Whenever something like this happens, I’m in demand in the media. After a day of this, I was upset at President Biden for sticking with his pledge that he would nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court; that is, he would restrict his pool of candidates by race and sex.
I was in Austin, Texas, and in my hotel room. It’s not the best practice to be doom scrolling Twitter and firing something off late at night. I said, “If I were a Democratic president, I would pick the chief judge of the DC circuit. It’s the second most prestigious court in the country, and his name is Sri Srinivasan. He happens to be Indian American, an immigrant, and has a lot of diversity points as well.” But I said that due to the latest hierarchy of intersectionality, we would end up with a “lesser black woman.”
I meant that if I considered Judge Srinivasan the best, then everyone else was less qualified, including the black woman President Biden would choose. Then I went to bed. All heck broke loose on Twitter, and the next morning it was a firestorm. My career was in the balance over this badly phrased tweet, the substance of which something like 76 percent of Americans agreed with, that the President should consider all possible candidates.
After four days of hell, Dean Will Treanor of Georgetown decided I would be onboarded, but that I would be suspended with pay, pending investigation into whether I had violated the university’s harassment and anti-discrimination policies. It became clear that the so-called investigation was a sham. It took four months to investigate a tweet, even though the university had clear protections on paper for freedom of speech.
I finally got this report from the Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action. They made it clear that had I been an employee, I would have been subject to discipline because I was creating a hostile educational environment. The standard they were applying was that if any faculty and staff say anything that someone even claims offensive, that puts you in this Kafkaesque inquisition.
I decided I couldn’t work like that. I wrote a resignation letter that was published in the Wall Street Journal. The next day, I announced my move to the Manhattan Institute, where I am to this day. It was four days of hell, or four months of purgatory, if you will.
These college leaders, most of them, are not social justice warriors or anti-free speech. They are spineless cowards. They are career bureaucrats who have learned to climb the greasy pole within academic bureaucracy. That means they have to placate the activists on the Left who are very loud, and also these bureaucracies that are often the tail wagging the dog.
We’re seeing a lot of external stakeholders, donors, alumni, employers, and others paying attention, not just conservatives. They’re seeing, through these extreme circumstances, that this is crushing our institutions of higher education, the spirit of free inquiry, and people becoming educated. There’s also this oppressor/oppressed stuff that’s disproportionately taught in multiple academic departments that is poisoning the minds of students.
Fundamentally, it’s about changing the culture. The presidents, deans, and department chairs have the tools they need to reinstill classical values of open inquiry, freedom of speech, and the idea that education is supposed to make you feel a little uncomfortable and challenge your views.
If the non-politically active majority says, “That is nonsense. We’re not going to allow it,” whether it be in our corporations, our prosecutors’ offices, or civic organizations—that’s what it’s going to take to stop it.
One mantra I took to heart during my saga with Georgetown is from the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Russian critic. He was illiberal himself in many ways. He was Eastern Orthodox and didn’t like the decadence in the West. Coming out of the Gulag, his big lesson was, “Live not by lies.”
If people do that, you can have society recognize that the emperor has no clothes, and that’s fundamentally how you have transformative change.
