The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | April 18, 2026 | No Comments

The University of Pennsylvania campus

For a decade or so now, I’ve been using that headline — a literary allusion to the famous 1970 article in which Hunter S. Thompson pioneered “Gonzo journalism” — in posts about elite academia. The decadence and depravity is mainly a function of the liberal hegemony on these campuses, where Republicans are so scarce among the faculty and administration as to be nearly non-existent. This is true not only at the Ivy League schools, but also at all the other most prestigious private colleges and universities (Stanford, Northwestern, Duke, etc.) and even at the more selective state schools like Cal-Berkeley and the University of North Carolina. Insofar as any institution of higher education is regarded as “elite,” it is characterized by a vehement commitment to leftism, which excludes not only conservatives from employment, but even silences dissent by moderate and pragmatic liberals. The experience of former Clinton administration official Lawrence Summers, who was driven out of the presidency of Harvard University for questioning the “diversity” rationale in tenure decisions, shows that not even card-carrying Democrats are safe in such environments.

This week we got a report from Jonathan Zimmerman, a well-regarded senior professor at the University of Pennsylvania:

In March of last year, about two months after President Trump returned to the White House, I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?
Dead silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words. . . .

You can and should read the whole thing. Zimmerman has located the exact source of the problem, i.e., that the Left now dominates higher education so completely that those inside the campus bubble can’t even see what the problems are, much less think constructively about possible solutions. When Zimmerman urged his colleagues to consider a moment of self-reflection — to ask them to consider how they had helped create the threat represented by the Trump administration — his question was met with a sermon about how “circle the wagons” was offensive.

Although the Left’s hegemonic domination of academia is now worse than ever, it is not new. Seventy-five years ago, when William F. Buckley Jr. published God and Man at Yale, liberalism was already so prevalent on campus that Buckley’s critique was met with furious denunciations. Yale trustee Frank Ashburn, writing in the Saturday Review, said of Buckley’s work: “The book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face.”

To compare Buckley’s book to a Ku Klux Klan rally was outrageous and insulting, but such is ever the fate of anyone courageous enough to speak out against institutionalized liberalism. One wonders what deranged insults are now flooding into Professor Zimmerman’s email inbox after he dared write this in the Chronicle of Higher Education.



 

Category: The Ivy League Is Depraved and Decadent

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