President Trump has declared open war on Harvard University. If he is serious about taking power, he has no choice. With an annual turnover of more than six billion dollars, more than 10,000 employees and more than 20,000 students, the university is one of the world’s centres of ultra-liberal ideology. A body subject to the fanaticism of the mob radiates its ideology and power into editorial offices, companies, banks and courts. This is not just another bunch of cowards like Facebook or Disney bowing to the new power, at least in appearance. It’s not like cleaning out a few federal offices.
Let’s try to imagine it the other way round. That Harvard was a bastion of conservative power and the liberals were attacking it. They wouldn’t have a hard time. Antifa and BLM-type paramilitary commandos would start blocking or occupying buildings, disrupting activities, there would be a wave of physical assaults on faculty and academic officials, the state police would completely clear the field, and the banks would cut off Harvard’s financial services. The university would probably capitulate after a few days.
It’s not hard to see that none of this is new. Neither its fighting power, nor its ability to impose its will through the financial system, nor its determination to win at all costs. Talk of an emerging dictatorship is utterly absurd. But my guess is that sooner or later the Trump revolutionaries will have no choice but to resort to harsher methods. Revolutions usually begin with noble, humane ideals, but eventually it will become clear that if the revolution is not to be defeated, it cannot do without revolutionary terror.
At the moment, Donald Trump is making very moderate demands.
The American university environment today is an environment of such fierce political pressure as we have never seen in the Czech lands during any phase of communist rule. The slightest suspicion of dissent means liquidation. The reader may think that this will drive some of the best minds away from the university, but if you are Harvard, you have more than a billion people applying for jobs or studies, so you can afford some waste of talent. In this situation, the Trump administration wants to loosen the censorship at Harvard a bit to allow some more independently minded people to work there. This is reflected in a lot of organisational changes and reviews.
Sounds reasonable and uncontroversial to normal people, but totally unacceptable to people at Harvard. Curtis Yarvin compares it to the hypothetical situation in 1945 of allowing an SS division to continue to function and demanding that it give more opportunities to Jews when recruiting new SS men. This cannot work. Trump’s demands are too lenient, so they don’t get to the heart of the problem, Yarvin argues.
But the question is what can work. For some institutions, it helps to have quiet supporters inside, so that if you apply enough pressure, they will take control and turn the institution into your ally. But that’s not going to be the case with a perfectly channeled Harvard-type university. Just to illustrate. I haven’t found data for Harvard, but at the most prestigious US schools, heterosexual white males make up about 10% of the student body (if you don’t count Jews). Opposition is even rarer.