Aligning the Ivy League

There's an online battle underway to coerce a change in the networked alignment of the Ivy League. The conflict is more complicated than it looks.

Just before Christmas 2023, Chris Rufo (of the dissident networked right) ensnared Harvard University, already fully aligned by the networked tribalism of the left, in a carefully prepared trap. Let’s dissect what happened:

The Trap

To trap Harvard, Rufo released copious evidence that its President, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her doctoral dissertation.

• Antipathy to plagiarism is a core value of academia. It (should) transcend partisan politics.

• This claim placed Harvard and the media covering the incident on the horns of a dilemma.

  • If they took action and fired Claudine for previous plagiarism, it would look like coercive alignment by the network right, infuriating the networked tribes on the left.

  • If Harvard ignored or diminished the claim, the Ivy League would lose legitimacy and gain vulnerability to attacks from the networked right.

• In the end, after furious lobbying and coercing the press to halt their coverage, they opted to take the hit to legitimacy and dismiss the claim by calling it “duplicative language.”

A Tribal Civil War

Rufo was able to put Harvard into this position because a civil war on the networked left weakened the Ivy League and the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT in particular. Let's construct a timeline to understand the cause of this civil war and how it reached the national stage.

• On October 8, one day after the attack on Israel, a large coalition of student groups at Harvard signed a letter calling it an apartheid state and blaming its conduct for the violence the day before and what would follow. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”

• The reaction was swift and immediate. At first, the anger was focused on people blaming the victims of terrorism. It was soon followed by anger that the tribal left’s prohibitions against antisemitism weren’t being extended to criticisms of Israel and that the anti-colonialist tribal narrative had become dominant.

• This anger led to an aggressive counter-attack against the students involved by the pro-Israel network. This campaign began with efforts to dox and vilify the students involved (the dox truck that circled Harvard Square and parked in front of their homes), followed by efforts to ban them from internships and future employment was set in motion. It also included aggressive counter-protests (with vociferous shouting matches) between pro-Israel and anti-Israel protesters.

• It was soon evident that these aggressive tactics weren’t effective at coercing the University to extend protections against antisemitism to Israel (the state). Instead, protections were put in place to limit doxing — including assigning people to block people with smartphones from taking pictures of protesters. Paradoxically, this protection effort led to an opportunistic event.

• The turning point was a video that showed a Harvard student trying to video protesters (to dox them, shame them, and bar them from employment) being blocked and pushed by protesters trying to prevent him from doing so. With some careful editing and moral framing, the video became an empathy trigger, demonstrating that Jewish students weren’t safe at Harvard (or anywhere) and antisemitism was rampant. This manufactured hate crime was quickly amplified nationally and followed by similar footage to prove it was ongoing.

• As outrage built, the billionaire financier and Ivy League donor Bill Ackman stepped onto the stage. Bill’s experience manufacturing Congressional investigations and media furor to damage companies he had shorted (bet big that their stock price would decline) made him the perfect person to coerce the Ivy League into alignment.

• With the “rising antisemitism narrative” in place, Bill and his allies started to make moves at the Congressional level. The first of those was a Congressional resolution (311-14, with 92 voting ‘present’) that contained the following language: “the House of Representatives… clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” This laid the groundwork for claiming that any criticism of Israel, from its government’s statements to its policies, is a hate crime. It also spelled out “river to the sea” as a call for genocide.

• The second move was a Congressional hearing to pressure the Ivy League into alignment with this resolution. At the hearing of University presidents (Harvard, MIT, and Penn), aggressive questioning by Congress (Rep Stefaniks, aggressive questioning in particular) pushed the presidents to publicly affirm alignment with the Congressional resolution and a pledge to expel or deny entry to any students with anti-Israel alignment. Using a prepared approach, the presidents deflected the questioning, and the empathy triggers ignited a firestorm of criticism and actions that led to the removal of Penn's president from her post.

Different Alignment Goals

The moralistic outrage generated by the hearing didn’t end with the removal of Harvard’s president. Still, it did make her vulnerable to damage from Rufo’s plagiarism charge, the defense of which damaged the institution's legitimacy.

• It’s clear why the networked right and the pro-Israel network want to coerce a change in the Ivy League’s alignment (force them to adopt the same values/enemies). If they succeed, this alignment will percolate into the rest of the University system and, eventually, the educational system as a whole. This matters. For example, over the last few decades, due to the educational system’s alignment with the networked tribalism of the left, Israel has been increasingly depicted as an apartheid state. This systemic moral framing has provided the reflexive priors easily activated by online empathy triggers and fictive kinship we’re currently seeing.

• However, the alignment each network seeks is opposed. The networked right aims to remove the identitarian tribalism of the Ivy League and the university system in general. It seeks fewer restrictions on speech and less support for the networked tribalism of the left on campus.

• The goal of the pro-Israel network is precisely the opposite of the networked right. It doesn’t want to remove networked tribalism and speech restrictions from campus; it wants to reform them by extending the protections already in place for antisemitism to protect against criticism of Israel.

What it Means

We expect this development to add to the confusion and broken decision-making currently hollowing out the US.

• Neither network will make much progress in coercing the Ivy League into alignment. The networked tribes of the left are entrenched and will successfully resist the pressure to do so. However, this alignment effort will periodically generate outrage that will damage the already tattered legitimacy of the US university system.

• Despite this failure, networked efforts to punish any criticism of Israel by claiming it is antisemitism will be successful in other areas of the old establishment, in much the same way that negative depictions of China, or the Chinese people, have had success in the entertainment industry. We can also expect other nations to claim similar protections against criticism in the future.

• In sum, these wars over networked tribal alignment will accelerate our inability to make decisions at every level of society and governance. Facts will not be considered facts by many people unless they fit their tribal alignment, and any facts presented by people in opposing tribes will immediately be seen as attacks (like Rufo’s plagiarism charge). Attacks that will be immediately rejected or ignored. Worse, many networks will manufacture facts (for example, fake hate crimes) to advance towards the goal.
  
  In the end, these conflicts will achieve the demoralization of the US that the Soviet KGB info warrior Yuri Bezmenov hoped to accomplish during the Cold War;

It will ‘change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.’