This is a wonderful way to establish one's credentials:
at most 3% of Harvard faculty members identify as conservative. I’m one of that 3%. I’ve taught at Harvard for 40 years.
He apparently teaches history (poor guy!). And then he identifies my prior:
Conservatives and libertarians who detest illiberal progressivism often imagine Harvard as the great Battleship Woke, crewed by faculty, students and administrators united in their desire to blast Western civilization and traditional America out of existence
Most of them, I actually don't believe have that desire consciously in mind, but that it is what fuels their behavior and, ultimately, what their actions and words end up at. The silver lining is that it's all pretend, it's all for show:
My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues. They sidle up and say, sotto voce, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this,” then proceed to unload their disgust with the latest activist outrages. They might have identified as leftists in their college years, but a frequent refrain I hear from them now is “this is not what the left used to stand for.”
Most people, even at elite wokester institutions, just want to get on with their work:
They want to pass on what they have learned to the next generation. They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time.
Many of my colleagues can see clearly enough that this crisis has been triggered by progressive activists, who are predominantly graduate students or members of the university’s vast diversity bureaucracy. Many faculty wish that the fanatics would just shut up and take the target off Harvard’s back.
THIS bit I thoroughly welcome
...and it was incomprehensible to me how people (mostly) on the left didn't learn this profound, obvious, Madisonian lesson during Trump 1.0:
Even if the courts do succeed in restoring Harvard’s federal funding, which is by no means certain, the university should think carefully about the hazards of accepting federal funding in an age of populism. My progressive colleagues were fine with federal influence on Harvard so long as it furthered what they saw as just causes, such as diversity and equity. Now that their research budgets are being held hostage to the demands of an unfriendly White House, left-leaning faculty are starting to appreciate anew the value of freedom from government mandates.
Also, we ought to abolish higher ed.
non-paywalled via archive: https://archive.md/T4LuJ