Great universities have been a target from the first, the middle, the last: Harvard Hates America, as one right-wing tome put it in 1978. The 1951 book that made William F. Buckley famous at the age of 26, God and Man at Yale, took on not merely the content of what postwar Sons of Eli were learning—anthropology that relativized Christian faith, Keynesian economics—but the very idea that professors should teach based upon their curiosity and conscience: that scholarship should be creative. Instead, Buckley argued that Yale’s curricula should be set by the rich, and presumably America-loving and religiously orthodox, businessmen who sat on its board as trustees. That would denude Yale of its accursed liberal proclivities for good. It would become, as universities were centuries before, a more nearly feudal institution.
Buckley claimed to be writing, as conservatives often claim, a defense of liberal values, which actual liberals (those hypocrites!) supposedly evade. He argued that what Yale calls “academic freedom” (he mostly puts it in quotation marks) is actually indoctrination in an “orthodoxy” (one of the more frequently used words in the book to signify what he claims to be fighting against).
The New York Times, likewise, let Rufo publish an essay calling for “abolishing D.E.I. programs on liberal grounds.” Rufo cares about the actual values that sustain a liberal vision of freedom and justice in same way that Israeli war-cabinet minister who calls for “voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons” actually cares about humanitarianism.
Conservatives are remorseless and creative in deploying that Jedi mind trick. As they are remorseless and creative in the pursuit of the next liberal bastion to degrade. In my first book, I wrote about what happened when they did it to an organization called the National Student Association. In the mid-20th century, NSA’s main activity was holding annual conventions to which student leaders from around the country would tromp to pass symbolic resolutions. These then would be reported in the media as all-but-official X-rays of the Mind of American Youth. By 1960, they were passing resolutions in support of things like the anti-segregation lunch counter sit-ins in the South. So in 1961, via stealth, disguise, and parliamentary cunning, agents of the conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom sabotaged the voting on that year’s resolutions, to make it look like college students were not becoming increasingly liberal.
(Ironically, in 1967 the radical magazine Ramparts revealed that the NSA was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. Which actually only emphasizes the point: This was a time when displaying to the rest of the world that the U.S. was a tolerant, dynamic, creative, and non-philistine—liberal—society was a central CIA Cold War project. Another story for another time, but in its early years, that was one of the reasons many conservatives despised the CIA.)