‘What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun’-Kohelet, son of David, king in Jerusalem, made this point 3,000 years ago. Want a prime example of words that ‘aged well’? These are Kohelet’s words. Arguably, they did not age at all…. And if another example is needed, it exists in the form of the autobiographical account of Richard Pipes, a historian of Russia whose illustrious career started and developed in Harvard, then continued in the framework of the CIA, and then concluded in Harvard. Being an advisor to the American administration on all-things-Soviet during the period of the Cold War, Pipes became a very public persona. His reputation of a ‘conservative intellectual’ is a responsibility of the ‘liberal press’. The label of a ‘conservative intellectual’ has a function akin to a warning ‘contains nuts’ on food products: consume with care, remembering your sensitivities, just in case, you know…There is no equivalent warning for a ‘liberal intellectual’; that kind of natural product is pure and safe, it does not come with risks….obviously. Now, that you are warned, let us go to the similarities between Pipes and Kohelet.
‘VIXI: memoirs of a non-belonger’ is Pipes’ autobiography, published in 2003. Pipes was 80 years old at the time of this publication, not a bad point in one’s lifetime for an autobiography. Still, he will live to 95. He kept a diary. If available, diary entries between 2003 and 2018 (the time of his death) would be a treasure trove for a cultural historian. The reason to bring Pipes’ writings to the light of day at this particular moment is the Harvard situation, that developed recently and seemingly (to many) all-of-the sudden. The ‘Harvard situation’ is, of course, a reported reality of harassment and intimidation towards the Jewish students, a reality treated indecisively, some say irresponsibly, by the university administration. And then there is a Congressional hearing dedicated to the fate of Jewish students and universities’ treatment of anti-Jewish hostility, where Claudine Gay, now a former President of the University, gave a less than convincing presentation.
The ‘Harvard situation’ invoked endless analyses. A lot of them are trivial but some are very good, making it hard to add something novel. Some examples. Gad Yair, an Israeli professor of sociology, dedicated a lot of time to Harvard’s antics and to what he perceives, in much broader terms, as American intellectual malaise spreading throughout the universities. His video blog is in Hebrew, limiting the exposure of his content to Hebrew-speakers only, but it really deserves a bigger audience. However, the first prize for the analysis of Harvard situation goes, in my view, to Halen Dale, a superb writer and public intellectual, who -appalled- drew a parallel between the American universities today and the English monasteries before the dissolution, in an essay unambiguously titled ‘Dissolve the Universities?’. What can be added to that?- I asked myself. Then, one weekend, I opened Richard Pipes’ autobiography at random, on page 107. That is what it said:
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“In the mid-1960s, violent disturbances broke out at several major American universities…In 1969 ‘the student revolution’ struck Harvard. The disturbances were meticulously organised by a group which called herself Student for Democratic Society (SDS) but seemed to be run by older radicals quite contemptuous of democracy; many of the younger members were from Stalinist families……
The unrest had no clear objectives: that is, although endless ‘programmes’ were drafted, it was an emotional explosion which affected both students and faculty. All sorts of frustrations and resentment, preciously held repressed, floated to the surface. Graduate student assistants wanted higher pay; Orthodox Jewish students wanted kosher food served in houses. Lectures were disrupted by radical students: here and there a bolder professor expelled them …but most were helpless. Strangely, for all my conservative reputation, I never experienced such disruptions: the main victims were liberal professors afflicted by a guilty conscience. Anyone who has observed such events at close range becomes aware that mass hysteria communicates from person to person like a virus, for no apparent reason and with no clear purpose. It is next to impossible to resist. ……
The faculty split on the issue of the administrative response. One part backed President Nathan Pusey, decision to call in the police; another turned against him. The former organised into a ‘conservative’ caucus, while the latter formed a ‘liberal’ one…The remaining 90 percent of the faculty pretended that nothing had happened….. The conservative caucus, which I joined, met informally in the homes of its members to draft policy statements…The liberal did likewise but their stress was on a ‘dialogue’ with the rebellious student which in practice meant finding ways of appeasing them….The faculty meetings…turned into raucous affairs…..I listened to the discussions with a sensation akin to nausea. I had a hard time believing how many of the frightened faculty were prepared to give up all that made out university great in order to pacify the mob and how dishonestly they rationalised their fears. It was in this mood that the faculty voted to establish a black studies programme and to allow black student to participate in faculty appointments to it, although hardly anyone believed that this programme made for a legitimate field of concentration. …
I never quite regained the esteem I had for my colleagues: their self-interest and cowardice lurked all too clearly beneath the façade of academic concerns. Nor did the students behaviour raised them in my eyes. The majority were intimidated and lacked all initiative. The instigators of the disturbances acted at no risk for themselves: liberal opinion, even as it condemned their excesses, assumed that their violence was inspired by genuine grievances and sympathised with them. A neighbour of ours , when told of an explosion set off by a radical, killing one scientist, wondered about what the killer wanted ‘to tell us’. When, half a year earlier, a small band of Russians had demonstrated in Red Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia, they were instantly seized and sent to prison, as they expected to be. This was heroism: the actions of our university dissidents were antics.
Harvard changed profoundly after the 1960s. It began to view itself as an agent of social change and increasingly devoted itself to solving society’s problems: instead of acquiring knowledge, no matter how esoteric, and teaching it to students it emphasized ‘outreach’. Rather than select its faculty and students solely by criteria of talent and creativity, it pursued cultural and sexual diversity. …Much of what Harvard now did reminded me of the early Soviet educational experiments which aimed at breaking down the isolation of institutions of higher learning and harnessing them in the cause of social reform. Altogether, the drift was of a Soviet kind…”
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There is much to be learned from Pipes’ autobiography. That should be self-evident. The quoted paragraphs form a tiny segment into a composition of a truly prophetic nature. Staying on the topic of Harvard: there is very little in today’s ‘Harvard situation’ that is genuinely new. Cultural movement, started by the ‘baby boomers’ mostly, that generation born straight after the Second World War, the first generation not to experience any real material deprivation and to suffer from ‘affluenza’ as a result, a generation uninoculated by ‘real life’, shall we say, is still going strong. It would even be a mistake to characterise the today’s situation as having ‘roots’ in 1969 students’ revolution. We are not at the level of leaves or fruits, in terms of development. It does not look like we have moved to the ‘next stage’. The grandchildren of the baby boomers, leading the movement in 2024 (Generation Z? Millennials?) have not added much to the picture. A much sharper way is seeing that ‘revolution’ as continuing since 1969 till now without a clear break. The parallels, the resemblances are too many and too close: the abandonment of quality of analytical insight as a single criterion of worthiness of any intellectual endeavour (tick), The abandonment of objectivity (tick), celebration of poorly specified grievances (tick), ‘packaging’ of grievances around matters of race, ethnicity and sexuality (tick), proliferation of grievances-supported fields of study (tick), flourishing of the culture of fear and guilt (tick), and unapologetic entitled aggression, aggression, aggression towards anyone unmarked as an ideological friend or at least an ally.
What is new then? A few terms here and there, that is all, like ‘woke culture’, and the speed of distribution of the messages. The latter is due to the technological changes and only means that the cultural impact of the ‘Harvard situation’ is amplified. The response to this very essay in 1969, before it is forgotten, would have amounted to 2-3 specimens of hate mail in total. I will have 20-30 by tomorrow, that much is clear. Plus a couple of well-meaning suggestions to take the whole essay down, in the interests of my reputation. In the past they would have been whispered in person, tomorrow they will land in an inbox, carefully worded.
On a serious note…..Students in intellectual history looking for a worthy PhD topic should consider concentrating on Pipes’ legacy-that thesis would make an intellectual best-seller. Careers of students in cultural history could benefit from tracing today’s woke culture back step by step all the way to the 1960s. Last but not the least: careers of demographers could be enhanced if they took the challenge of linking this particular cultural development nicknamed as ‘supersititio’ by Helen Dale to the demographic realities of the West. The original meaning of ‘Superstitio’, by the way, is not that close to what today’s instincts of a native English speaker would dictate. As Oxford Classic Dictionary informs us: “ though perhaps originally implying a positive attitude, had become pejorative by the end of the 1st century BCE. Superstition meant a free citizen’s forgetting his dignity by throwing himself into the servitude of deities conceived as tyrants.’ Voila!