https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-20-elite-american-universities-completely-beyond-hope
In a post last week I marveled at the sudden discovery by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT of the importance of freedom of speech when it involves demonstrators favoring elimination of Israel and slaughter of Jews. Yet somehow, at the same institutions, comparable principles just don’t seem to apply in the case of basic dissent from leftist political orthodoxy. When the official party line gets questioned, all the elite universities have multiple tactics to diminish and banish the deviators, whether that be by demanding loyalty oaths (e.g., “diversity statements”) in hiring or admissions, holding mandatory “diversity” or “sensitivity” training sessions, disinviting speakers, conducting pretextual investigations of dissenters, funding the favored and denying tenure to the disfavored, and many other such methods.
So how bad is it out there on elite campuses, really? It’s not so easy to find out. Mostly, the schools keep the worst of the rot fairly well hidden from the public, and for that matter from alumni. The publications sent to alumni (I get several of them) wildly play down the extent of the left wing political orthodoxy enforcement.
But the controversy following the Congressional testimony of the three Presidents had caused the curtain to get somewhat pulled back. The past couple of weeks have seen a few enterprising commenters putting together some collections of very revealing university materials for students, and of statements by university officials.
My first example comes from an unlikely source, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times named Pamela Paul. Ms. Paul is a relatively recent addition to the Times’s stable of regular columnists, having come off a stint as editor of their Book Review. Many commenters at the Times seem to think Ms. Paul is a “conservative,” although I would say that is far overstating things. (For example, here is a November 30 column about the possibility of a second Trump presidency (“[W]e know there’s a bomb under the table — the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency . . . [C]rippling destruction . . . will ensue.”), and another from September 21 defending President Biden against a potential impeachment (“The impeachment inquiry is just the latest twisted Republican abuse of Democratic precedent.”))