Commentary: Our ‘best and brightest’ are the worst among us

The university is supposed to be an institution dedicated to the preservation and transmission of the culture, knowledge, and collective wisdom of the ages, a redoubt against the various species of barbarism ever threatening to take back their own. But it has been clear for some time that universities — and especially our most elite universities — are no longer playing anything like that role. Instead, they are leading the way in waging war on civilization on barbarism’s behalf.

Although it may seem like ages ago, just a few decades back, in 1984, our system of higher education still maintained a good deal of ideological balance: 39% of university faculty identified as left/liberal while 34% identified as right/conservative. By 1999, those numbers had undergone a seismic shift: from 39% to 72% left/liberal and from 34% to 15% right/conservative. By 2018, the situation was more dire still: a comprehensive National Association of Scholars report headed by Mitchell Langbert of Brooklyn College, which tracked the political registrations of 8,688 tenure-track professors at top liberal arts colleges, found that “78.2 percent of the academic departments in [the] sample have either zero Republicans, or so few as to make no difference.”

Unsurprisingly, over roughly the same time period, the political views of those who attend universities have veered to the left and still further left the more time they spend ensconced in contemporary academia’s toxic monoculture.

In 1994, for example, 8% of postgrads were “consistently conservative” and 7% were “consistently liberal.” By 2015, the percentage of consistent conservatives hadn’t changed much, even going up slightly to 10%. What changed dramatically is that a whole bunch of people in the middle of the ideological spectrum shifted far left: 31% were now “consistently liberal.” For college graduates, the “consistently liberal” category shifted similarly from 5% in 1994 to 24% in 2015.

So much for the liberal myth that reality itself has a liberal bias, with education inherently making people more liberal by teaching them facts and opening their minds. It is not education but ideological education that sends people flocking leftward.

What occurred behind the scenes is an ideological takeover of these institutions. After the generation of 1960s counterculture radicals aged into positions of power in subsequent decades, instead of preserving and transmitting culture, universities began to posture themselves as leading an attack on culture and tradition in the name of half-baked notions of progress, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, feminism, anti-heteronormativity, and transgenderism. In the process, they have utterly unwound the hard-won, high-minded universalist, humanist creeds toward which our most visionary thinkers and leaders had been guiding us throughout the centuries. Instead, they have reinfused our cultural and political life with precisely the kind of atavistic and petty tribal identity politics that had been, ironically, a hallmark of the 20th century’s collectivist far-right movements, i.e., fascism.

But where fascism at least tried to deploy such tribal loyalties to unify nations under a single banner (while, of course, brutally persecuting outsiders and nonconformists), contemporary identity politics tear nations apart from within. They do so first by convincing us to conceive of ourselves not as citizens of a single polity, much less beings belonging to a single species, nor even as parts of our local communities or organic associations, but rather as members of artificially constructed tribal identity categories readily configured to do battle in the culture war of all against all.

The interests of those in other identity categories may intersect with our own to varying extents at various times, resulting in temporary alliances, but in the end, our fundamental goal is to further the interest of our own particular grouping, resulting in icons of earlier feminist or gay rights revolutions, such as Martina Navratilova, being vilified by transgenderists because her support for female athletics is ultimately incompatible with their assault on the integrity of that category.

The left’s use of these weaponized identities to press their respective, specific causes and thus lock and load for a culture war makes its frequently repeated charge that the right is waging a culture war rather incongruous.

The latest eruption of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, has exposed the true level of barbarism all too frequently encountered among our supposedly “best and brightest.”

Let me make this much clear: This is not about how you feel about the deeper history and issues involved in that conflict, which are complex. In my experience, such long-standing conflicts usually have few outright heroes and villains and many shades of gray. That said, I can respect that many people, whether out of ethnic or religious loyalties or because of political considerations of one sort or another, have strong views in favor of Israel or of the Palestinians. All of that, however, is completely beside the point when we’re discussing a terrorist group that decided it was a good idea to go about beheading babies and parading unconscious, naked victims around through the streets. Just as you can be a good German patriot without endorsing Hitler, you can be a supporter of the Palestinian cause while still condemning individuals with a level of consciousness somewhere in the general neighborhood of Genghis Khan.

Somehow, however, this insight, which does not require a Ph.D. in moral philosophy to grasp, didn’t make it up to Cambridge, Massachusetts. As many of us have now heard, more than 30 Harvard student groups, including the African American Resistance Organization, Amnesty International, the Harvard Islamic Society, and Harvard Jews for Liberation issued a statement featuring such gems as “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence” and “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

What got some of the signatories, all of a sudden, to acquire a moral compass and begin to scramble to take their names off the signatory list was a threat by CEOs of some major employers to dox and blacklist them ... because, well, in the Harvard pantheon of values, support for terrorism is right near the top — somewhere between endorsement of child genital mutilation and visiting the sins of great-great grandparents upon future generations by agitating for reparations for slavery — but parlaying one’s Harvard pedigree into a lucrative career opportunity is the unquestioned master virtue, second to none.

Nor was Harvard the only elite university at which students felt the need to speak up for medieval savagery. Among many other such examples, 20 student groups at Columbia University published a statement that, after briefly paying lip service to the “tragic losses” on “both” sides, went on to write, in boldface, “The weight of responsibility for the war and casualties undeniably lies with the Israeli extremist government and other Western governments, including the U.S. government, which fund and staunchly support Israeli aggression, apartheid and settler-colonization.”

The president of the New York University Law Student Bar Association claimed, “Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life.” At George Washington University, meanwhile, about 50 students held a vigil for Palestinian “martyrs.” A Yale professor posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity,” prompting Yale’s higher-ups, faced with, at this writing, over 42,000 petition signatures to give her the boot, to suddenly embrace the right of free speech. There are many more where these came from, of course.

That our educational elites are voicing their support for rape and murder in this instance is, as I have already suggested, no mere one-off or outlier. These universities are systematically churning out graduates who have views out of step with much of society and with the dictates of civilization.

Such people routinely judge others — and even judge works of art — based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. They oppose free speech (with Harvard leading the pack in that ignominious category and most other top universities not far behind). They support policies that fail to hold people accountable for — and so incentivize — rampant criminality, while making our cities increasingly unlivable for law-abiding citizens. They support a free-for-all immigration policy that effectively allows law-breakers to cut the line while would-be legal immigrants — those inherently far more likely to become integrated, productive Americans — wait patiently for years on end.

And these same elites are the ones pushing aggressively to undo the reality of a gender binary perfectly obvious to humans across the ages and to replace it with a dangerous social contagion in which prepubescent children who have not the faintest clue about sex and gender are thought capable of deciding that they have been born in the wrong bodies, "assigned" the wrong gender at birth.

And so, it is high time to take stock of exactly where we are: Today, Harvard and its cohort institutions are coasting on their reputations. Where once they were temples of knowledge and culture, today they celebrate the desecration of our highest achievements and our finest traditions. Where once they cultivated our best and brightest, today they play host to the worst among us. And where once they were defenders and preservers of civilization, today they are the heralds of our new age of barbarism.

Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney in New York specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a writer of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and polemics.