RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Jewish Supremacism: My Awakening to the Jewish Question” is the name of a book by white supremacist David Duke. If you go far enough left, you go far right without knowing it. Mr. Penslar leads Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies and has been named a co-chairman of the university’s Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism. The latter appointment was an “unforced error,” Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism, told the Journal Wednesday.

The spontaneous campus celebrations after Hamas’s massacre, rape and kidnapping of Israelis on Oct. 7 meant that Harvard could no longer ignore its problem with Jews, and especially the Jewish state. Prodded by donors and shamed by the media, the university’s then-president, Claudine Gay, commissioned a committee.

Then Ms. Gay told lawmakers that calling for the genocide of Jews was sometimes acceptable at Harvard, depending on the “context.” The head of the advisory committee, Rabbi David Wolpe, resigned. He said Harvard was gripped by an ideology “that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil.” Like a real president sending in the Navy SEALs, temporary president Alan Garber launched the task force, jointly commanded by Mr. Penslar and a social scientist from Harvard Business School who researches driverless cars.

I’m an inmate of the open-air asylum that is Cambridge, Mass., and some of my best friends are professors. All of them are from the shrinking minority of classical liberals and liberal conservatives. We meet in private, lest their colleagues spot them. They know the battle of ideas is lost. The ship of fools was hijacked decades ago by the radical left. It floats down the River Charles on a tide of donor cash, dissenters thrown overboard.

Like the real America, Harvard is federal by design but paralyzed by the administrative state. Each of its undergraduate colleges and professional schools has its own fundraising machinery and endowment. Each has its boutique DEI commissariat that corrupts the academic hiring process and pollutes the intellectual atmosphere with what Rabbi Wolpe calls the “toxicity of intellectual slovenliness.” The president and the Harvard Corp. resemble the U.S. government before the creation of the Federal Reserve and the New Deal: strong enough to speak on everyone’s behalf but struggling to impose their orders.

I’m told that Mr. Penslar’s faculty colleagues are rallying in his support and preparing that deadliest of academic weapons, a letter that everyone signs to prove his independence of mind. I’m also told that when the advisory committee asked for data on anti-Jewish speech and conduct at Harvard, none was available. The same went for “Islamophobia,” which is obligatorily regarded as being a problem of equal magnitude, even though it isn’t.

Here are a couple of questions for the task force to investigate. Among all America’s sectors of public life, only its elite universities feature mass protests, incitement and even physical assaults against Jews. Could this be related to the subversion of the academy by the left? Is there a correlation between high levels of foreign donations and the addition of Jew-baiting to the curriculum?

In Florida, Republicans have used their funding leverage to expel the DEI merchants from the temple of learning at Sarasota’s New College. Market forces are closing liberal-arts colleges whose ideological mania outstrips their endowments and brands. But as Princeton dropout F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, the rich are different. At Chrysler, Iacocca worked with the federal government on a bailout, then rapidly rebuilt the company from the bottom up.

Harvard knows better. It already takes hundreds of millions from the federal government, but it can’t rebuild itself quickly. Its reputation sinks, but it is buoyed by its wealth. Donor campaigns can pressure some of Harvard’s schools to raise standards in hiring. Administrations can tell professors to keep politics out of the classroom, but they can’t keep the professors out. Radical politics are now as much a part of the job as the tweed coat and pipe used to be.

In the old days, ships were quarantined for 40 days in times of plague to avoid infecting the landlubbers. Harvard needs to be quarantined for 40 years. That’s how long it’ll take for the latest recipients of tenure to vacate their plush perches. They might be fired for making students feel “unsafe” by suggesting that a man can’t become a woman. They can’t be fired for promoting stupid or wicked ideas. Their colleagues gave them tenure for doing just that. It’s Claudine Gays and Derek Penslars all the way down.

I paid good money for my Harvard master’s degree. My principal is dwindling by the day. My children aren’t applying to Harvard or Yale. Don’t send your kids and your checks. Do your homework. Invest in new institutions whose curricula give real value. If your alma mater has become the mother of all leftists, practice some tough love. Truth is the daughter of time, but investor preferences can hurry it along. As the Gandhi bumper sticker on the professorial Subaru Forester says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.