Finding religion ghosts in the Ivy League wars, with help (sort of) from Andrew Sullivan — GetReligion
Thus, I see “religion ghosts” in the current Ivy wars.
I am not sure that gay-rights legend Andrew Sullivan sees the same ghosts that I do. But it’s impossible to read the following Substack commentary by this old-school liberal — “The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off: Did the Congressional hearings finally expose the scandal of the Ivy League?” — without seeing the, well, DNA of some potential Ivy League problems facing traditional Jews, Catholics, evangelicals and others. Yes, traditional Muslim believers, as well.
This is strong stuff. I will let Sullivan preach for a new minutes. Read this carefully and look for ghosts:
Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.
In the hearings, [Harvard] President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.
This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.
Maybe some of these spoken and symbolic speech issues contain religious and moral content?
It might be a good time — YO! JOURNALISTS! — to check in with some symbolic religious groups on Ivy campuses. I would start with Orthodox Jews, Southern Baptists, Black Pentecostals, Latino Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and others.
Does anyone want to ask if members of traditional religious groups are routinely included in lists of “oppressor” groups?
That said, I will add my own “Amen” to this word from Sullivan:
The absolute worst thing you can do right now is what the presidents of these woke institutions now say they intend to do: switch Jews out of the “oppressor class” and into the “oppressed one,” and re-apply all the DEI discrimination on their behalf.
That doesn’t solve the problem; it compounds it. Pro-Palestinian, and anti-Israel speech should no more be censored than any other — and the suppression is real. There should be one standard and it should be free speech. But there can be no free speech and no guarantee of it until the toxins of critical theory, and the architecture of its enforcement, DEI, are excised from the university altogether. Asking the current leadership to correct these lost institutions is an exercise in futility.
I will ask: Are Orthodox Jews going to move into the “acceptable” class? I have my doubts about that.
Oh, and let’s be careful out there.
FIRST IMAGE: The Ivy League, a graphic of school logos at Emigrarusa.com
