The Dark Ages Are Back!

I seem to be finding a lot of material at The Atlantic lately. Alan Lightman, who has been a professor at both Harvard and MIT and appears to be nothing if not a member of the academic establishment, has recently sounded the alarm: The Dark Ages Are Back.

Since April 22, more than 500 leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies have signed a statement protesting the unprecedented interference of the Trump administration into higher education, interference that included external oversight of admissions criteria, faculty hiring, accreditation, ideological capture, and, in some cases, curriculum. As the statement says, higher education in America is open to constructive reform. However, “we must oppose undue government intrusion in the lives of those who learn, live, and work on our campuses.”

Especially targeted by the administration have been international students.

Here's where his argument starts to lose momentum. In this post, I looked at sources including the Chronicle of Higher Education to discover that universities love international students for the simple reason that 80 percent of them pay full freight -- no schoarships or other financial aid; if they borrow, they get the loans in their home countries,.

The percentage of foreign students at Harvard, as I pointed out in that post, is 27%. The percentage of international students at MIT, where Prof Lightman teaches, is even higher, at 29.1%. As I pointed out, these students tend to be the privileged scions of third-world ruling classes who attend elite US universities because the degrees are status symbols.

Harvard and MIT are happy to take their money, and it isn't a great leap to recognize that if those third-world rich kids want to harass Jews on campus in the name of supporting Palestine, neither Harvard nor MIT will get crosswise with them. And indeed, Prof Lightman will never intrude on the lives of those who learn, live, and work there, most espedcially the international students, without whom he and his colleagues would not have cushy paychecks.

The most recent interference from the Trump administration is Trump's threat to take away Harvard's tax exempt status:

pic.twitter.com/cjWgAaCP7v

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 2, 2025

It looks as if Trump actually has strong legal grounds for doing this:

It all goes back to 1983 and an 8-1 Supreme Court decision called Bob Jones University v. the United States. Back then, the Christian university didn’t allow interracial dating, which it considered a violation of biblical values. The IRS decided that since the United States was firmly opposed to racial discrimination as “public policy,” the school should lose its nonprofit status. The Supremes overwhelmingly agreed.

I've commented here that Harvard's undergraduate admissions policies are generally recognized to have originated as a way to limit Jews without having an explicit Jewish quota, and more recently, the same methodology has been used to limit Asians, while at the same time increasing the quotas for more favored groups. This practice was found unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 2023. Prof Lightman blithely ignores this background, instead quoting a letter from MIT President Sally Kornbluth:

“To live up to our great mission, MIT is driven to pursue the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence. That means we are, and must be, in the business of attracting and supporting exceptionally talented people, the kind of people with the drive, skill and daring to see, discover and invent things no one else can. To find those rare people, we open ourselves to talent from every corner of the United States and from around the globe.” In the past, MIT and the many other institutions of higher learning in America have been Bacon’s “merchants of light.”

Wait a moment. In the past, MIT, Harvard, and the many other institutions of higher learning have systematically discriminated against Jews and Asians, who indeed are also exceptionally talented people. In fact, I strongly suspect that in any future class action suit against any selective university, discovery will show that the century-old discriminatory policies have persisted with only slight cosmetic changes. As I pointed out in my post at the link, in a recent Harvard entering class, roughly 80% were in non-merit categories including foreign students, legacies, and preppies.

And we need to recognize that the Harvard admissions paradigm has been generally used by all selective unversities, certainly all the Ivies. If the whole process is discriminatory, all such institutions risk losing their non-profit status. This in turn suggests that the traditional college admissions process itself will need to be scrapped and reinvented -- and this leaves aside the whole question of faculty hiring.

And we have the whole additional problem of the faculty career path through graduate school, in which legions of graduate students are prepared, at least in theory, for a steadily shrinking market of tenure-track positions in a highly corrupt hiring, promotion, and tenure process, which is already collapsing of its own weight. A serious look into this aspect of academic culture would upend the univerity system as we know it. Prof Lightman undermines his own argument in this passage:

Of course, the intellectual and creative freedom in America has enabled great productivity far beyond the precincts of science and technology. Exemplars include William James in philosophy and psychology, Toni Morrison in literature, Noam Chomsky in linguistics and cognitive science, Hannah Arendt in political theory, Martha Nussbaum in law and ethics, Margaret Mead in anthropology, W. E. B. Du Bois in sociology, John Rawls in political philosophy, Susan Sontag in cultural criticism, John Dewey in philosophy and education, and many, many more.

William James is a philosophical dead end. Toni Morrison? And I've had to study Noam Chomsky in grad school myself -- linguistics as a field is based on his theory that language evolved as a series of computer program-like modules, something for which there is no empirical evidence. Margaret Mead's work has been acknowledged as fabricated for generations. John Dewey is a joke. And these examples are apparently the best Prof Lightman can think of. But Harvard has produced many lesser luminaries, including Ted Kaczinksy, the Unibomber, whose personality is alleged to have been shaped by a Harvard undergraduate experimental program, or for that matter Timothy Leary or B F Skinner.

If Trump's effect is to cause a rethinking of higher education that eliminates the Harvard-MIT model, so much the better.