FROM HARVARD TO HILLSDALE: THE RIGHT IS UNDER ATTACK FROM WITHIN

Source: Harvard University

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There persists among alumni and administrators at the nation’s elite universities a consoling fiction: that the collapse of right-wing student institutions is the natural consequence of recklessness, marginality, or cultural maladaptation. It is a story told with relief. It converts failure into virtue, dissolves responsibility, and allows those charged with stewardship to imagine themselves as reluctant executioners of what could not, in any case, have endured.

The story is false.

What has occurred—at Harvard, at Stanford, and increasingly elsewhere—is neither accidental nor organic. It is a deliberate, patient, and corrosive systematic undermining of right-wing institutions by internal actors unwilling or unable to prevail through open argument, and therefore resolved to prevail by other means, namely through procedure and escalation. The pattern, once seen, is unmistakable.

First, a small, pernicious faction embeds itself within an institution over time—sometimes for months, sometimes for years—presenting itself as loyal, conscientious, and often steadfastly conservative. These are rarely firebrands. Rarer still that they would declare their aims. They submit to the institution’s forms, ascend its ranks, speak the language, and wait. This waiting is not loyalty—it is parasitism—and what is presented as commitment is merely proximity purchased for later use.

Second, when leadership moves to impose seriousness by raising standards, clarifying purpose, accelerating output, or exercising authority, this perfidious element refuses the test of open contestation. Argument gives way to leverage. Private conversations are guided toward provocation, and internal exchanges are deliberately inflamed, not to resolve disagreement, but to generate material for later use. Messages are preserved and selectively recorded. Portions are isolated, cropped, and stored. Pieces are elevated while wholes are ignored. Implication replaces explanation. Truth is not lost through carelessness, but deliberately neutralized, rendered unusable so that accusation can proceed without obstruction.

This work is not hurried. It unfolds quietly, over time, with intent, and therefore with guilt. Nothing that follows can be described as an honest misunderstanding.

Third, disputes that should have been resolved within the institution are carried outward. Boards, donors, and university-adjacent power centers are approached not with full records but with curated fragments—dossiers assembled to shock rather than to inform, and, when necessary, to imply consequences should prompt compliance not be forthcoming. What is communicated, often obliquely but unmistakably, is that inaction will invite escalation: that if established authorities do not move to effect the will of a hungry, subversive few, reputational damage will be visited upon the many. The aim is to secure judgment in advance of understanding, and to ensure that one side is condemned before it has even grasped that it stands accused.

Truth is not lost through carelessness, but deliberately neutralized, rendered unusable so that accusation can proceed without obstruction.

Fourth, boards—often distant from the daily reality of the institutions they nominally oversee, acutely sensitive to reputational risk, and insufficiently anchored in their fiduciary responsibilities—yield. Bylaws are cast aside, dashed upon the rocks precisely because they exist to preserve order and to compel deliberation in service of truth. That is intolerable to actors whose project depends not on truth but on speed, pressure, and asymmetry. Due process is abandoned. Elected leadership—frequently selected in the first place under the mistaken assumption that it could be guided, managed, or quietly directed from behind the scenes—is overridden once it becomes clear that these leaders intend to lead in earnest, for the good of the institution rather than for the convenience of those malignant tumors who sought to instrumentalize them. The fantasy of being a gray cardinal collapses the moment authority is exercised independently, and that independence is a threat such creatures cannot long abide. Where mediation should have appeared, cease-and-desist orders descend. At that point, the institution ceases to be governed by rules and is governed instead by fear deliberately cultivated at every level. Lacking the capacity to command respect, these people demand it; when that fails, they construct systems of cost and consequence so distorted that even the resolute begin to calculate means of survival. What follows appears to outsiders as consensus or moral clarity, but is in truth compliance extracted under duress.

At Harvard, this strategy succeeded.

A right-wing publication, The Harvard Salient, which had strengthened its editorial standards, increased its output, clarified its mission, and re-engaged its membership, was not undone by excess or incompetence. It was undone by what many involved have described as a coup d’état. The resignation of the overwhelming majority of its active members—and of the entire masthead—in solidarity with its ousted leadership, rather than acquiescence to authority imposed through procedural abuse, exposes the hollowness of subsequent claims about a toxic culture or fringe leadership. Institutions do not evacuate themselves en masse unless legitimacy has been gravely violated.

Those claims, moreover, did not arise organically from the life of the organization. They were deliberately provoked by two students who had long demonstrated hostility toward the Christian character of the organization and toward its leadership. These actors worked systematically to inflame discussion, nudging conversations toward maximal outrage while quietly documenting the most inflammatory moments. Screenshots were taken not to correct misconduct, but to stockpile material for later use.

The aim was straightforward: to construct, retroactively, a narrative of moral criminality. Anti-Zionist political argument, encouraged and amplified by these same individuals, was later reclassified as evidence of antisemitism. From that reclassification followed a second, more cynical move: the assertion of personal victimhood, advanced despite the absence of any substantiating evidence and despite the fact that the alleged hostile environment had been, in significant part, engineered by the claimants themselves.

What was presented as whistleblowing was, in reality, entrapment. A controversy was cultivated in advance so that it could later be moralized, weaponized, and deployed as justification for removing leadership that had proven resistant to manipulation. This was not the exposure of a failing institution. Rather, it was the manufacture of an accusation designed to make institutional defense impossible. Bad-faith actors learned, once again, that escalation works.

History gives little reason to assume that such elements, once embedded, relinquish their ambitions voluntarily.

Similar tactics are now plainly visible elsewhere at Harvard, most notably in the campaign directed against the John Adams Society. In this case, the attack did not originate from within the institution at all, but from individuals who were not members and resented that fact—outsiders who nonetheless coordinated an effort to delegitimize an organization to which they did not belong. That effort culminated in a single-source article published by The Harvard Crimson, an article that failed to attribute a single substantive quotation to a single relevant person, yet proceeded to cast sweeping aspersions on its character and legitimacy. The episode was revealing on two fronts: first, of the pusilanimity of the so-called sources; and second, of the precipitous decline in editorial standards at a paper once capable of distinguishing between reporting and advocacy. The aim, as elsewhere, was to render the institution suspect to donors, speakers, and students alike, until it could be hollowed out by reputational attrition or abandoned under pressure. It failed.

At Stanford, comparable efforts were directed against Stanford Review, the university’s long-standing conservative paper, which until recently was struggling—much like The Harvard Salient—to contain the influence of internal actors operating in bad faith. There, dissent was constrained and scrutiny of those exercising effective control was discouraged, with the evident aim of securing editorial dominance without accountability. Resistance, however, came earlier and more forcefully. Under its present leadership, the publication appears—for now—to have stabilized. Whether that stability reflects a permanent resolution or merely a temporary reprieve remains an open question. History gives little reason to assume that such elements, once embedded, relinquish their ambitions voluntarily.

At the René Girard Society, the trajectory was less fortunate. Like the John Adams Society, it had been making real strides toward clarifying its mission and positioning itself for maximum efficacy in a changed political and intellectual landscape. Yet it ultimately succumbed to internal pestilence that secured positions from which they could arrest momentum rather than advance it.

It would be tedious, and in any case unnecessary, to descend into parallel narrations at Yale University, Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Notre Dame, and elsewhere. The attentive reader will already have supplied them for himself. The same causes, operating under slightly altered circumstances, have produced the same effects, with a regularity that should silence any appeal to coincidence. One need not insist upon particulars to recognize the hidden hand at work.

The pattern is perhaps most starkly illustrated in the aftermath. At The Harvard Salient itself, the new regime has begun methodically purging its public record—scrubbing from its website essays and articles now deemed undesirable, particularly those that defended Christian principles such as natural law, reaffirmed the supremacy of the Christian religion, or documented the mistreatment of Christians. What could not be seized procedurally is now being erased retrospectively. This revisionism has been accompanied by a familiar tactic of pressure timed to media exposure. The prior leadership, acting out of concern for the safety and reputations of the students entrusted to its care, agreed to step aside on the explicit understanding that internal communications would not be leaked or weaponized. That understanding was violated almost immediately. Materials were released regardless, confirming what the episode had already suggested: that those now directing the publication feel no obligation to the moral inheritance that once underwrote it, no respect for the Christian foundations upon which both the nation and its leading universities were built, and no fidelity even to the basic norms of contract and restraint to which they had affixed their assent. 

Leadership that hesitates here mistakes tolerance for virtue. Tolerance is not a virtue.

There is, finally, a responsibility that falls with particular weight upon those entrusted with leadership. To be placed at the head of such an institution is not merely an honor; it is a charge. It cannot be overstated how essential it is, early and decisively, to identify and remove those who act in bad faith—those who embed themselves not to build, but to hollow out and to sabotage. To do so will, no doubt, spare the leader future difficulty. But that consideration is incidental and small-minded. The deeper reason is graver: the survival of the institution itself may depend upon it.

Leadership that hesitates here mistakes tolerance for virtue. Tolerance is not a virtue. It forgets that institutions are not abstractions but living things, sustained by trust, loyalty, and shared purpose, and therefore uniquely vulnerable to those who exploit these goods while secretly despising them. To allow such hymetic actors to remain—out of politeness, fear of controversy, or hope of accommodation—is to surrender the institution piecemeal. One may defer conflict for a time, but one does so at the cost of multiplying its eventual force.

What occurred at Harvard and elsewhere was not a scandal. It was a warning. And unless students and alumni are prepared to take it as such—to build institutions capable of resisting capture from within—the same quiet seizures will repeat themselves, one organization after another, until nothing remains but husks and the moral alibis of those who stood aside.