Trump and the Academic Cocoon
A New York Times op-ed by a Yale historian tries to see universities from the vantage point of an outsider. Instead, it unwittingly illustrates why universities will not self-correct without external intervention.
Yale historian David Blight has written an op-ed for the New York Times calling for a “reckoning” on the part of universities. Academia must grapple with its blind spots, he argues, in order to understand why blue-collar workers voted for an “authoritarian in a red tie” in the recent US presidential election. But despite these good intentions, Blight unwittingly illustrates why universities will not self-correct without external intervention.
Blight is a scholar of American race relations and the Civil War; he directs Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His massive 2018 biography of Frederick Douglass won a Pulitzer Prize. He holds one of the most prestigious chairs at Yale, he’s a prominent voice on campus, and he has left a significant public footprint in non-academic historical associations. But his worldview remains stunningly parochial.
Blight’s op-ed tries to see universities from the vantage point of an outsider. “The worst thing we university liberals could do right now is to keep wondering why ‘they’ hate us,” he notes:
History has been waiting to explode our hubris; and sometimes, even as we have facts, truth and rule of law on our side, we make ourselves good targets with our jargon, our righteousness and our fragmentation. We are out of touch with working class Americans, even if the policies that Democrats have enacted work for them.
Public confidence in academia has declined, he says, on account of:
[S]eemingly uncontrollable tuition costs, steady diets of negative press about alleged leftist ideological purity, opaque admission policies, the expensive obsession with professionalized athletics in colleges, prestige-driven meritocracies that create exclusive bubbles of self-importance and the hoarding of endowments at elite schools.
Blight frames such criticisms as the perceptions of academia’s foes, and he is careful not to endorse them. “We need answers for our critics who believe we are an ideological monolith, whether they are right or not.” So, are universities ideological monoliths? Blight does not say. Is the existence of “leftist ideological purity” a real problem within academia? Blight is mum. He juxtaposes academia’s “stress [on] our racial, ethnic and gendered parts” with the need, in a democracy, to have the “whole and the parts ... sing together.” He is quick to add, however, that identity-based fields are “important and established for good reasons.” God help him had he not included that caveat.
Either Blight does not see the ideological monoculture of which he is a part or he fears criticising it. Either way, he confirms the very charge he refuses to adjudicate. And his assertion that the media regularly publish negative stories about academic leftism suggests a low tolerance for criticism since such criticism rarely appears in papers like the Times. Only the conservative press regularly reports on the latest campus uprisings against apostasy, and it is unlikely that Blight subjects himself to Fox News.
What does Blight leave out of his accounting? For starters, the extent of de facto campus censorship. Had he actually wanted to assess the “ideological monolith” charge, he might have started by looking more closely at his own discipline. On 17 August 2022, James Sweet, the president of the American Historical Association, published a column in the AHA’s newsletter criticising the “presentism” of much contemporary history writing. Today’s historians, wrote Sweet (a specialist in Africa and the slave trade at the University of Wisconsin), view history “through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism,” while minimising “the values and mores of people in their own times.” Moreover, he added, today’s historians are blind to violations of social justice committed outside the West.
Jeffrey Herf
A storm duly erupted on social media. A history professor at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, wrote on his blog:
Given the pervasive and obvious ways in which Right-wingers, Nazis, and other bad-faith actors have deployed strikingly similar tactics in the service of white supremacism and misogyny (and misgynoir), one might wonder why a white, male historian of Africa and the African diaspora would deploy a rhetorical strategy that centers these particular examples. I mean, I certainly do.
Sweet capitulated within two days. On 19 August, he appended a craven author’s note to the front of his essay in which he took “full responsibility that [my column] did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused.” The note concluded: “Once again, I apologize for the damage I have caused to my fellow historians, the discipline, and the AHA. I hope to redeem myself in future conversations with you all. I’m listening and learning.”
This grovelling repudiation of plain-speaking has become the norm in academia, including in the STEM fields. “Ideological purity” is not something that an ignorant or malicious press merely “alleges,” as Blight puts it. It is a daily reality. Students and faculty who hold a contrarian position on systemic racism or gender fluidity know it is better to remain silent lest they suffer condemnation and ostracism. Good luck getting hired if you want to study behavioural and cultural contributions to racial inequalities. Blight overlooks the loyalty oaths that many would-be professors must sign if they want to be considered for a job. Those oaths test a professor’s enthusiasm for incorporating diversity tenets into the syllabi and teaching, no matter how incongruously; they require assent to the view that racial disparities are by definition the product of racism.
Other academic associations are just as compromised as the American Historical Association. Physics, mathematics, and chemistry organisations have issued apologies for the racism of their fields and called for greater diversity hiring and admissions (which means selecting less qualified minority and female applicants over more qualified white and Asian male applicants). The attack on academic excellence can be found in virtually every faculty hiring search and in the publishing decisions of virtually every academic journal.
Sweet’s critique of presentism could apply to Blight himself. Earlier this year, Blight published a 350-page report on Yale and slavery that rebuked the university for its past sins against present-day certainties. (Blight’s New York Times op-ed borrows language from that report.) “We have not sought,” Blight wrote in the introduction, “to root out evil from the soul or the history of a great university. No single book, nor even a room full of them, could do that for any institution, organization, or government.” Blight presumably viewed that concession to Yale’s “evil” as an act of magnanimity, not of hubris or self-aggrandisement. But some sins still needed to be called out, such as the university’s 1915 Civil War memorial.
Blight described that memorial as a work of “racism” and a product typical of “elite White men.” Why? Because it commemorated students who died fighting on both sides of the war and did not mention slavery or the Union victory. Blight dismisses the instinct of reconciliation that motivated the monument as simply a cover for “white supremacy.” Such white supremacy would presumably include the comity between Union general Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Appomattox in 1865 and Lee’s subsequent invitation to the Grant White House. It would include the Massachusetts congressional delegation’s choice in 1874 of a Mississippi secessionist to eulogise the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner. It would include President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 praise of Robert E. Lee as “one of our greatest American gentlemen.”
Blight’s 2024 report unleashed a geyser of reparations-like spending from Yale: funding for public schools, economic development grants to New Haven, and scholarships to non-Yale institutions. Such matters were once outside what was considered a university’s core competence. Yale has so many excess funds sloshing around from taxpayer support and tuition, however, that it can set itself up as a mini-government dispensing largesse as well as ideological correction. A follow-up report is in the works. Volume II will focus on another evil in Yale’s soul: naming many of the college’s undergraduate dormitories after “slaveholders.” It is a 21st-century breakthrough to posit slave-owning as the primary attribute of 18th-century statesmen.
For further local insight into “why ‘they’ hate us,” Blight could usefully ponder the mistreatment of Yale sociologist Nicholas Christakis in 2015. Christakis’s wife had suggested that Yale’s students could choose their own Halloween costumes, free from oversight by Yale’s diversity bureaucrats. For defending his wife from the deluge of outrage that followed, Christakis was denounced as a racist by a crowd of Yale students. He was jeopardising the safety of Yale’s minority members, they screamed. In response, the university’s then-president Peter Salovey conferred a racial-justice prize on two leaders of the nearly three-hour abuse session and increased Yale’s already princely expenditures on racially coded academic programs.
Jamie Kirchick
Blight might ask how Yale’s students became so convinced of their own fragility and so confident in their right to be swaddled in conforming views. Yale’s law students, like law students everywhere, periodically erupt in tantrums if the local Federalist Society chapter invites a speaker who has ever taken a position that contravenes progressive dogma. Blight is fulsome about academia’s commitment to justice and the rule of law, but campus diversity bureaucrats have stripped due-process protections from male students accused of sexual assault. During Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court nomination hearings in the Senate, Yale’s students pledged “Solidarity with Survivors,” a mantra that implicitly contravenes the presumption of innocence.
In 2019, Yale dug out a small stone carving from the back of its main library. The sculpture showed a Puritan with a musket and an Indian with a bow and shield, one of hundreds of such fancies that decorate Yale’s neogothic architecture. Ordinarily, historical preservation principles would demand the protection of this little bagatelle. But after fierce study of its meaning, Yale concluded that the carving “depicts a scene of warfare and colonial violence toward local Native American inhabitants.”
The threat that this sculpture posed to Yale’s students was judged to be so great that Yale promptly covered up the musket as an interim measure, like a Victorian draping a piano leg. Eventually, the university removed the work entirely and it has not been seen since. No Yale student in the modern era had ever complained about the sculpture, but Yale’s solicitude for the safety of its allegedly “marginalised” students guarantees that were one of them to notice the work, he, too, would leverage the rhetoric of trauma that the academic world so readily provides.
Blight’s understanding of broader politics will seem lucid to his fellow academics. In his Times article, he calls Kamala Harris a “brilliant Black woman [who] ran an honorable campaign about unity in a fractured political culture riddled with fierce tribalism.” Many outside Yale, however, will find this assessment unhinged. During her 2024 campaign for president, Harris was unable to answer straightforward questions about her own political positions. Without a script, her speech dissolved into meandering repetition, cul-de-sacs, and baffling circumlocutions. The Biden-Harris executive orders on racial equity insisted on the permanence of whites’ supremacist views. Those orders, implemented in ninety government agencies, doled out government benefits on the basis of race, following the lead of university racial preferences.
Blight’s hothouse politics would ordinarily not matter, since a professor’s extracurricular beliefs should be irrelevant to his work as a teacher. But with the ideological skew on campuses as great as it is—according to the Buckley Institute, 88 percent of the Yale faculty in the social sciences and the humanities are Democrats while just one percent are Republicans—the faculty monoculture has long since seeped into teaching as well as scholarship.
According to Blight, it is the Trumpist Right that fuels “culture wars,” not the Left with its biologically nonsensical theories about sex, say, or its policies shutting parents out of their child’s “gender transition.” Blight draws a puzzling moral from the election: “Election outcomes, if nothing else can, should make us aware that substantial parts of our society may like to know why history or science or art themselves even matter in their daily lives.” Among the many meanings that observers have read into the recent result, doubts about the relevance of the liberal arts or science are surely the most self-involved. Blight does not confine this reading to the 2024 election; all “election outcomes,” apparently, remind us about the need to justify academic activity to society.
Heather Mac Donald
Weirder still is Blight’s explanation of why Trump voters fail to understand the value of universities: “‘they’ are scared by the price of milk, and tuition, and by hurricanes.” Scared by hurricanes? It is the Left that keeps up a steady alarm about the existential threat of allegedly climate-change-induced storms. Red-state residents simply band together to help with recovery efforts. And being “scared” is a condescending characterisation of the response of non-Harris voters to the price of milk or college tuition. “Fed up” is more like it.
Blight’s view of Trump supporters is as strange as his view of Harris’s brilliance. In a July 2024 article for the New Republic, Blight wrote that MAGA enthusiasts are the “equivalent of the 1850s Slave Power” who seek to spread a “deadly poison” of authoritarianism throughout the body politic. It is time to “call the enemies by their names,” he declared, explaining that the US faces the same threat from “MAGA-fascism” as it did before the Civil War from separatist slave-holders. The election would decide whether the “Union can endure half-MAGA neofascist and half-Democratic pluralistic under rule of law.” The Supreme Court’s recent decisions striking down a constitutional right to abortion and overturning the doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies are as inimical to the American experiment as was the Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision (which held that the federal government could not stop the spread of slavery into the territories because doing so would interfere with slaveowners’ property rights in their slaves).
Blight had drawn the parallel between Republicans and the Slave Power before. In 2020, he tweeted: “Republicans have become the new Confederacy in our system. The difference is that they will tear us apart and take down our institutions in order to own them. We need to say some things out loud about who and what they are.”
Republicans have become the new Confederacy in our system. The difference is that they will tear us apart and take down our institutions in order to own them. We need to say some things out loud about who and what they are.
— David W. Blight (@davidwblight1) September 20, 2020
With all due respect to epistemological relativism, it is delusional to call Trump’s voters “neofascists.” They do not seek the end of democracy, they just want their voice back. They are starting to rebel against the elite hatred directed at them for beliefs shared throughout human history until 20 years ago. They support the rule of law, but they hold a different view of what threatens it most: government campaigns against “misinformation” and politically motivated prosecutions, say, rather than promises to strictly enforce immigration laws and cut back on 20th-century accretions to the federal government. Blight nevertheless views half of his fellow Americans as enemies of the Constitution and rubes too stupid to understand that the Democrats’ lax immigration policies and hostility to law enforcement “work for them.”
The Right’s rhetoric about Biden and Harris undoubtedly seemed as lunatic to those politicians’ supporters as Blight’s hysteria about Trump and his followers will seem to most Republicans. The latter’s fiercely partisan views now animate almost all university functions and have spilled over into virtually every mainstream institution. Blight’s New York Times op-ed warns against allowing “Trumpists to own and tell our national story” during the commemoration of American independence in 2026. If Blight and his fellow academics had their way, we could expect that 250th-year-anniversary to echo Blight’s 2024 Yale and slavery report, with its belief in the ongoing “realities of white supremacy.”
Sloppily written and badly punctuated to boot, Blight’s op-ed epitomises the cocooned state of contemporary academia. Universities should face a choice: Forgo the billions of taxpayer dollars that underwrite their bloated tuitions, politicised bureaucracies, and one-sided intellectual orthodoxies or accept strict conditions of colourblindness, admissions transparency, and political neutrality in every aspect of their operations. The Yale faculty and its counterparts throughout the country will undoubtedly feel under siege from unsophisticated “culture warriors,” but it is those who believe in preserving Western culture who now need to stand up and take the universities back.
