By Partha Chakraborty
(Partha Chakraborty, Ph.D., CFA, is an economist, a statistician, and a financial analyst by training. Currently, he is an entrepreneur in water technologies, blockchain and wealth management in the US and in India. Dr. Chakraborty lives in Southern California with his wife and teenage son. All opinions are of the author alone)
Sally Rosenbluth. Claudine Gay. Elizabeth Magill. Three most accomplished people, Presidents of three most sought-after universities in the US – MIT, Harvard, and UPenn, respectively. Glow of intellect, contributions in the field, poise, and grace lights up any room each enters, anywhere, including inside the Hose of Representatives on December 5, when the three appeared before the House Committee of Education and the Workforce.
Then they opened their mouths and flunked a simple test. Every one of them.
Each was asked by Elise Stefanik, a US Representative (NY 21: R, in picture above), a simple yes or no question. “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [University Name]’s code of conduct or rules against bullying and harassment?” Repeatedly, and in many iterations of the same, they twisted themselves into pretzels in refusing to come back with a definite answer.
“Depends on the context” was the most any of them would go. The backlash was immediate. Dr. Magill was forced out at UPenn, along with its Chair of the Board, who did not testify, after she released a video statement the next day, where she managed to say nothing new and consequential, but appeared to look like she was being prepped for guillotine; in a way she was. Dr. Gay released a personal apology and has managed to keep her job after Harvard Corporation defended her. Dr. Rosenbluth continues in her role, too.
In their mind they were correct, and, legally, they may be. The US Supreme Court defines “threat” as “serious expression of the intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or a group of individuals,” and harassment as “behavior so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it sufficiently bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”
Legitimate arguments can be made that behavior exhibited by a large section of the student body in the wake of Oct 7 may just be cantankerous, and disgusting, expressions of odious thoughts and ingrained enmity to a population – the Jews. Heinous as it is, these are allowed under the First Amendment. That the Presidents refused to take a stand on behalf of respective universities may even conform to the Kalven Report, issued by the University of Chicago in 1967, considered the gold standard, that a university shall “be a home and sponsor of critics, but not itself a critic.”
The three Presidents’ testimony would be excused, even if denounced in context, if the universities acted “without fear or favor.” Evidence suggests anything but.
Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at U of Chicago, has faced the situation repeatedly. In October 2021 he was about to deliver “John Carlson Lecture” on Climate Science at MIT but disinvited when it was discovered he penned an Op-ed in Newsweek highlighting “a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit.” His voiced opposition to identity-based preferences in university admissions, in no way connected with his speech, and expressed in an Op-ed, merited disinvitation, MIT said, because “words matter and have consequences.” Shortly thereafter, the faculty at Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center (BASC) refused a request from its Director David Romps to speak at the Center, resulting in Dr. Romps resigning from his position. UPenn has been trying to punish Amy Wax, a Law professor, repeatedly for her audacity to point out inconvenient facts in law school cohorts and ungracious remarks about Asians. Carole Hooven, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard, said that sex is binary and was forced to leave her paid faculty position as “a result of the lack of support from Harvard” in expressing “scientific views in an environment free of harassment.” The list goes on.
Six days after George Floyd murder, President Gay of Harvard, then in her role as Dean of Arts & Sciences, came up with an official statement that committed the Faculty of Arts and Sciences with “a shared responsibility to bring truth to bear,” and owned up “individual and institutional shortcoming” on behalf of the faculty. According to media reports, what followed at Harvard, and repeated on American campuses, is a reign of terror where opposing voices choose to keep quiet as a matter of course so as not to rock the applecart.
That ship did not sail yesterday. As CNN’s Fareed Zakaria opines in his Dec 10 show “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” “American Universities have been neglecting a core focus on excellence, in order to pursue a variety of agendas, many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. He expands that “those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology, and turned these universities/institutions into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.” Fareed points out that in the humanities “hiring for new academics hiring center on race and gender of the applicant as well as their research agenda that must be around representation of so-called marginalized / oppressed groups.” About the universities Fareed continues that neglecting “their mandate of pursuit of excellence to favor many agendas of a self-serving clique, all-powerful within academia, and most vocal banging the same broken drums of cantankerous complaints against things that actually make America great, and acts as the lure for aspiring candidates from all over the world – yours truly included.”
These social engineers forgot how it comes across to the deserving lot, even among target beneficiary groups. A presumption that your identity denudes you from a capacity to take part in a cogent argument and face the most contra position with poise, conviction, data, and analyses supporting your view – a “presumption that people are not able to handle” – is an insult on the identity itself. John McWhorter, a Professor at Columbia, points out that “training people to think of themselves as weak is a form of abuse” that goes far beyond “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
In the wake of Oct 7, universities’ performative acts of virtue-signaling – with “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and “micro-aggressions,” among others – fell on the wayside when it came to having Jewish students feel safe from mobs chanting slogans that have genocidal connotations invading classrooms, eateries, quads, libraries, even Jewish halls of residence. In closed meetings, and in open ones too, speakers exuberated over feelings they had seeing Hamas terrorist acts. Marches have brought campuses to a standstill where all sorts of verbal calisthenics were performed in praise of the “oppressed,” and their “right even obligation” to “revenge any way they see fit,” even if that meant wiping out the Jewish people in the land of Israel.
Yes, under the First Amendment, these were allowed unless a threat or harassment ensued. But imagine, if equivalent events happened in the wake of George Floyd murder?
Outside of the STEM, and, regrettably, often inside them, it is nearly impossible to find a scholarly work that does not at least mention “intersectionality.” Merriam-Webster defines intersectionality as “the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of discrimination combine, overlap, or intersect” to create systems of discrimination or advantage. In most cases this is meant, and used, to connote that, paraphrasing, ‘instruments of oppression’ impact peoples across geographies and time, creating an overarching thread, somewhat akin to saying “nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” or, paraphrasing, “Oppressed of the world, Unite.”
The fact that most advocacy groups failed to pick up on acts of violence against their Jewish cohort on Oct 7 points to something scholar Ilya Shapiro called “intersectionality hierarchy”. Shapiro, of Cato Institute, was about to take up a position at the Law Center at Georgetown University when he tweeted his disapproval of the appointment of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown. “Because Biden said he’d only consider black women for SCOTUS, his nominee will always have an asterisk attached.” Instead, he advocated for Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American judge. Shapiro had his appointment suspended, and then restored with a stern warning; in the end he did not take it up. Indian-Americans are supposed to be part of the oppressed ‘persons of color’ cohort, except that their claim to the venerated status is subjugated to somebody else’s.
Under liberal hierarchy of intersectionality, Israeli victims of barbarism by Hamas have no standing simply because they are supposed to be white, even if half of Israeli Jews are of Middle Eastern provenance.
Liberalism in college campuses has become nihilistic – of institutions that built and still maintain the country, of people who made the country great, of ideals of our Founding. There was a time liberalism was about ideals and US universities were flag-bearers. I consider my years at Cornell as a wonderful learning experience as an altar boy. No longer. Liberalism has devolved into is a race to the bottom, the bottom of intersectional hierarchy. It is not about elevating peoples, not anymore; it is about finding – inventing – reasons to complain and maintaining a running list. It is not about tolerance any more, it is about being proud of your intolerance of someone else’s presumed intolerance. It is not about identity as a private refuge, it is about using identity as a battlefield artillery scoring meaningless crumbs with no economic or social benefit. It is not about open debate, once a hallmark of liberal arts colleges that lured people like Fareed and myself, less than a tenth of academics identify as conservatives. It is not about accountability and perseverance; it is about how self-pity recuses you from these standards. In the end you fester in the box six feet under with nary to show for while they pretend failure is the crowning glory.
I am coining the term “Nihiliberalism” to depict that self-destructive avatar. I hope it is no more than a word soup of no import, ending up in the same garbage bin of history as “intersectionality” and “Critical Race Theory,” and many more. I have a suspicion it may not be, and I will continue to witness death by a thousand cuts of an idea, an ideal, and a promise, that are as shining as the City on a Hill.
That makes me truly sad.
Partha Chakraborty Op-Ed: On Hierarchy of Intersectionality and Nihiliberalism
