Harvard to the Finland Station

"You don’t need Harvard to lose. You just need to win."

There are rumors that I may be speaking soon at Harvard. I have nothing to announce at present. (But how hard can it be to rent an armored car?)

As a longstanding critic of that ancient institution, I want to critique the Trump administration’s letter to Harvard. I want to like the letter. I feel it is almost good. Almost does not necessarily cut it in this kind of a historical situation, however.

First of all, any critique of Harvard just has to mention Increase Mather and his son, Cotton, and their involvement in the Massachusetts witch panic of 1692. Infamously, Increase literally burned Robert Calef’s book, More Wonders of the Invisible World, one of America’s great monuments of truth-telling, the one book by a common merchant which finally deflated the “spectral evidence” of the Puritan clerics, in Harvard Yard. We could find the literal spot, and park the armored car there. (While it’s not going to be a tank and it always depends what they have on the airport lot, even a rental will often come with an operable 20mm autocannon or similar. Bring your own rounds.)

But leave that aside—we obviously can’t expect these kinds of histrionic flourishes from the sober, prosaic Trump administration.

One of the keys to monarchy is that an authority has two ways of exercising power: coercion and attraction. Whenever possible, use attraction. Coercion must only be used at well-chosen moments, with clear, decisive and permanent results. Attraction, which is the only operating mode of an oligarchical regime, must also be the normal operating mode of a monarchical regime.

In difficult problems—and we face a difficult problem here—the two forces must be used together, with great skill and harmony. Some of the pieces do seem to be coming together here, but others not quite.

It is quite impossible to coerce Harvard into instituting a “merit-based” admissions or hiring policy. It is just like conquering Germany in 1945 and issuing new directives to suppress anti-Semitism in the Waffen-SS. No authority could do it. No authority could make Harvard understand it—to the Harvard admissions department, ideology is merit.

The Harvard admissions department could not do its job unless it accepted this principle. There is no alpha in trying to force people to be something they aren’t. You don’t even need to punish your opponents—you just need to cut them out of the loop. Punishing them actually makes it harder to defeat them.

When I look at many of the requests the administration is making of Harvard, they have something of the flavor of Austria’s diplomatic note to Servia in 1914. It is not clear that the sender wants a “yes,” or has a clear picture of what a “yes” would look like. Austria had its reasons, but how did that work out? Is this the Art of the Deal?

Consider this condition:

By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.

This audit shall begin no later than the summer of 2025 and shall proceed on a department-by-department, field-by-field, or teaching-unit-by-teaching-unit basis as appropriate. The report of the external party shall be submitted to University leadership and the federal government no later than the end of 2025.

It is almost impossible to imagine any “external party” which could perform this function. It’s as if the conservatives woke up in the middle of the night and imagined they were liberals, who really cared about power and had spent the last 50 years, no, the last 100 years, building foundations and NGOs and other instruments of power.

No! The truth about conservative “oligarchs” is simple: they are not normal people. They are all autistic in some way. People with normal social instincts want power—viscerally. If they wanted power, viscerally, they would do what normal people do, when they become billionaires—and be liberals.

Instead, these semi-autistic people are genuine anarchs in the Juengerian sense—their visceral mission is to be free of power. If Elon Musk could staff his empire entirely with AIs, he would. His mission is going to Mars. His mission is not commanding an army of men—that’s just a thing he needs to do to go to Mars.

So, when they get rich, he and other people like them do not think: I need to build an army. Because I am rich, the only thing I can’t buy is power. If I want power, I have to find a scheme to get it it. But since I am rich, I can buy or build instruments of power, even before I get it. If my schemes succeed and I do get power, I’ll be ready to use it.

Normal people would think this. And do. But normal people are liberals, not anarchs. And normal billionaires, too, are liberals. They have their private armies. Ours don’t.

So actually—that list of things you’d do if you had an army? You don’t need that list. You can put it in the garbage disposal. You don’t have an army—armed or unarmed. It’s 2025 and you don’t even have an armored car. If you did, it would just get towed.

Now, if you had an army, an army with the staff and energy to go around the Harvard history department, and every other humanities department, and every other humanities department in every university in America, and eradicate the progressive woke communist mind virus, like so many antibodies—great. It would be like turbo McCarthyism. It would be McCarthyism on steroids. Imagine how great America would be if McCarthy didn’t just go after the communists, but also the liberals too. California would consist entirely of surfer girls who get married off to stockbrokers. We would still be #1 in plastics.

It’s not where we are. Maybe it’s where we want to be. Maybe it isn’t. None of that matters. What matters is that it would be completely crazy if, in a 2025 America totally colonized by “progressivism”—in your heart, you know it’s a euphemism—this turbo McCarthyism, with its imaginary cadre of uniformed Muskites, was to go around, not eradicating the cancer, but splitting the difference and asking for a variety (sorry, I can’t even use that other word) of viewpoints. Like: we’re not eradicating communism from the State Department. We’re just looking for a balance of communists and Christians. We just don’t want America’s diplomatic personnel to consist entirely of Soviet spies. Not that actual McCarthyism worked, either—but McCarthy himself would laugh. When we find the closest examples of programs like this that did work, such as the denazification of postwar Germany, they had no interest in balance whatsoever. Lol.

Ultimately, replacing “DEI” with a new “VD” boils down to a feeble demand that state institutions, official or (like Harvard) quasi-official, should distribute their jobs and sinecures according to a proportion of “viewpoints,” these being the public religions of the day. (That these religions are godless, focusing on random points of economics and law, does not make their dogmas thoughts, nor their worshippers philosophers.) Some civil services, notably Austria’s, work on this division-of-spoils principle. It’s a terrible idea and it can’t really happen here anyway.

And what is the goal, even?

Since “viewpoint diversity” obviously does not apply to Nazis, Hamas, Scientology, etc, this concept cannot even be philosophically defined. Moreover, you are fitting a square peg into a round hole—what is Harvard’s motto? Is it “Diversitas?” It is not.

Harvard long predated the Mathers and survived them far longer. Its actual mission is immortal, not political. Come at it with the sword, and it will beat you with a book. Smite it with a book, as Robert Calef did, and it might fall at your feet. If it doesn’t, things are worse than you thought. You may have to come back with an armored car. But even if you have to take down all the beautiful buildings, even if you have to sell off the brand to a hastily-assembled consortium of Indonesian investors, you have to come to Harvard to serve truth, and not to defeat it. Or you’re not defeating nothing.

It is difficult to conceive of the pure hackery of the “viewpoint diversity” approach. We begin by noticing that half of it is the D in DEI. You can’t make this up.

How did that happen? Pure, craven centrism. We split the difference. We worship half of their golden calf. We exist in the system. We agree that “diversity” is a good thing, comrades! We too support the workers and the peasants. What human soul could be their enemy? We feel only that the tired policies of state socialism are not doing their job to get the turnips to the grocery store. So we favor a free market in agriculture. Which obviously does not make us capitalists. Nor would we condone imperialism…

This is what you’re doing when you’re like: “Dear Colleague, please remember that the real diversity is a variety of viewpoints, like it says in Justice Powell’s Bakke decision—not variety of race, an imaginary thing that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t matter if it did.” (Never forget that the point of Bakke was that the Court found an excuse, and a word, for a practice that was already going on.) You too support the “workers and peasants.”

Over thirty years after the death of Marxist-Leninism, I write these words and ask myself: who could put these turds in their mouths? What human soul? Yet millions did, on a daily basis. We will know that “woke is over” only when, fifty or a hundred years from now, the D-word, the E-word, the I-word, and all their other friends in the jargon have gone unused for so long that they lose their historical connotation, and people feel free to say them again.

And a variety of viewpoints is not even Harvard’s mission! Its motto is one viewpoint: “truth.” If Scientology is true, Harvard must teach everything about Scientology, and nothing against it. If witches are real and come from the Devil, Harvard has to warn Boston and the world about them. But if these things are not so, not a word of them must be spoken.

And if Harvard had been speaking only the truth—the truth, the whole truth, and only the truth—what reason could there be to molest her? My friends, I pray of you: put on the full armor of God. Do you not wrestle against powers, and against principalities?

The most frustrating thing about this situation is that the administration, though it does not have the power to crush Harvard under its tank treads and sell the trademark on the blockchain, may well have the power to strike effective blows which satisfy the fundamental criterion of action: an action is effective if it makes further action easier. But these strikes have to be targeted, decisive, and realistic.

It is impossible for the Department of Education to effectively order Harvard to stop filtering its “holistic” admissions for ideological alliances—the political meaning of all “diversity” programs is just that they produce reliable political clients. It is quite possible, however, for the Department of Education to find that “holistic admissions” is as unsalvageable, and as pretextual, as “separate but equal” schools in the South.

Even when grades are considered, there is absolutely no way to prevent admissions departments from putting their thumbs on the scale. Grades in America are not in any way standardized. As soon as we realize this, we are halfway to laundering affirmative action into class rank. There is one objective admissions tool: the standardized test.

Now, imagine putting Harvard administrators in a trap where they had to choose between an interruption of research funding, and objective admissions by test only. Drop all the other demands. Focus all the energy on the decisive point.

The administration could sweeten the deal with exceptions to objective admissions: legacy, sports, and perhaps even some explicit racial quotas. (The implicit, mendacious Kafkaesque nature of the “DEI” era is ten times worse than its mere foul unfairness. Any biological reservation should be both defined, and enforced, by DNA evidence.)

Who is going to go to war to defend the American college admissions process? There is not a teenager in America who does not utterly despise this process—and even the admissions bureaucrats think it’s the best bad option. They, too, are sick of reading an avalanche of essays by rich kids all pretending to love the workers and the peasants. But some really do! It was an awful job before AI, and now…

Yet if the Harvard administrators accept, by the end of the Trump administration they will have a totally new student body which has been selected entirely for intelligence. It will not be aligned with the existing faculty. Its instinct will be to rebel against the old Harvard. In the end, the undergraduates always win—and Harvard always wins. When you need to win, forget about every other goal. You don’t need Harvard to lose. You just need to win.

An old regime is tired of life. It wants to die. It wants to surrender to you! And it will. You can “draw out Leviathan with a hook.” But only if you bring just the right hook. That hook is Harvard’s own motto. Be water! Flow with it—don’t struggle against it.

I have another idea—it belongs behind a paywall. If you do subscribe to read it, please don’t be mad when it’s simple. At least it’s not small.