Then, in the early-morning hours of July 4, masked gunmen allegedly shot Bautista, just off that same park, as he was beginning his shift as an employee of the city’s Department of Public Works. He remained lying on the pavement for more than an hour before a passerby discovered him. By the time emergency services arrived, Bautista was dead.

As if his killing weren’t tragic enough for his family, in the days that followed another dimension of the story unfolded. Just weeks before the shooting, the Cambridge city council had voted to shut off ShotSpotter, the gunshot-detection system that had been used by the city for more than a decade to help the police locate shootings and to more quickly respond to victims in high-crime areas. One of those unutilized sensors was located only feet from where Xavier lay wounded.

Viewed in isolation, Cambridge’s removal of an anti-crime technology could be dismissed as the predictable politics of a college town with an oversupply of highly educated liberal voters. But Cambridge isn’t an isolated case. Across the country, Left-wing activists and progressive elected officials are increasingly targeting law-enforcement technologies they cast as tools of state surveillance, corporate power, and racial inequality. 

ShotSpotter is one such technology. Others include Flock Safety — a license-plate-recognition system that police departments use daily to apprehend suspects fleeing crime scenes, locate abducted children, and recover stolen vehicles. Together, these local campaigns show how opposition to new anti-crime technologies has become fertile ground for Left-wing activists seeking political wins. 

Yet affluent progressives are rarely the ones who pay the price for this kind of anti-policing push. 

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For Bautista’s family and many residents of The Port, the city’s decision was impossible to fathom. Days after his death, more than 200 angry residents packed a meeting with city officials, demanding answers. The central question that emerged in the discussion was: why had the city removed a technology that existed to help first responders reach gunshot victims more quickly?

The answer begins in January, when a 24-year-old Harvard graduate and self-identified democratic socialist named Ayah Al-Zubi — the youngest person ever elected to the city council — was sworn into office and immediately appointed chairwoman of the council’s public-safety committee. Al-Zubi had no background in law enforcement or public safety, nor had she ever lived in a low-income neighborhood, having spent most of her adolescence in a comfortable suburb of Cincinnati, where both of her parents worked as dentists.

Even so, Al-Zubi made ending Cambridge’s ShotSpotter program her first priority in office. It was a cause she’d championed for months alongside other local Left activists, who’d concluded —  rather suddenly, it seemed — that the tried-and-tested technology is an instrument of racialized surveillance.

In the public hearings that followed, activists repeatedly hammered this point: that ShotSpotter was inherently racist because its sensors were disproportionately concentrated in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. As one elderly white Cambridge resident told the committee, “ShotSpotter does not make Cambridge a safer community… It makes Cambridge a more oppressive place to live… particularly for its black and brown residents who are already targeted by racism.”

Others repeatedly cited an 82% false-positive rate, a figure drawn from a nearly decade-old Harvard Crimson analysis that the Cambridge Police Department disputes. And still others criticized the technology for failing to deter gun violence, despite the fact that its manufacturer, SoundThinking, has consistently described ShotSpotter as primarily a gunfire-detection-and-response tool, rather than a prevention system.

Yet these present-focused arguments ultimately took up only a small share of the advocacy. Far more common was reasoning focused not on what ShotSpotter actually does, but on what it might someday achieve. Activists warned that the sensors could eventually record private conversations and that ICE agents or a future Republican administration might gain access to the data.

Future speculation thus dominated the discussions. The arguments reflected what has become a defining characteristic of contemporary Left-wing politics: a paranoid style and a paranoid political imagination detached from reality, in which hypothetical future abuses of technology and state authority carry far greater significance than present challenges. Soon, the council voted to remove ShotSpotter, with five votes in favor of the proposal, two opposed, and two abstaining.

The successful effort of a small group of Left-wing activists to remove ShotSpotter in Cambridge reflects a broader transformation in the nature of progressive activism during President Trump’s second administration. Compared to the first Trump presidency, when opposition was organized centrally around resisting a single political figure, today’s activism is more fragmented and directed toward technological objects that have come to symbolize the larger political and economic systems the movement opposes. 

Whether the target is a gunshot-detection system, a license-plate reader, a Tesla car, or a hyperscale data center, the hardware increasingly becomes the site through which broader Left-wing anxieties about surveillance, policing, capitalism, and inequality are expressed. This new focus revises the mission of the historic Left, which welcomed technological advancement, even as it sought to reform or revolutionize the relations of production. Under the new dispensation, the product itself is the target — and advancement is presumed suspect unless proved otherwise.  

The pattern has become unmistakable. Since Trump’s return to office, dozens of predominantly progressive cities, the largest being Los Angeles, have ended or reconsidered their relationships with Flock Safety. In each of these cases, the campaigns shifted the debate away from the technology’s demonstrated uses and toward what it might someday become. Similar campaigns have targeted data centers, turning reasonable land-use disputes into a broader ideological struggle over Big Tech.

This shift coincides with two larger developments. The first is the growing disarray of the liberal institutions that once organized and directed Left-wing political energy. After nearly a decade of defining themselves in opposition to Trump, Democrats and the broader network of DC-based progressive organizations have struggled to produce a comparable national movement capable of channeling the Left’s diverse grievances into a unified political project. The Women’s March, the impeachment campaigns, and the George Floyd protests represented the high-water mark of that form of resistance, yet none produced a durable political movement beyond opposition to Trump himself.

As Trump approaches the end of his presidency, even that organizing center is beginning to dissolve, and the political energy it once contained is dispersing into smaller, localized battles fought in mayor’s offices and city-council meetings over the technologies increasingly shaping everyday life.

The second development is the speed at which computing has embedded itself into the economy. As semiconductors have shrunk and computing power has become cheaper, more industries have adopted technology capable of processing vast amounts of information and automating tasks that once required human judgment or that were simply impossible to perform at scale.

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Public safety and law enforcement have enjoyed the benefits of this computing revolution. Tools like ShotSpotter and Flock Safety are examples of the same more-powerful computing now commonplace across medicine, manufacturing, and finance, filling long-standing operational needs through automation and pattern recognition. The primary difference is that the Left sees these technologies, when used by law enforcement, as proxies for fears about the future of state authority and technological control.

To be sure, new technologies can produce unexpected consequences. Social media promised greater openness and connection but also gave rise to pervasive targeted advertising and worsening mental-health outcomes for adolescents. That history helps explain the public’s current unease with new technologies.

But broad skepticism alone doesn’t explain why anti-crime technology has emerged as a lightning rod for Left-wing ire. The reason lies in the unique character of the technological revolution. Unlike previous waves of technological change, today’s computing revolution has unfolded without a broadly shared national narrative explaining its purpose, benefits, or tradeoffs. That vacuum has given activists an opportunity to frame the debate, and to define these technologies primarily as instruments of surveillance and social control. 

As political commentators search for signs of how the Democratic Party will regain national power in 2028, much of their attention remains fixed on Democrats in Congress. But a quieter political movement is taking shape in local governments across the country. Led by informal networks of Left-leaning activists and citizens, it has become one of the most effective forces of our time, helping to block billions of dollars in government contracts with major technology companies and successfully turning symbolic political campaigns into real policy victories.

Perhaps more important, these campaigns reveal something deeper about the modern Left. Its belief system is now defined by a generalized suspicion of technology, institutions, and the exercise of power itself, mirroring the descent of parts of the Right into conspiracism and what used to be called the paranoid style. As these ideas become more influential within the Democratic Party, it is worth asking whether they provide the foundation for a national campaign capable of persuading ordinary Americans that Democrats are prepared to govern. At stake, after all, are the lives of people like Xavier Bautista, whose death might have been prevented had Cambridge retained the technology it chose to abandon in response to the Left’s anti-tech paranoia.

Trump’s supporters have been repeating a series of arguments which seem, at first glance, perfectly reasonable. Harvard, they point out, has an endowment of more than $53 billion. Why does it need government subsidies? And if the university does need outside funds, why can’t private enterprises provide them? Isn’t it hypocritical for Harvard to take government money while refusing any government oversight, especially when the university faculty and student body lean so very heavily to the Left? Finally, doesn’t the government have a responsibility to withhold funds when the university lets antisemitism run wild on campus?

But like many superficially reasonable arguments, these are all in fact incorrect. If they have been widely accepted in US public opinion, it is in part because until this year universities like Harvard never needed to explain to the public how they operated. The basic system of research funding had been in place for decades, for the most part quite uncontroversially. And, since January, the universities have been caught flat-footed, uncertain whether to negotiate with the administration (as Harvard initially tried to do), or to defy it, even while trying to apologize for and staunch the very real spread of antisemitism on their campuses over the past year. Harvard arguably has quite a lot to answer for, but not in the way the Trump administration thinks. The administration’s actions are both unlawful and destructive.

Consider the issue of government support. It’s correct that Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world, doesn’t need “subsidies”. But the research funding that it receives is not a subsidy. For many decades now, the US Congress has held that it is in the national interest for the government to invest in long-term scientific research. It has mandated, through legislation, that federal agencies, most importantly the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allocate research funds for the purpose of investigating issues such as cancer, infectious diseases, cardiac disease, aging, drug addiction, and the like. Each year, Congress appropriates funds specifically for these purposes, and charges NIH and other agencies with choosing the best research projects, and then monitoring the results. In other words, Congress, working through the agencies, is paying universities to carry out research in the national interest. It is not handing over funds that the universities can use for any whatever purpose they choose; these funds are more akin to fees paid for specific services.

It’s true that in addition to the direct funding of research, the NIH also pays hefty “indirect costs” to universities to cover expenses shared between many different individual projects, including infrastructure in particular, as well as some equipment and labor costs. This is a long-standing practice that the agency has negotiated with universities, in large part to avoid having to split the expenses in question among many individual research projects. In the past, universities abused the “indirect cost” system, but more recently NIH has established much closer oversight.

Could private companies take over the role currently played by the federal government? In some cases, yes, but in most, not. The research Congress and agencies like the NIH fund is the sort that private companies will likely shy away from, because the discoveries in question might not generate revenue for decades — or the payoff might come in the form of improved public health, rather than in monetary form. Understandably, companies want a return on their investment.

Could a university like Harvard pay for the research itself out of its endowment? For a time, but only with difficulty. Like most universities, Harvard’s endowment is not a single pot of money, but a collection of thousands of different accounts, most of which have been donated for specific purposes: financial aid; an overseas study center; a professorship etc. At most elite US universities, no more than 15% of the endowment is “unrestricted” — legally capable of being used for any purpose. And these universities also consider it their fiduciary responsibility not to spend down the endowment, but only to use the annual return, which can average out to as little as 4%. In other words, even if Harvard decided to use all the returns from its unrestricted endowment to fund scientific research (starving other areas of the university in the process), it would be unlikely to come up with much more than $320 million a year. This is a lot, but it is much less than the sum the government is currently paying Harvard to conduct research in the national interest.

In any case, this spending has been mandated by Congress — a democratically elected body. The sole responsibility of the government’s executive branch is to ensure that Congress’s stated goals are being pursued in the most effective manner possible. Congress has never required that scientific research needs to accord with the president’s ideological agenda, and it has not given the president, nor the executive branch he oversees, permission to cut funding arbitrarily.

But surely universities need to accept government oversight if they take government funds? Indeed — and they have done so, for decades. This oversight was established by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that universities accepting federal funds cannot knowingly allow the civil rights of their students, faculty and staff to be violated. If other forms of government oversight are to be imposed beyond this, it is for Congress to do, not the president.

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The Trump administration knows this, and so it has justified its actions by referring to the Civil Rights Act. It has accused Harvard of violating Titles VI and VII, which forbid discrimination on the basis of race and religion. And it points to student protests that in many cases undoubtedly did cross the line between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, and made many Jewish students fear for their safety. Just this week, Harvard released a report that portrayed the university struggling to contain expressions of hatred and intimidation that frequently crossed far over the blurry line separating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. (A companion report found that 47% of Muslim respondents at the university did not feel physically safe on campus.)

But the Civil Rights Act also lays out a procedure for the federal government to follow if it believes that Titles VI or VII have been violated. It must start a formal inquiry, produce a formal report, and give the university a chance to respond. If, after the conclusion of this procedure, the government finds against the university, then it can withhold funds — but only to the parts of the university in which the violation took place.

The Trump administration has not followed any aspect of this legislatively mandated procedure. It has not produced a formal report, nor has it given Harvard a chance to respond. It has above all cut off funds to Harvard Medical School, which was the site of virtually no protests or antisemitic incidents. Moreover, the list of demands it sent to Harvard in mid-April did not only include addressing issues of campus antisemitism. As noted, it called for Harvard to overhaul its governance, disciplinary mechanisms, admissions procedures and hiring procedures. It called for steps to be taken to ensure “viewpoint diversity” on the campus — meaning the hiring of conservatives to offset the faculty’s overwhelmingly liberal political stance.

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Now, there is a case to be made that Harvard could use a greater degree of viewpoint diversity than it currently enjoys. Its faculty indeed lean pretty far Left, and the intellectual climate could benefit from less groupthink, more real debate. The university also needs to squelch the sort of horrid antisemitic activity that took place last year. It needs to ensure that the harassment and intimidation of Jews described in this week’s report are ended, along with the harassment and intimidation of Muslims. If President Trump wants to urge Harvard in this direction, fine. But he should do so in a lawful manner.

And, in any case, while the Harvard faculty and student body do lean pretty far Left, that does not mean that the entire university is somehow in thrall to “woke” ideology, as Trump’s supporters seem to believe. Harvard is a massive operation. It has schools of medicine, dentistry, engineering, and business — none of them known as bastions of wokeness. They barely featured in the report, and yet they will still be penalized.

Indeed, the destructive effects of Trump’s actions will fall most heavily on the least political parts of the university. It will be hard for Harvard to replace the funds that the federal government is taking away, and even harder for institutions with smaller endowments. The result is that research programs that have contributed immeasurably to scientific knowledge, technological advancement and public health will be pruned back or shut down altogether. Harvard and other leading universities will no longer attract some of the best minds from around the world. Thousands of people at Harvard alone — people who had nothing to do with the protests — could lose their jobs, while companies that supply equipment to university researchers could go bankrupt. This level of harm is wildly disproportionate to whatever faults the university allegedly committed, and it is not lawful. Even if you think “Harvard had it coming”, the Trump administration’s assault is not the answer.

The answer is straightforward: both Ali and Gay came unprepared onto a major public stage, failed spectacularly in their respective roles, and massively embarrassed their respective organisations.

In early August, Ali had dreams of winning the 100-metre sprint for Somalia at the International University Sports Federation (FISU) Summer World University Games in China. Her performance was a fiasco. She looked confused at the starting blocks. Once the race started, she was so slow the cameraman struggled to keep her in the frame. As for the remainder of the race, one Forbes reporter noted: “Ali completed the 100-metre dash in 21.81 seconds, an embarrassing finish that’s almost double the winning 11.58-second time run by Brazil’s Gabriela Silva Mourão and nearly nine 9 seconds behind the second slowest time of 13.15 seconds by Turkmenistan’s Alsu Habibulina — leading many to ask questions about how a runner, who has never competed in a major event and appears to be untrained, was able to compete on such a large international stage.”

When she finally made it to the finish line, she did a little skip and a hop of triumph. A video of her sloth-like performance went viral on social media, along with demands for an explanation.

In early December, Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard was called to testify in Congress and asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus violated Harvard university’s code of conduct. Gay delivered prepared remarks, priding herself and her institution on protecting free expression and, after a pitiful exercise in evasion, settling on the answer that calling for the genocide of Jews on campus depended on the context. She did the equivalent of Ali’s hop and skip with her smiles and smirks. The video clip of her abysmal performance went viral along with demands for an explanation.

Back in Somalia, the most pertinent questions in Ali’s case were obvious. Where was her record? How did she qualify? Where were the gatekeepers? The Somali Minister of Sports ordered an investigation, which found that a relative of Ali had ignored or lowered the standards of athletic selection for Ali. He sacked the woman in question and apologised publicly. This may not be the end of corruption in the government of Somalia, but it ended the story there within about 48 hours.

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After Gay’s shambolic performance in Congress, similar questions were asked and answered by the public. The most obvious being: how did someone with a wafer-thin scholarly record of only 11 journal publications over a period of 26 years get to become the president of Harvard? Allegations and proof of nearly 50 instances of plagiarism followed. How on earth was this overlooked? Where were the gatekeepers?

The Harvard Corporation, the authority responsible for hiring the university’s president, chose a different path from the one taken by the Somali Minister of Sports. After a series of denials and statements of “unanimous support for the president”, threats against the New York Post and accusations of bigotry, they persuaded Gay to step down. Nevertheless, she continues to stay employed by Harvard as a tenured professor, retaining an annual salary of around $900,000. As for the university itself, the result is at least a billion dollars in withdrawn commitments from various donors, more congressional probing, a slump in applications from prospective students, and the trashing of its reputation.

All of which raises a peculiar question: if the Sports Ministry of a war-torn African country is able to show ethical clarity when objective standards of merit have been violated, what is holding back the leadership of America’s most renowned university? The answer, I suspect, lies in the three-letter acronym that has been menacing American and other Western institutions of higher education for the past decade: DEI, which supposedly stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

DEI is the programmatic implementation of an intolerant progressive agenda that views the existing structures of government, education, media, and industry as deeply unjust. It presents these institutions in the light of a hierarchical “intersectional” model of the oppressors and the oppressed. The ultimate oppressor is white, male, and straight. Blacks, women, gays and others are defined as their victims. To redress these past wrongs, DEI is supposed to design new structures of “positive” discrimination, or “affirmative action”.

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This is how individuals such as Claudine Gay secured promotion to the commanding heights not just of the Ivy League, but of many other august institutions. Merit, qualifications, the ability to lead — all these criteria were cast aside as expressions of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy”.

The blame for this, of course, cannot be solely pinned on the individuals who have since benefited from DEI. As Gay ascended the ladder of academic preferment, her ambition was central but hardly sufficient. Rather, she did so with the complicity of a network of gatekeepers: the admissions offices of Princeton and Stanford; the peer reviewers who overlooked her plagiarism; the Harvard committees that promoted her through the various ranks of the professorship; and, finally, the members of the Harvard Corporation who deemed her the most suitable candidate for the position of president.

Thanks to their collaboration, and the fall-out following their exposure, the truth about DEI has been thrust into the mainstream. As an acronym, it still holds, but not in the way they intend. In reality, the D stands for the degradation of the standards once upheld at institutions such as Harvard; the E stands for their erasure; and the I stands not only for the indoctrination that follows, but also intimidation. Gay, after all, not only plagiarised the work of Carol Swain and other black academics. As dean and then as president, she set about destroying the careers of black scholars who choose to play by the rules of merit and academic integrity, notably Roland Fryer.

In a homogeneous society such as Somalia’s, identity politics is all about the bloodline. There, people in positions of authority try to give members of their extended family a leg up, whether or not they are qualified for the position in question. On rare occasions, the corruption might be caught on camera, as with the chubby girl who fancied she could win the 100-metre sprint. Normally, though, the favouring of family and friends continues until the resentment erupts into the next cycle of civil violence. There are no nice-sounding acronyms to cover up venality and, since everyone has the same skin colour and adheres to the same religion, immutable traits are irrelevant.

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In a more sophisticated society such as the United States of America, corruption takes a different form. Here, identity politics assumes the role of bloodlines. Preferment is given to “women” or “women of colour”, so long as they follow strictly the progressive party line. But the net result is essentially the same. People without talent are rewarded and promoted. Those who would fare better in a meritocracy are left seething with resentment.

In her graceless attempt to portray her downfall as something more than the result of her exposure as a fraud, Claudine Gay alleged that there was “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society… Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organisations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”

The reality is very different. Harvard — like the New York Times, which published her screed — has done the work of unravelling public faith all by itself. It has made a mockery of itself as surely as the Somali Sports Ministry did when it fielded a manifestly unqualified runner. The difference is that Harvard humiliated itself for the sake of an ideology, as opposed to plain nepotism. Until that ideology is extirpated not just from one university but from American education as a whole, the mafia of mediocrity will continue to march on — and produce many more Claudine Gays along the way.

Even in the red state of Oklahoma, the American heartland and buckle of the Bible Belt, it took some courage to state the obvious in a university classroom when it offended conventional political pieties. But the students were always more sensible than the faculty.

I learned this shortly after 9/11, when I appeared on a university panel to discuss what was to be done. I told the packed room that we should hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda and kill them. A professor who later received an appointment at a prestigious theological seminary immediately accused me of proposing to slaughter innocent people, the inevitable “collateral damage” of military action. After the panel, other, like-minded colleagues stopped speaking to me. But half a dozen students told me that they appreciated my comments, even though they didn’t share my views.

Some years later, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) invited a neo-Nazi from California to speak at one of their events. Leaders of the Tulsa Jewish community contacted me, but the university president refused to get involved. When one of the few Jewish students on campus told me that she was going to speak with the leader of the MSA, I assumed she would be rebuffed. Yet after their conversation, he agreed to cancel the event.

Those were the days. Progressive liberals have now given birth to a generation of demonic ideologues who excuse sheer evil. Reading the “Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine”, I can only hope that many Harvard faculty are appalled at the little monsters they’ve helped to create.

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The statement, signed by 31 student organisations from Harvard College, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Medical School, and the Kennedy School of Government (including, incredibly, a group called “Harvard Jews for Liberation”), “hold[s] the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”. That would include, as Victor Davis Hanson has written, “pulling Jewish elderly, women, and children out of their homes and executing them, and then throwing their bodies into the street” — atrocities last seen during the Holocaust.

The statement makes no mention of Hamas, the Iranian-funded Islamist terror group that is explicitly dedicated to the obliteration of Israel through Jihad. The Hamas Covenant includes the following language, from the hadith (sayings attributed to Mohammed): “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

Instead, the Harvard students characterise the Palestinians as hapless victims of “colonial retaliation”, academic cant as tiresome as it is crude. “In the coming days,” their statement asserts, “Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.… Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory.”

But the ordeal that the citizens of Israel are suffering is very well-charted. It is an ordeal perfected by the Nazis: violent cruelty that is meant simply to humiliate and defile, including what the Holocaust survivor Terrence des Pres called “excremental assault”. No one can watch this video of an Israeli woman, bruised and bloodied, her wrists tied with wire, her sweatpants soiled with feces (to beat the shit out of someone is a real thing), pulled out of the back of a Jeep by her hair, and not understand this fact. Have the Harvard students seen this video of men chanting “Allah hu Akbar!” while sitting on the naked corpse of Shani Louk? She was a tattoo artist and conscientious objector to Israel military service who was murdered and robbed at a music festival for peace. She could have been among their best friends.

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For all their education and supposed intelligence, the signers of the Harvard Statement remind me of some unlettered Polish farmers Claude Lanzmann interviewed for his film Shoah. These men lived next to the Treblinka death camp, and although they did not (as one says) “speak Jew”, they knew what was going on. They saw the old men and women, the mothers with babies and children, dragged from the trains. They heard them scream as they were whipped down the chutes leading to the gas chambers. Asked how they felt about this, one replied, according to Lanzmann’s translator, “If I cut my finger, it doesn’t hurt him.” Another said: “You get used to anything.” Who says you have to attend an Ivy League school to learn moral relativism?

Lanzmann wonders how another Polish villager feels now that the Jews are gone. “How can I tell?” she asks in return. “I never went to  school. I can only think of how I am now. Now I’m fine.” But the Harvard signatories did go to school, and they, too, are just fine.

Harvard remains the jewel in the crown of the American university system. Its graduates will enter the ranks of the elite and become leaders in government, law, business, and culture. Yet its most outspoken students are shamefully incapable of recognising pure evil when they see it. (Surely they see it—they have YouTube in Cambridge, don’t they?) As Yael Bar Tur has written, “I could be sitting in class with these students, watching children brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped and their mutilated bodies torn apart by a jeering crowd — and hear why it’s justified.”

Not coincidentally, Harvard just earned the worst score ever recorded in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings: -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average. The nation’s premiere university appears to be an echo chamber of moral vacuousness and antisemitic ideology. More than a national scandal, the Joint Statement exposes the profound moral and intellectual rot at the heart of American higher education.

It’s significant, then, that in the past decade or so dozens of colleges have withdrawn their SAT requirement. Institutions such as Harvard and the entire University of California system, and dozens of others, have either gone test-optional, meaning students can submit their scores but are not required to, or rejected the test entirely. Sometimes, the alternative is to further emphasise GPA, or grade point average — that is, the average grades students earn in high school, often weighted according to the perceived difficulty of the course. In other tellings, the alternative is to embrace so-called “holistic admissions”, which means more emphasis on the essay that pupils submit, extracurriculars, and the “feel” of an application. Either way, this rejection of the test is couched in the language of social justice and equality, with anti-SAT crusaders insisting that the test is inegalitarian, racist, and obsolete.

With race-based affirmative action likely to be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court early next year, the question of diversity on campus is as live and laden with tension as ever. Diversity, in this context, means racial diversity specifically. It might seem odd to recommend an obscure academic book from 2018 as an essential read to understand this tension, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Measuring Success: Testing, Grades, and the Future of College Admissions is a collection of studies from the fields of educational measurement and psychometrics. It powerfully confirms the value of the SAT and similar entrance exams.

It’s essential to understand what kind of student was particularly well-served by the SAT: the kind who is bright and talented but who had failed to live up to their potential in class. These students tended to be the brilliant dreamers; they were the ones in possession of uncommon cognitive skills, but who performed poorly in knowledge-based exams because of bad time management, resistance to the indignities of organised education, or an inability to prioritise school over their own interests. For decades, excellent SAT scores got students into colleges that they wouldn’t ordinarily get into, creating opportunities to find diamonds in the rough who had perhaps never found their footing in school.

The students who the SAT disadvantaged, in contrast, were the grinders — those who were not particularly talented or gifted but who were able to get good grades through ingratiating themselves to teachers, studying maniacally, and always getting whatever points were available for effort. There’s no doubt that society needs both types of student, but the elimination of the SAT benefits only one sort.

There are many fundamental misconceptions that plague discussion of the SATs, and unfortunately, my long experience discussing the test tells me that most people’s ignorance is of the motivated kind. I got my PhD in English, but my focus was on the assessment of student learning and my dissertation was on tests of college learning. And what I learned during that process, and have had reinforced since, is that many people want to maintain myths about such tests out of a sense of resentment and naïve political concerns. This book helpfully dispatches with many common, but bad, arguments.

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Consider the claim that the SAT should be abolished because it is not in fact a strong predictor of college performance. Those who make it often throw around correlations between the SAT and freshman year grades that appear to be low. But this is a quirk of how that data is collected. Such analyses can necessarily only consider students who got a high enough SAT score to get into a given college; that is, students who don’t get into college can’t have college grades, and so that whole sector of data is missing from analysis. This is a classic case of range restriction. If we correct for this problem, the SAT’s correlation with freshman grades is robust and consistent. The authors of Measuring Success demonstrate this, before going on to show empirically that SATs predict not just first-year college but a number of other important indicators of life success.

They note, too, that we have known about this range restriction issue for decades, and yet critics of the SAT continue to make this elementary mistake. It speaks to the committed ignorance many people have on this topic. There’s such deep resentment towards high-stakes tests, which cause stress for test-takers before starkly ranking them, that people are willing to look beyond little things like intellectual consistency or responsible evaluation of research.

The GPA is already broadly considered the single-most important criterion for applicants. The crowd that would prefer to give it even more consideration in admissions are at least still sticking with a quantitative indicator; the question is why we would prefer less quantitative data (just GPA) rather than more (GPA plus SAT).

In a nice show of professional respect, Measuring Success reprints a 2009 study that is often invoked by SAT critics. That research found that GPA was a strong predictor of college success, which some take to mean that we can safely discard the SAT, because it adds nothing to our understanding of a student’s potential. But Measuring Success goes on to examine a replication of this study, with newer data, which finds that the predictive accuracy of GPA has fallen, probably due to grade inflation, a problem which does not afflict a test like the SAT, which is normed every year. The SAT’s predictive quality, in contrast, went up.

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The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

If nothing else, using the SAT ensures that more information, and more kinds of information, are used in selecting students. But this kind of diversity — diversity of thinking and learning and academic style — is not the kind of diversity that competitive colleges are pursuing. Elite American colleges are already more racially diverse than the country writ large, but the perpetual cry is for more people of colour on campus. This is the source of the most persistent criticisms of the SAT. The broad claim about the SAT is that, since there are race and class disparities in SAT scores — white and Asian pupils score better than Hispanic and black, and rich better than poor — then the test must be discriminatory and should be abolished.

This is a bit like blaming seismographs for earthquakes. The SAT does not create inequality; the SAT reveals inequality. Contemporary progressives believe that black people and poorer people face many hurdles in life, thanks to entrenched inequality. I agree entirely. But if we’ve acknowledged that, how can we blame the SAT when its results are skewed against the poor and racial minorities? All of that inequality has consequences, and one of those consequences is poorer test scores. All educational data is race-and-class stratified, including the gold-standard National Assessment of Educational Progress, various state-specific exams, ancillary data like attendance and discipline, and crucially, GPA. That’s right: the very metric that many critics of the SAT would have us replace the test with shows the same race and class dynamics!

Perhaps this is why test-optional efforts to diversify campuses have often fallen flat. Crucially, Measuring Success presents three studies that consider the question of whether going test-optional results in a more diverse campus — and all three find no evidence to support that claim. For example, the study “The Effect of Going Test-Optional on Diversity and Admissions” finds that going test optional “has no statistically significant effect… on the proportion of underrepresented students of colour enrolling in the institution”. If removing the SAT does not in fact improve minority representation, then what are we doing here, exactly?

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Of course, admissions officers have plenty of freedom to decide who they’ll accept, particularly at private institutions. As long as schools aren’t engaged in federally-prohibited race or gender discrimination, the average college can select pretty much whoever they want. The schools dropping the SAT make a big show about diversity and equality, never bothering to note that they and not the test determine who gets the brass ring. Advocates for dropping the SAT ask us to put even more faith in those units of our highly-bureaucratic and self-dealing institutions of higher education. And this, finally, is the most irrational belief of all: the notion that, if we only give the admissions departments of exclusive colleges more power, they will do what’s right and usher in a new age of equity and diversity in higher education.

This amounts to a childish faith in institutions that we have no reason to trust. Colleges and universities design their admissions departments, like any other department, with self-interest in mind. To demonstrate this, simply look at affirmative action at elite universities. These institutions keep their data very close to the vest, but it’s widely believed that schools such as Harvard use their affirmative action seats primarily as money-makers. They are alleged to do so by seeking out rich children of recent immigrants, whose parents (they expect) will be able and willing to donate — which would mean the average Ivy League affirmative action slot isn’t filled with a poor American-born descendant of African slaves, but rather with the upwardly-mobile progeny of a Nigerian surgeon.

This is the reality of diversity at elite colleges. Yet critics of the SAT have dogged faith that the SAT is all that stands in the way of more equitable and diverse admissions. The notion is a mirage. If we’re going to fight discrimination and inequality, we’ll need tools to understand the size of the problem — tools like the SAT. Using them, we can embrace not just racial diversity, but diversity in terms of the strengths we recognise in applicants.

What I soon discovered was that none of them had much idea how to make an argument in any context. Nor were they particularly skilled at analysing the arguments of others. They didn’t know how to read; they didn’t know how to write; and they didn’t know how to think.

What do I mean? The syllabus consisted, for the most part, of short exemplary texts: a column by David Brooks, a blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and so forth. But whenever I assigned them anything a little more complex or sophisticated, it flew over their heads. These were students who were used to the idea that reading meant skipping and skimming.

Their writing was not much better. Most were competent at a basic level, but none had had any real guidance or instruction. One week, we did an exercise designed to help them make their prose more vivid and energetic. I had them read a short piece of writing pedagogy, then handed out a sheet on which I’d reproduced a single sentence from each of their most recent pieces that needed that kind of attention.

We set to work on the first, dissecting, pruning, and rewriting. After about ten minutes, we had it in decent shape; it wasn’t graceful yet, but at least it was concise. And then I said, “Okay, it’s taken thirteen of the finest minds in Claremont ten minutes to rewrite that sentence. This is what you need to do with every sentence you write.” They looked at me with horror and amazement. It wasn’t just the scale of the task that was rising before them. It was also the fact that no one had bothered to tell them that before.

It was then I finally understood something that my students had told me the first day of class. I had asked them to introduce themselves and talk about their strengths and weaknesses as writers. Many had said some version of “I’m good at writing naturally” or “I’m good at writing conversationally,” “but I’m not good at revising” or “I’m not good at editing”. What they had been telling me, I realised that day in the middle of the semester, was that they thought of writing as something that just happens, that they had never been asked to pay attention to their sentences as conscious constructions.

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As for their thinking, they had the same relationship to their arguments as they had to their prose. They just made them; they didn’t and really couldn’t think about them in a metacognitive way. They couldn’t recognise contradictions, anticipate objections, entertain alternative interpretations, make essential distinctions, or delineate the limits of their propositions. Remember, this wasn’t freshman composition. This was an advanced writing seminar at some of the most prestigious colleges in the country.

These problems weren’t confined to Claremont. Later that same year, in a piece about the differences between the way his students read Shakespeare and the way that students used to, Stephen Greenblatt wrote this:

“Even the highly gifted students in my Shakespeare classes at Harvard are less likely to be touched by the subtle magic of his words than I was so many years ago or than my students were in the 1980s in Berkeley. What has happened? It is not that my students now lack verbal facility… In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual and resembles the texting and blogging that they do so constantly. The problem is that their engagement with language, their own or Shakespeare’s, often seems surprisingly shallow or tepid.”

A little later Greenblatt writes, “When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden.”

Note how similar his observations are to mine. Note especially that sentence in the middle: “In fact, they write with ease, particularly if the format is casual.” As my students were at Claremont, Greenblatt’s at Harvard are able to write “naturally,” to write “conversationally”, but are at a loss when it comes to writing formally, or to reading complex texts in ways that are more than “shallow or tepid”, or to making arguments that are better than “wooden” (which sounds like a euphemism for “bad”). That they “write with ease” despite having a “shallow or tepid” engagement with their own language is part of the problem.

Greenblatt offers the familiar explanations for these generational differences: the rise of the internet, the emergence of social media, and so forth. But he neglects to address the fact that Harvard undergraduates are supposed to be among the exceptions. The students in his Shakespeare class undoubtedly boast a median verbal SAT score in the upper 700s (out of 800). The large majority probably received a perfect score of 5 on the AP (Advanced Placement) English exam. If any group of college students should be capable of deciphering complex texts, writing incisive expository prose, and constructing compelling analytic arguments, it is they. But apparently they’re not.

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To understand how this predicament came to pass, one needs to understand how students manage to get into places like Harvard or the Claremont colleges in the first place. It is not by learning how to read, write, or think. It is by jumping through the endless series of hoops that elite college admissions offices have developed over the decades to winnow down their skyscraper stacks of application folders.

To win a place at such a school, students most receive top grades in a broad range of AP courses, show evidence of participation in a dozen or more extracurricular activities—sports, arts, student government, et al.—demonstrate “leadership”, engage in “service”, and gather experiences, often through purpose-built programs, to write about on their personal essays, statements designed to convince the admissions officer of the existence of an actual human being beneath the credentials. To do all this, they will work without cease for years on end, sleeping little and foregoing the freedoms of adolescence.

This is not a system that’s designed to foster intellectual engagement. Students learn to skip and skim, not just their assigned readings, but everything. Everything is done at maximum speed and with the least possible effort. Curiosity and passion must be actively suppressed. Students become experts, not so much in subjects as in working the system. There is simply no time to do anything else.

This is not to say that things are better below the level of the elite. For many years, public education in the United States has been dominated by high-stakes assessment regimes. Schools, accordingly, “teach to the test”, foregoing the development of holistic understanding in favour of the grinding repetition of isolated skills (a practice known as “drill and kill”). And since the tests cover math and reading only, many subjects have been stripped from the curriculum, along with any opportunity for students to follow the wayward path of their own interests. The system might almost have been devised for the express purpose of destroying the love of learning.

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If that’s the kind of education students have received by the time they get to college, do things get better once they arrive? Not usually. Old habits die hard. Elite students, already competing for the next prize, continue to conduct their lives at the same frenetic pace. At the large mass of institutions below the level of the elite, the problem is less apt to be misdirected zeal than sheer indifference. Courses are a bother; campus culture runs to sports and beer.

Nor will students get much help from their professors. As I’ve travelled to colleges and universities around the country over the last 14 years, I’ve been stunned by the sheer laziness of so much undergraduate instruction. Professors on the tenure track have no incentive to care about their teaching, and a great deal of incentive not to. The adjuncts and other contingent instructors who make up the vast majority of the American faculty — underpaid, overworked, and sometimes teaching well outside their field — simply don’t have time to do a proper job.

The whole creaking machine is lubricated by the magic grease of grade inflation. As of the early Sixties, 15% of grades at American colleges and universities fell within the A range. By 2013, the proportion had reached 45%. To paraphrase the joke from the old Soviet Union, students pretend to work, and professors pretend to grade them.

It is within the context of these forms of collegiate stupidity that we can understand the one that is now the most salient: wokeism. Wokeism can be thought of as the opportunistic infection of a host with an already weakened intellectual immune system. Students haven’t learned to think, so they lack the means to spot its inconsistencies, its hypocrisies, its absurdities. They haven’t learned to read, so they uncritically absorb its empty language. They know little of history, so they accept whatever tendentious version wokeism hands them.

Wokeism also satisfies important psychic needs, of the kind that education ought to address but does not. It provides students with an interpretive framework with which to understand the world. For earlier generations of young adults, that function would have been performed by Marxism or Freudianism or feminism or liberal progressivism or American patriotism. All have long since been discredited except for feminism, which had itself been in abeyance and has now been absorbed by, and subordinated to, the new intersectional identitarianism.

Indeed, after decades of postmodernism, with its assault on the very idea of grand interpretive narratives, wokeism represents a return of the repressed — the repressed in this case being the ineluctable human hunger for meaning. For wokeism, like those earlier belief systems, offers a framework that is not only cognitive and historical, but also moral and existential. It tells you not only where you come in, but also who you are and how you are to orient yourself toward others and the world. In other words, it offers purpose and direction.

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I am not suggesting colleges should play that role. They should play a better one: instead of telling students what to think and how to live, equipping them to work those questions through for themselves. But that’s a mission institutions long ago abandoned. It’s too hard; it requires professors to see themselves as mentors, with all the commitment of time and energy and feeling that entails; and it implies a level of self-confidence, a willingness to confront students with the idea that their education ought to be about something more than becoming as wealthy as possible, that colleges and universities no longer have.

In the absence left by that delinquency has flourished the careerism that has come to dominate the American collegiate experience. For many years now, students have told me how empty, how meaningless, their education feels. Which means that wokeism fills a void that’s ethical as well as intellectual. Under its ascendancy, campuses are once again alive with moral zeal.

In telling students what to think, wokeism also provides them with something to say. The value of this should not be underestimated, particularly in the age of social media. Having opinions — easily, instantly, on everything — is essential to the contemporary presentation of the self. The process of forming them is aided immensely if you already know where you’re supposed to stand on every subject, including ones you haven’t heard of yet.

Of course, college students have always been champion spouters. But there are some crucial differences today. The most important fact about the alternative intellectual frameworks I enumerated earlier — Marxism, Freudianism, and so forth — is that they existed not in series but simultaneously. They were ideologies, but they were competing ideologies. Indeed, they each represented a menagerie of mutually competing sub-ideologies: Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Marxist humanism; the schools of Jung and Reich as well as Freud; the rival strains of second-wave feminism.

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Which meant that students couldn’t just believe: they had to debate, had to read the sources, had to know what they were talking about. Debate and contention were pretty much what it meant to be a college student, at least at the schools and in the circles that took themselves seriously. So while wokeism represents a reemergence, after many years of intellectual prostration (on campus as in public life), of ideas and ideology, it does so on very different terms. With wokeism, there is no debate. There are no competing ideologies or rival schools. There isn’t even much of any reading, from what I can tell. There is only assent.

Another thing is different now, as well. Professors are different. No longer do they see their role as challenging students’ unexamined convictions — of scraping the stupid off their brains, as the documentarian Rob Montz has put it. The old salutary adversarialism has been replaced by an insidious alignment of views. Students and professors now are social justice warriors together, marching in lockstep, wreathed in clouds of self-congratulation, for the one true cause.

But this is really no surprise. Wokeism, as a bundle of intellectual tendencies, began in the academy. Decades on — academics being great conformists — dissent has largely been bred out. Meanwhile, leftist professors (that is, most of them), ensconced in bureaucratic institutions and the upper middle-class, are desperate to hold onto their self-image as subversives, speaking truth to power (in their monographs), doing battle with the system (that pays their salaries).

Besides, as parents themselves, in most cases — parents in the modern mold — they are allergic to authority, uncomfortable with negativity, and eager to be seen as friends. The degree of student ass-kissing that I’ve observed among professors now is something to behold. The situation, in many respects, is reminiscent of the Sixties: an era of social upheaval, a feeling by the grown-ups that they’re being left behind, a compensatory worship of the young (“these kids are going to save the world”), all tending to stifle the impulse to question or challenge. If you can’t teach ‘em, join ‘em.

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Finally, the schools are different, too. Having searched for decades for a rationale for their existence that is more respectable than training workers for the labour force, they’ve embraced the cause of wokeism as the new institutional mission. We have entered the era of the social-justice college. Schools now bill themselves as places to learn, not to understand the roots of contemporary society or contribute to the stock of human knowledge, but to “change the world.”

And everybody understands that the world means only in one direction. I was speaking with an old friend who works at Columbia. She asked me why we shouldn’t teach our students how to “instrumentalise” the things they learn from us. I said, fine, as long as you’re okay if a student instrumentalises what they learn from you to try to overturn Roe v. Wade. She looked at me in horror; the possibility had clearly never crossed her mind.

I spent some time a couple of years ago at the University of San Diego, a private institution. The campus was adorned with banners bearing slogans such as “Be — The — Change” and “Shape — a better — World”. One young man I met there, one of the few students who seemed intellectually alive, likened them to prayer flags. The faculty member who brought me to campus remarked that schools were in danger of turning themselves into madrassas. The New School university in New York, founded as the New School for Social Research in 1919 at the height of the Red Scare, as a bastion of free intellectual inquiry, now employs a Senior Vice President for Social Justice. From social research to social justice: that pretty much sums up the trajectory.

Is there any real learning still happening at American colleges and universities? Of course there is: in the interstices, the institutional cracks, where it can evade the surveillance of the diversity deanlets and the persecutions of the PC police. It survives behind the doors of the classrooms and in the quiet of the offices of the dwindling minority of true teachers who remember what it looks like and are committed, come what may, to keeping it alive. It persists inside the dorm rooms and the brains of the few recalcitrant students — the real campus subversives — who insist on being individuals, on thinking things through for themselves. May it live to see the end of this new dark age.

A longer version of this essay appeared in the Dutch-English journal Nexus. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged by the author.

In his new book Rationality, Pinker is adamantly opposed to telepathy and other kinds of extra-sensory perception (ESP). His position is that they do not happen because they cannot happen. He freely admits that he pre-judges the evidence by claiming that these purported phenomena are extremely improbable, assigning them an infinitesimal “prior probability”, in the language of Bayesian statistics. He acknowledges that “believing in something before you look at the evidence may seem like the epitome of irrationality”, but he justifies his refusal to look at the evidence by classifying these phenomena as “paranormal’, lumping them together with seemingly unrelated topics like homeopathy, astrology and miracles.

He then invokes an 18th-century argument against miracles by David Hume. As Hume put it, either miracles are impossible because they “violate the laws of nature” or because “no testimony is sufficient to establish” they contradict what has “frequently been observed to happen”. In Pinker’s paraphrase: “Which is more likely – that the laws of the universe as we understand them are false, or that some guy got something wrong?”

To clinch his argument, Pinker invokes physics. He is not a physicist himself, so he relies on the authority of Sean M. Carroll, a theoretical physicist who claims that the laws of physics rule out ESP. Other physicists disagree. Pinker rounds off his discussion by quoting Carl Sagan’s mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

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In a recent interview in the Harvard Gazette, Pinker explains why he rejects the “primitive intuitions” that lead most people to believe in ESP. He and his fellow rationalists “unlearn these intuitions when we buy into the consensus of the scientific establishment — it’s not as if we understand the physiology or neuroscience or cosmology ourselves”.  Instead, they buy in as an act of faith.

For readers wondering how acts of faith might bias our judgements, Pinker helpfully identifies “the Myside bias” as “probably the most powerful of all the cognitive biases, namely, if something becomes an article of faith within your own coalition, and if promoting it earns you status, that is what you believe”.  This surely applies to himself.

Is Hume’s argument against miracles relevant to ESP? Hume was writing about descriptions of biblical miracles. He was right that they are not frequently observed. But is telepathy a unique miracle that is said to have happened far away and long ago? No. It is frequently observed today.

The most common type of telepathy occurs in connection with telephone calls. Research carried out in Europe and the Americas shows that most people say they have thought of someone for no apparent reason, and that person then called, or that they knew who was calling when they heard the phone, before looking at the caller ID or answering. Similar kinds of telepathy occur with text messages and emails. (I give details of these surveys and summaries of experimental tests in my book The Sense of Being Stared At).

Telepathic experiences are not an extraordinary claim, but an ordinary claim. It is Pinker who is making an extraordinary claim by asserting that telepathy cannot happen and that most people are wrong about their own experience. Where is his extraordinary evidence? He has none, and, even worse, believes he doesn’t need any.

Telepathy is frequently observed in animals. In random household surveys in the UK and the USA, roughly half of dog owners said that their dog anticipated the return of a member of the family by waiting at a door or window, in some cases more than 10 minutes in advance. About 30% of cats did the same. In many cases, people said that this happened when the person came home at a non-routine time, and by public transport or in unfamiliar vehicles such as taxis. The animals’ responses were not simply a matter of routine or hearing familiar vehicles approaching; they seemed to depend on some other kind of connection between owners and their pets.

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Sceptics will reasonably ask whether people could be mistaken in making these observations. Perhaps people know who is calling because they are familiar with that person’s habits and unconsciously anticipate when they will call. Or perhaps they think of people frequently and forget all the times those people do not call. Perhaps people dote on their pets and are victims of wishful thinking, remembering when their dog or cat was seemingly waiting for them, and forgetting when it was not. Perhaps, or perhaps not.

Fortunately, science and reason provide a way forward: the scientific method. Scientists test hypotheses. Several researchers, including myself, have carried out hundreds of experimental tests of telephone telepathy to investigate whether random guessing explains the results, or whether something else is going on. For these tests, the subjects chose four people they knew well to serve as potential callers. Then, in filmed experiments, they sat beside a landline telephone, with no caller ID. For each trial, one of the four potential callers was selected at random and asked to call the subject.

When the phone rang, the subject said to the camera who she felt it was, for example ‘Jim’. She was right or wrong. She could not have anticipated that Jim would be calling by knowing his habits, because he was selected at random. By chance, about 25% of the answers would have been right. In fact, in hundreds of trials, the average hit rate was 45%, hugely significant statistically. You can see a film of one of these experiments and the results of many randomised experiments published in peer reviewed journals here. We found similar positive effects in experiments on email and text-message telepathy.

I have also carried out more than a hundred filmed experiments with dogs that behave as if they know when their owners are coming home. The filmed evidence showed that the dogs anticipated their owners’ arrivals even when they returned at random times, unknown to them in advance, and in unfamiliar vehicles. You can see a test independently filmed by the science unit of Austrian State television (ORF) and results of numerous tests published in peer-reviewed journals here.

Pinker is not alone in his denialist stance. He is a prominent member of an advocacy organisation called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), which publishes the Skeptical Inquirer: The Magazine for Science and Reason. His CSI colleagues include Richard Dawkins and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. CSI’s well-funded campaigns are designed to discredit “claims of the paranormal” in the serious media and the educational system. Organised skepticism is remarkably effective, and CSI has an international network of affiliated groups, as well as many local skeptic chapters and online vigilantes, ever ready to ‘debunk’ the paranormal. (In the UK, organised skeptics use the American spelling with a ‘k’ rather than the British spelling ‘sceptic’ to indicate their affiliation with the American Skeptic movement.)

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With their support, Pinker thinks he has bought into the “consensus of established science” — but this consensus is sometimes illusory. His understanding of scientific consensus is not based on empirical data, such as surveys of scientists’ opinions worldwide or on experimental research, but rather on the beliefs of his CSI colleagues. He puts his faith in a denialist coalition in which rationality is unfortunately scarce. Their echo chamber is now greatly enlarged through Wikipedia. CSI encourages groups like ‘Guerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia’ to train committed skeptics as editors and administrators.

Dogmatic skeptics currently control practically all the Wikipedia entries on subjects they regard as ‘paranormal’ as well as the biography pages of those who research these taboo topics, including me. The Wikipedia entry on parapsychology portrays the entire subject as ‘pseudoscience’. The entry on pseudoscience defines it as “statements, beliefs or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method”.

By this criterion, Pinker is a practitioner of pseudoscience. He makes statements that claim to be scientific and factual but which violate the scientific method by ignoring the evidence. His particular kind of pseudoscience is especially damaging. As a professor of psychology at Harvard, he models dogma and prejudice in the heart of the scientific establishment.

How different from one of his predecessors at Harvard, William James, who was refreshingly open-minded and curious about experiences that could not be readily explained. If Steven Pinker is prepared to defend his views on telepathy in a public debate, chaired by UnHerd, I would be happy to argue that it is more rational and scientific to look at the evidence than to ignore it.

After a bit of encouragement from my usual critics, the Council of Islamic Relations, followed by a petition from a motley array of faculty members, Brandeis rescinded their offer. Frederick Lawrence, who was then the university’s president, rang me just hours before the university issued a public statement.

At the time, I dismissed it as a one-off incident; an anomaly that could simply be brushed off. How wrong I was. That same year, a group of Muslim students tried to cancel my study group on the political theory of Islam at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, part of the Kennedy School. First, they complained to the university’s administration. When that didn’t work, they sent a letter to the funders of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. Then they suggested that I should install an imam in my class to counter my arguments. Unlike at Brandeis, the university authorities didn’t capitulate.

In both incidents, the challenge to academic freedom and free speech was posed by Islamists. But that didn’t disturb me: as an apostate who has spent many years criticising them, and received death threats in return, I was used to their antipathy.

Fast forward to 2021, however, and it seems I was wrong to dismiss this censorious attitude as an Islamist impulse. Hardly a week goes by without reports of a professor being protested, disciplined, and sometimes fired for violating the new and stringent norms of academic discourse. We read of scholars such as Kathleen Stock being driven to resign from their positions after constant hounding and threats. We read of a lecturer being no-platformed for daring to suggest that evaluations should be based on academic merit. We read of a Native American student being forced to apologise by a Yale University diversity tsar for making a harmless joke in an email.

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And that’s just in the past month. We have reached a point where grace and forgiveness are near extinct on American campuses; where reputations built over decades can be destroyed in a week. Some people still describe the phenomenon as “political correctness”. But this is much more like a religious movement. It’s hardly surprising that the Islamists’ opportunity to piggyback on existing illiberal and intolerant forces is now even greater.

Social justice, critical race theory, diversity, equality and inclusion — such terms are difficult to object to when taken at face value. And as a consequence, they have grown and spread like weeds in almost every institution. By the time we recognised the deeply illiberal notions that lurked behind these bland phrases, it was too late; they had already taken over whole departments, embedding their extensive roots into the fabric of academic institutions.

I didn’t see this coming. Seven years ago, I considered those who sounded the alarm to be engaged in histrionics. But today it is impossible to deny that the alarmists were right.

After the Brandeis cancellation, I published my intended remarks, stating that “we need to make our universities temples not of dogmatic orthodoxy, but of truly critical thinking, where all ideas are welcome and where civil debate is encouraged”. At the time, I was hopeful. Yet every passing year, free discourse increasingly became the exception in academic settings.

And while countless academics have been crucified for daring to speak out, it is ultimately their students who have suffered most in this tragedy. Our education system is failing them: rather than being a place of learning, universities have transformed into a place of fear. They demand safe spaces and a life free from all forms of aggressions: micro and macro. They graduate ill-prepared for the future, no longer equipped with the critical skills needed to thrive in a society where safe spaces, trigger warnings and preferred pronouns are not the norm. Their lives as students have been stripped of opportunities to overcome challenges and adversity, to develop inner-strength and confidence.

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Faced with such a toxic climate, riddled with the weeds of intolerance, one might think the solution is to simply give up. But to do so is not only cowardly; it ignores the fact that there is cause for optimism in the future. There are seedlings sprouting that point to renewal.

This is partly because America’s markets remain strong and reactive, bringing supply to wherever there is demand. The American market is hungry for a new approach to education. Demand is high for a university that delivers on academic freedom, merit-based recruitment of students, and is a safe space for people to learn and exchange ideas, not imagined injuries. And the supply is coming.

This week, I joined an intellectually diverse and curious group of professors and scholars in launching the University of Austin (UATX). It is an institution that stands, above all, for the pursuit of truth. It will offer a rigorous, liberal education from leading experts in their fields; a place that will teach students how to think, not what to think; a place where they will be intellectually challenged and, at times, made to feel uncomfortable.

Professors will be able to explore ideas and topics that are taboo elsewhere, without threats to their reputation, livelihoods or well-being. Unlike nearly a fifth of universities, we will not require statements of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. All we are looking for is a commitment to learning. And that doesn’t seem to be in short supply: within 12 hours of announcing the University of Austin, more than 900 academics submitted inquiries seeking a position.

Their students, once applications open, will be accepted on the basis of merit, based on an admissions exam. The university states: “UATX will not arbitrarily factor in race, gender, class or any other form of identity into its decisions. UATX stands firmly against that sort of discrimination in admissions.” Of course, none of this matters if spaces are only reserved for a wealthy elite. So we are working on a financial model that will help lower tuition costs and provide scholarships or bursaries, providing an equal opportunity for students, regardless of their financial background.

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Starting a new university will no doubt be challenging, but the truth is that this is only the beginning — the first of many new educational institutions. American parents all over the country are in revolt against the increasingly divisive educational opportunities available to their children (witness the results of the Virginian gubernatorial elections). In the coming decade, it is not inconceivable that the market will deliver new grade-school opportunities for students, as well as other new institutions of higher education.

There are those who fear that the political extremes of the Left and Right may one day destroy the republic. But the only way to destroy America is to destroy our market system. As long as individuals have choice and the market self-corrects, we will continue to thrive. Where there is demand — and the result in Virginia prove there is demand — the supply will follow.

This is what the University of Austin symbolises: a new choice for all those disillusioned with the established institutions. For too long we have looked on as universities have been disfigured, blissfully unaware that all we needed to do was create our own. Let’s hope this is the beginning of a new Renaissance.

Along the way his identity parade (all guilty, m’lud) takes in hardened malefactors such as “false dichotomy”, “guilt by association” and “straw man”, in addition to more exotic wrong’uns like the “motte-and-bailey tactic” (a kind of medieval cousin to that old lag “moving the goalposts”) and — a new favourite of mine — the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy”. First you fire a bullet into the barn door. Then you paint a bull’s-eye neatly round the hole. Ta-da! Much investment “advice” comes right out of that Texan barn.

Almost any arena of opinion and argument offers the prospect of a full card at Pinker Bingo. Political knockabout of the sort you hear weekly either in Westminster or on Question Time gives you the chance to shout “House!” within minutes. Even public debate that should bow readily to evidence-based reasoning, such as the international response to climate change, will throw up fogs of rhetorical pollution. Look at the preliminary positions, from both drastic-action radicals and kick-the-can gradualists, staked out in advance of the imminent COP 26 conference in Glasgow. With the planet’s future at stake, advocacy groups still tend to smother the clear light of reason in a dense cloud of confirmation bias, special pleading, guilt-by-association — and so on. You could argue that the comforting litany of targets and initiatives intoned by governments and agencies also deepen the sleep of reason. 

Trust in technocratic fixes may also function as a kind of mind-numbing cult. A century ago, the pioneering sociologist Max Weber — whom Pinker cites much less than he should — saw that the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rationality that defined modern life would become an official religion, prone to heretical pushbacks in the form of mystic, charismatic or ecstatic movements. The stand-off between top-down climate-change bureaucracy and the gestural militancy of the radicals proves him correct.

As in eco-politics, so in media, education, culture and even (arguably) the social superstructures of science itself. Within modern institutions, and modern selves, the sphere of rationality Pinker toils to expand cohabits with what he calls the “mythology mindset”, immune to reason’s charms and claims. Behind the Pinker project lies a teleology of his own, the a priori conviction he permits himself. That is the belief in long-term human progress — measured in indices such as declining violence, improving health and longevity, expanding empathy and solidarity — set out in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and reinforced by Enlightenment Now (2018). 

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Critics dismiss this principle of incremental betterment as groundless optimism. He treats it as simple historical factuality. “Progressives don’t like progress,” he has quipped about his radical detractors. “Our picture of the future,” he insists in Rationality, “need not be a bot tweeting fake news forever. The arc of knowledge is a long one, and it bends towards rationality.” 

Pinker’s steadily advancing reason is no alien, Mr Spock-like logic machine or unfeeling calculus of personal advantage. He often cites David Hume, who claimed in his Treatise on Human Nature that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Take “slave” here to mean something like “operating system” and you approach the Pinker ambition to subject our goals and drives — some selfish, many others not — to a more reflective scrutiny of the mental processes that underlie our choices.

Pinker’s wide appeal rests partly on the self-help, how-to character of his arguments. Wherever your will and desire (those driving passions) make you want to travel, rationality’s toolkit will help you reach your destination. Thus rational-choice theory, which he expounds in the new book with typical brio and lucidity, may serve idealistic as much as self-interested ends even though it sounds “about as lovable as Ebenezer Scrooge”. It powers, for instance, the results-oriented philanthropy of the “effective altruism” movement ­— to the dismay of puritans who expect guilt and lamentation, sackcloth-and-ashes, from would-be social reformers . 

Pinker, though, also wants to uphold truth and morality according to his own liberal-secular lights. So he inflects his value-neutral account of the pitfalls on the road to reason with warnings against the dangers of populist irrationality in power. Enjoyably, he does point out the logical flaw in saying that “we’re living in a post-truth era” (if it’s true, it’s false, like that ancient Cretan liar). Still, the Trump years and their perceived assaults on reason have shaped this new work and — together with glancing allusions to the pandemic — given it a topical edge. He deplores the “myside bias” and skewed “motivated reasoning” of a polarised, them-against-us culture. And he rightly dislikes most forms of binary reasoning. 

In the end, however, Pinker himself reverts to a simple dualism between the “reality mindset” he endorses and the “mythology mindset” that underpins supernatural faith, elects frauds who tell 30,000 lies to the US presidency and — most recently — has killed thousands of conspiracy-prone anti-vaxxers. Near the end of Rationality, he reinvents the oldest wheel on the cart of sociology and anthropology when he states: “The function of these [mythological] beliefs is to construct a social reality that binds the tribe or sect and gives it a moral purpose.” Of course, but what then? How should we try to connect myth and reality? 

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The pandemic has shown us that, even in the best-informed societies, the spread of evidence-free “mythological” beliefs and the willingness of millions to act on them can cost lives on a battlefield scale. The task of building bridges between the magical thinker and the reasoning creature — both of whom coexist in every human mind — feels more urgent than ever. Can Pinker’s mental toolkit span the gap?  

Pinker has little sense of dialectic. His clean-cut antithesis between “reality” and “mythology” in human thinking belongs in the lab, or the lecture-room, rather than in the messier interpersonal spaces where we live most of the time. Even Nietzsche — whom, again, he could have profitably consulted more than he does — saw the eternal wrangle between the reason, order and control of Apollo and the frenzy, fury and bliss of Dionysus as a perpetual to-and fro rather than a winner-takes-all struggle. With Pinker, the cause of reason tends to look like a zero-sum game: the light advances and the darkness diminishes, or vice versa.

Pinker is above all a teacher — a professor of psychology at Harvard since 2003. And teachers — unless, perhaps, they teach literature, philosophy or even quantum physics – need truth to vanquish falsity. His career-defining mission to advocate and communicate the tools of reason draws its strength from a pedagogic model rooted in his home-ground disciplines of experimental psychology and psycholinguistics. He may have written an entire book to disprove the tabula rasa picture of the human mind — The Blank Slate in 2002 — but he does believe that sustained effort can help rewrite our pre-existing scripts.

Like any caring teacher, Pinker sometimes has to make us suffer — but it’s all for our own good. “Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence,” he warns, “is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.”  

It’s not all pain in the Pinker classroom, though. Much of the fun of Rationality comes in the counter-intuitive exercises that our keep-fit instructor sets his cerebrally flabby pupils. If these don’t make your brain (pleasurably) ache as dormant muscles flex into action, then they should. Few readers will forget in a hurry his probability work-outs, especially this one: “Suppose that the prevalence of breast cancer in the population of women is 1%.” A breast-cancer diagnostic test has a true-positive rate of 90% and a false-positive rate of 9%. A woman takes it and tests positive. What are the percentage chances she has the disease? Between 80 and 90%, a sample of doctors estimated. The correct answer is around 9%.

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“Bayesian reasoning” — a key component of Pinker’s procedure in Rationality — will direct our attention to the “base rate” of any phenomenon (that 1% prevalence) and avoid distraction by the surface noise of the foreground figures. Base-rate neglect, as he demonstrates, plagues much policy-making, as does the cognate vice of the “availability heuristic”. Rare plane crashes sway behaviour more than frequent car crashes, a blue-moon terror outrage outranks the long-haul attrition of air pollution, and so on. Our judgments, individual and collective, repeatedly succumb to “psychological amplifiers such as recency, vividness, or emotional poignancy”. Hard, or lurid, cases make bad laws — and bad decisions. 

And so on, as the skittles of error fall to reason’s conquering ball. Pinker disentangles our confusions of correlation and causation. He guides us through the moves of formal logic that let us unpick the assertions of advertisers and pundits (some of them deeply intuitive, as when we sceptically say “that’s a big if…”). He outlines game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma that asks us to choose between potential gains, or losses, with no knowledge of the other players’ actions.

As a primer for cognitive hygiene, and a booster pack for your powers of critical reflection, Rationality does what it says on the box — and lots more. Yet in Pinker’s pay-off chapter, cheekily titled “What’s wrong with people?”, his grasp falters. His recommendations for improving rationality in public affairs sound either self-evident or anodyne: those rule-governed contracts; scientific peer review; media fact-checking; “statistical and critical thinking” in education; “evidence-based evaluation” in health and social policy. Lamely, he suggests that “It would be nice to see people earn brownie points for acknowledging uncertainty in their beliefs”, or “questioning the dogmas of their political sect”. And who would bestow those coveted points on repentant zealots? Party activists rewarded for loyalty? Social-media corporations that profit from traffic-driving division? Although he throws harsh words against the blowhard simplifications of media commentators, Pinker’s own nostrums often hover around the op-ed level. The “mythology mindset” that flourishes both in party politics and social activism would find little advantage in his forms of deliberative doubt. Just now, polarisation pays.

A teacher to the last, Pinker knows, supremely well, how to lead willing students towards a greater light. What’s missing is a robust model of the “impartial” agencies – communal and political – that might enable people to learn, cherish and deploy the tools of rationality as citizens, not just as pupils or professionals. Correctly, Pinker regrets “the decline of class-crossing civil-society organisations”, like churches and clubs, where people meet for a shared, connective purpose – rather than gather virtually in “sociocultural tribes” made up of uniform but atomised opinion-consumers. But he can’t say much about how super-charged rationality alone would heal the rifts between “myside” and your side.

Curiously, just across the Harvard campus, a solution of sorts might await. The great Bengali-born philosopher-economist Amartya Sen fails to rate a single mention in Rationality. Yet Sen – a Harvard professor since 2004 – began his career as an analyst of “social choice theory”. He has devoted more than half a century of original work to the role of public reasoning in entrenching and enhancing democratic norms.

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Sen grew up in Rabindranath Tagore’s utopian community at Santiniketan: the Bengali polymath’s visionary scheme to ground practical reasoning in peaceful and productive daily life. From famine prevention to women’s empowerment and the codification of the UN’s human development index (which he co-created), Sen has argued that the collective pursuit of rationality can serve common goods and deepen the bonds of belonging and community. 

Sen, an admirer of the Adam Smith, believes that strong institutions of collective reasoning can mitigate self-seeking and that “It is the power of reason that allows us to consider our obligations and ideals as well as our interests and advantages” (Development as Freedom). From village councils in India to the building (however incomplete) of accountable global agencies, he has done a lifetime’s best to make democratic rationality work in the public square. Think of it as a project to make Pinker’s “reality mindset” yield the same sort of collective pleasures and rewards as his “mythology mindset”. 

Pinker notes that, on a private level, people to tend to make pretty good sense, and good choices, about their lives. Sen asks how co-operative politics may do that too. For now, Pinker’s Rationality can tell us with forensic verve and agility how to catch out those faith-driven diehards as they blunder through their faulty premises, false syllogisms, illusory correlations and so on. So far, he can’t show convincingly how — or why — they should play a better game.  

Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane, £25)

Except it was all fake: in the experiment, which relied on the monkeys looking in particular directions when shown certain patterns, Hauser had simply pretended that they were looking in the direction relevant to his language-evolution theory. They hadn’t been. When a research assistant questioned how Hauser himself kept finding the results he wanted when nobody else who looked at the data could, he turned into a browbeating bully: “I am getting a bit pissed here,” he wrote in an email. “There were no inconsistencies!”

It is just a tiny bit ironic, then, that Hauser had also written a book about morality. Moral Minds: The Nature of Right and Wrong came out in 15 years ago, and described Hauser’s theory that we have an in-built, evolved morality module in our brains. Perhaps his had gone somewhat awry: not only did he fake the data in that monkey-learning paper, but there were also allegations that he’d lifted many of his book’s ideas — most notably, the idea that morality has a “universal grammar”, like language — from another academic, John Mikhail, without crediting him at all.

You might have expected better from an Ivy League university professor. But the Hauser case was a classic reminder of how even the most high-powered intellectuals from the most august institutions should never be given our implicit trust.

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Sadly, we now have yet another story that underlines this lesson; something similar might have happened again. Another psychology professor from a top university; another pop-science book; another set of results that aren’t real and were never real to begin with; another set of credible (though, I hasten to add, at this time unproven) allegations of scientific fraud. And another irony, because the potentially dishonest results were in a study about: honesty.

Duke University’s Dan Ariely has written several books that made a big splash in the world of popular psychology and “behavioural economics”. His combination of humour and what appears to be deep psychological insight made them fly off the shelves. In 2008, Predictably Irrational provided an apparently “revolutionary” argument for why economists were wrong to assume rationality on the part of the average consumer. In 2012, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty used some of Ariely’s own research to explain what makes people break the rules. Ariely’s slick, charismatic TED talks have racked up millions of views. One of them, titled “Our Buggy Moral Code”, explains “why we think it’s okay to cheat or steal”.

Unfortunately, it seems someone involved with Ariely’s research thought it was okay to cheat. Last week, an in-depth statistical analysis showed that a dataset from one of his 2012 papers was, essentially beyond doubt, fraudulent. The study had apparently showed that people were more honest about how much mileage their car had done if you made them sign a “I promise this information is true” statement before they reported the mileage, rather than at the bottom of the page. But it hadn’t shown that. In fact, it seems no such study ever happened, and the data was just produced using a random number generator.

Ariely responded to the claims: he said that he’d had a car insurance company collect the data, so someone there must have faked it (impressively, the faker made the results of the study line up perfectly with Ariely’s theory). In other words, his crime was one of sloppiness rather than fraud, since he didn’t double-check the data. He won’t say which insurance company it was — his responses were described by BuzzFeed News’s investigative journalist Stephanie Lee as “vague and conflicting”— nor will Duke University reveal any of the details of the investigation they claim to have made into the matter. The study with the allegedly fraudulent data — which has been cited over 400 times by other scientists — is to be retracted.

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Like Hauser’s paper on monkeys (which has been cited more than 175 times), that apparently faked paper on honesty has already done damage to the scientific literature: each of those 400 citations used it, to a greater or lesser extent, to buttress some scientific argument they were making. In every case, they seem to have been misled. This is part of the tragedy of fraud in a cumulative endeavour like science. The least Ariely could do now is provide every possible detail of the provenance of the fake dataset so the scientific community can get to the bottom of it.

But, in the case of Ariely, reticence is something of a pattern. In 2010 he told an interviewer a “fact” about the extent to which dentists agree on whether a tooth has a cavity (he said it was only 50% of the time). His apparent source, Delta Dental insurance, denied this. Ariely claimed someone at Delta Dental had given him the information — but he wouldn’t reveal anything about them, other than the fact they’d definitely not want to talk to anyone else about it.

And just a few months ago, another of his papers (from 2004) was given a special editorial “expression of concern” because of over a dozen statistical impossibilities in the reported numbers. These couldn’t be checked, Ariely said, because he’d lost the original data file.

Maybe it’s worth looking at Ariely’s own theory about cheating and dishonesty. In his TED talk, he described an experiment of his in which the participants had been more likely to cheat on a “dollar-per-correct-answer” maths test if they only had to self-report their number of correct answers, having shredded the answer sheet. That is, when nobody could check the details, dishonesty kicked in. (Someone should probably check the data in that study is legitimate, though.)

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Science is supposed to be all about nullius in verba — take nobody’s word for it. Everything, down to the tiniest detail, is supposed to be readily verifiable. Even if a scientist has done everything completely above board, they shouldn’t have to rely on “the dog ate my homework” or “I do have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school so you wouldn’t know her” excuses. The whole idea of having a scientific record is to, well, record things; a literature that’s full not just of fraud but also unverifiable claims is a strange contradiction in terms.

Even if this is the end of the Ariely affair and no other issues with his research are found, it’s still a perfect illustration of so many of the problems with our scientific system. A patchy literature of unclear veracity. Researchers losing track of their data, allowing error, and sometimes fraud, to slip in. Scientists building lucrative careers on a foundation of dodgy research, while the people that clean up their mess — the fraud-busters and data sleuths — go largely unsung. Bestselling popular books spreading untrue and unverifiable claims to thousands of readers.

You need only look at previous massively-successful books on the topics of human biases and the importance of sleep to see how low-quality research and sloppy scientific arguments can reach enormous audiences. At best, the implications of this are that dinner-party conversations will contain even fewer solid facts than usual. At worst, patients (or their doctors) will make decisions about their health on the basis of some unproven, vaguely-reported fact they read in some famous professor’s popular book.

It’s easy to get distracted by the tangles of irony of these cases: the immoral morality expert; the dishonesty expert who (at best) got duped by dishonesty. As amusing as the stories are, they also have rather grim consequences. No matter the subject area, and no matter how impressive the credentials, our trust in the experts keeps being betrayed.

And in some sense, this is a good thing. Scandals like this remind us to take nothing at face value. Nullius in verba, after all. In response to the new fraud revelations, Ariely wrote that he “did not test the data for irregularities, which after this painful lesson, I will start doing regularly”. Whether or not you trust Ariely’s research or his books any more, it’s good advice.

But while Gorsuch and his colleagues applied protections against discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex or national origin”, he also made clear that the legislation in question was designed to protect “individuals not groups”. According to the ruling, a scheme that “promotes equality at the group level” would fall foul of the law if it involved discrimination at the individual level.

And so, even as Bostock was heralded as a major moment for LGBT rights, Gorsuch’s opinion set off alarm bells in progressive circles. In particular, many wondered whether his understanding of discrimination spelt trouble for the system of race-based college admissions that has been in place since the civil rights era. Did the last great liberal judicial victory contain clues about the next great liberal defeat? Is “affirmative action” doomed?

These questions may soon be answered. The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether to hear Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, a case brought by a group of Asian-Americans who claim they were illegally discriminated against as part of the university’s pursuit of a diverse student body. Lower courts have found in favour of Harvard, but many suspect the conservative majority on the Supreme Court may see things differently.

The past pronouncements of Chief Justice John Roberts, without whom a defence of affirmative action has little chance of survival, suggest sympathy with the students’ arguments. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” was his blunt summation in a 2006 case concerning high school integration efforts.

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The lawsuit against Harvard doesn’t just accuse the university of discriminating against Asian-Americans but doing so systematically by marking them down on personality scores that rate traits such likability, “positive personality”, courage and kindness. Analysis of admissions data by the Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono, an expert witness in the case, found that an otherwise identical Asian-American male with a 25% chance of admission would have a 32% chance of admission if he were white, a 77% chance if he were Latino and a 95% chance if he were black.

Suspiciously, the very smartest Asian American students tended to score higher for their personalities. The plaintiffs argue that this amounts to a soft quota system and compare its enforcement to the way in which Harvard used “character and fitness” criteria to, with a nod and a wink, cap the number of Jewish students on campus in the 1920s and 30s.

For now, the court has bought itself time by asking the Biden administration for its view of the case. Nonetheless, the stage is set for an almighty battle over one of the most contentious policies to emerge from the civil rights era.

Indeed, whenever the Supreme Court has dealt with affirmative action, its judgments tend to be reflected in the racial politics of the time. In the 1960s, affirmative action was presented as part of a package of emergency measures necessary in the immediate aftermath of Jim Crow and legal segregation. By 1978, the court moved away from explicit desegregation. In Bakke, it found that racial quotas were unconstitutional but that the pursuit of “diversity” for its educational benefits was legal, and that race might be considered a “plus factor” in the admissions process. (It is this vague goal of diversity that explains the scoring system under fire in the Harvard case.)

But this 20th-century liberal fudge is getting harder to sustain. The backdrop to any affirmative action case being heard by the Supreme Court in the near future will be the increasingly strident anti-racist creed preached on college campuses, supported by the Democratic Party and subscribed to by the media and business elite.

Ironically, it is the assertiveness of today’s racial politics that may make the defence of affirmative action more difficult. In other words, the problem for the American Left is that they have said the quiet part out loud. Rather than hiding behind the fig leaf of the pursuit of the educational benefits of diversity, or arguing for time-limited, case-specific policies, many progressives are happy to call a quota a quota and see the fight against racism as a never-ending all-encompassing struggle.

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Take Ibram X Kendi, today’s prophet of anti-racism. He is explicit about prioritising group iniquities over discrimination against individuals. In fact, his whole approach is about tinkering with outputs rather than striving to treat people equally. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity,” he writes in How To Be Antiracist. “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”

To Kendi, equity is measured in terms of outcome, and has only been achieved “when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing”. By Kendi’s logic, not only is a system of explicit racial quotas not racist; it’s the only truly antiracist approach.

The Biden administration doesn’t express things in such hardline terms. But it nonetheless claims to be putting “equity”, and not equality, at the heart of everything it does. In an early executive order Biden defined equity as “the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment”. That may sound innocuous enough, but in reality it has so far meant numerous straightforwardly discriminatory policies.

And many of these measures have already run into legal roadblocks. In Wisconsin, a judge has halted a Department of Agriculture programme that allocates loan forgiveness on the basis of race. In Texas, a judge has ruled against a measure in the Covid relief bill that explicitly prioritised restaurant-owners of certain racial backgrounds.

The infrastructure bill that passed the Senate last week was also infused with the logic of equity. For example, in the bidding for contracts to install solar power or reconfigure the roads in American cities, the government will prioritise minority and female-owned businesses. Legal challenges will surely follow.

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Perhaps a compromise can emerge. One option would be for an affirmative action approach focused on giving a leg up to Americans that really need it. Rather than engineering a cosmetic and subjective kind of diversity that keeps consciences clean and money flowing into the endowment pot, America’s elite colleges could positively discriminate in a more explicit but socially useful way. Richard Kahlenberg, an expert witness in the Harvard case, argues for socio-economic preference in college admissions, which would drop the offensive charade of personality assessments and target working-class blacks, hispanics and whites. It’d be a less dishonest, less divisive and almost certainly a more beneficial approach.

Meanwhile, if the Biden administration wants to target extra support at the neediest farmers, it need not pander to “equity” with openly discriminatory policies. Instead, it could simply… target the neediest farmers. Doing so would be fairer policy and better politics.

In the meantime, whether in the Harvard case or elsewhere, a legal and political collision seems inevitable. There has always been a tension between the more expansive policies born in the civil rights era, foremost among them affirmative action, and the kind of colour-blind creed consistent with the constitution and preached by Martin Luther King and others. But today’s combative and ascendant anti-racism is stretching that tension past its limit. It is a powerful dogma — but it could soon meet its match in the Supreme Court.

The outbreak of this second virus was confirmed earlier this month by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention, which issued a statement declaring racism an “epidemic” that posed a “serious public health threat”. Citing a “growing body of research”, the CDC director called on her agency — and America at large — to “confront the impact of racism”.

This is, on the face of it, a peculiar focus for America’s leading public health agency; one might think it would be preoccupied with the other pandemic ravaging the country. And yet the CDC’s statement was all too typical of today’s medical establishment. The American Psychological Association recently announced that America was “living in a racism pandemic”; the American Medical Association has called racism an “urgent public health threat”; and The Lancet has declared it  a “public health crisis we can no longer ignore”.

It is easy to dismiss such rhetoric as “woke” nonsense, typical of “progressive” America’s obsession with race. But there is something striking — and troubling — about the way in which racism has evolved from a social problem into a medical one. For it is not simply a case of well-meaning medical practitioners parroting the language of social justice to “assuage their liberal guilt”, as a former member of President Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board put it. From a public health perspective, it has potentially fatal ramifications.

Take, for example, the “anti-racist agenda for medicine” recently published in The Boston Review by two Harvard doctors. In it, the pair argue that, because colour-blind solutions have failed to achieve racial equity in health care, they have had to introduce “race-explicit interventions” in their Boston hospital. These have culminated in a pilot programme of preferential care for black and “Latinx” heart failure patients, due to launch this spring; instead of triaging their patients according to the seriousness of their condition, race has become a mitigating — and deciding — factor.

In effect, it will mean that a black person with a less serious condition could be prioritised over a white patient on account of their skin colour. “Building on calls for reparations,” the two doctors explain, “we call this a vision for medical restitution.” Here, writ large at the heart of the medical establishment, was Critical Race Theory — the idea that the US is a fundamentally racist country and that race is a social construction designed to oppress and exploit people of colour.

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In many ways, it was only a matter of time. As far back as 2010, the American Journal of Public Health published an article titled “Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis”, in which two Professors of Public Health argued that only a “race-conscious” approach to healthcare would be able to combat racial inequities. Based on “race equity and social justice principles”, they encouraged the development of solutions that “bridged gaps” in health, housing and employment.

In the years since, this medicalisation of Critical Race Theory remained purely academic, largely confined to Professors looking to rack up a few journal citations and bask in the warm glow of approval from fellow Left-wing academics. But after the death of George Floyd, that changed overnight.

As Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, politicians began likening the scourge of racism to a health emergency, calling it a “pandemic on a pandemic”. The mood was captured by Austin’s mayor, who cried out: “Racism is literally killing black and brown people. It’s a public health crisis, and it’s beyond time to treat it as such”.

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Public health officials agreed. “While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid,” said one infectious disease expert, “there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes”. Meanwhile Anthony Fauci, the chief medical advisor to the President who had previously denounced anti-lockdown protests, was decidedly more equivocal about BLM: “It’s a delicate balance because the reasons for demonstrating are valid, but the demonstration puts one at additional risk.”

Soon after, America’s public health bodies began discussing racism in terms formerly only used to describe Covid-19. The American Medical Association, for example, recently announced that it wanted to increase funding into the “epidemiology of risks and damages related to racism”, while the CDC’s new Racism and Health Program seeks to “build a healthier America for all” by confronting racial and health disparities.

Yet the most striking feature of these statements is their similarity. Each one promises to “acknowledge” the damaging effects of structural and systemic racism and supports the “development” of policy to combat racism.

But what does this mean in practice? In New York, for instance, the City Department of Health, in an attempt to address low testing and high positivity rates among minority communities, launched a hyper-local testing programme. It proved a success and resulted in 8,730 tests across the two postcodes. So far, so sensible.

However, compare that to the approach of the Milwaukee Health Department, which, in order to “own the work of racism being a public health issue”, devised its own “health equity initiative”. Contained within a “three-step process”, it proposed the introduction of racial equity training, the development of “a racial equity framework” and the creation of safe spaces and a “welcoming, inclusive” organisation.

This latter approach is characteristic of Critical Race Theory, which disregards evidence-led specifics in favour of ideology-based generalities. But in the field of medicine, this is particularly dangerous. American medical insurance companies, for example, now attribute lower levels of depression among black people and Latinos to under-diagnosis, even though suicide rates among white people are three times higher. Yes, depression doesn’t always manifest itself through suicide, but it is strange, as Wesley Yang notes, that Blue Cross, which provides insurance to a third of Americans, “sees ‘not enough depressed black people’ as a problem that has to be fixed”.

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By Giles Udy

Elsewhere, certain states are adopting race-prioritised vaccine rollouts — a move first mooted by the CDC last year. These states, including Vermont and Montana, claim that, even after controlling for income, underlying health conditions and other variables that potentially affect the disease, there is still a racial disparity.

Put to one side the disturbing historical parallels of dividing Americans by their skin colour — it is not even clear that this racialised approach to vaccines makes sense from a public health perspective. After all, there are a number of other issues — such as education, access and outreach — that are also hindering the vaccine rollout to non-white communities. Moreover, as one former Biden official warned, it could even have the opposite effect and deter uptake if minorities fear that they are being treated like “guinea pigs”.

In reality, all that has resulted from this policy is a racially distorted vaccine rollout that is likely to fuel resentment in an already divided country. Today’s doctors are, of course, doubtlessly well-intentioned in their attempts to cure America’s societal ills. But shifting attitudes on race is a long and difficult process — and not something that can be remedied with a three-step public health initiative.