time,’ UN Experts Warn, Demanding a Ceasefire to Prevent Genocide,” Press Releases, UN Human Rights, November 2, 2023.
8. Solcyre Burga, “Is What’s Happening in Gaza a Genocide: Experts Weigh In,” Time, November 14, 2023.
9. Matt Egan, “Harvard’s Board: We Unanimously Stand in Support of President Gay,” CNN.com, December 12, 2023.
10. Ibid.
11. “Yale Statement on Desecration of a Menorah,” YaleNews, December 10, 2023 (accessed December 11, 2023).
12.  Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
13. Skip Worden, Institutional Conflicts of Interest. In making this argument, I am admittedly at odds with some other scholars who maintain that a conflict of interest only becomes unethical when it is exploited. I contend that those scholars are too optimistic on human nature to suppose that an arrangement that could be exploited can long exist without being exploited. So, whether viewed as a temptation or as likely to result in harm, institutional conflicts of interest are in my view tantamount to being inherently unethical. Therefore, I recommend that such arrangements, whether in business, government, or business-and-government, should be dismantled rather than tolerated or, even worse, ignored. 
14. Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
15. In having vengeance reside with God—Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord—the vice is snatched from humans but at a cost. Nietzsche take the attribution of a vice onto a being of omnibenevolence as discrediting the concept of God, hence the philosopher wrote, Gott ist tot. A better concept would entail, Vengeance is null and void, even and especially in the divine. Then there would be no internal contradiction in the concept of God as it has come down through history in the Abrahamic religions.
16. “Yale Statement on Desecration of a Menorah,” YaleNews, December 10, 2023 (accessed December 11, 2023).
17. Ibid.
18.  Ibid.

19. Ibid.
20. Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
21. As a student at Yale, I took Steven Carter’s class on Law and Religion, in which cases on the separation of church and state were covered. As surreal as calls for a genocide of Jews is, so too are the calls by some U.S. House representatives for a Christian nation. Given such calls, I believe it is prudent to keep city property, including public schools, free of religious iconography. For the record, a Christmas tree is not religious in nature (unlike a manger), and thus to equate it with a religious object is to commit a category mistake. Moreover, secularized “myth,” whether of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman, or the Pilgrims and the Indians sharing a peaceful feast, that is integral to an official national holiday, is not in itself religious.