Four stories arrive in the same news cycle, and they look at first like disconnected items from the wilder margins of American life. A Justice Department announcement lands with the heavy irony of a mantra: the federal government is opening a probe into a prestigious college for discriminating in favor of minority students. At Berkeley, one of the most celebrated public universities in the world, a mathematics professor sounds a desperate alarm: the celebrated “test-blind” admissions policy, designed to be more fair, has quietly produced a generation of students who cannot handle the algebra they were supposedly admitted to learn. In California, a Bernie Sanders–backed candidate for Congress openly tells voters that diversity, equity, and inclusion is a “social justice–driven duty,” and she embraces the title of political activist with the same fanfare a professor might reserve for a Nobel Prize. And far from the quiet lecture halls, the Pentagon delivers a chilling letter to Harvard, New York University, and twenty-eight other major universities, demanding a full audit of their financial and academic entanglements with foreign powers. The stories seem to live in different states, physical Americans, even different decades. But read them the way a family reads them, and they are one single biography: the university has left behind its old religion of curiosity, merit, and truth, and in its place stands a new idol, an institution that decides who belongs by the color of their skin, what they believe, and whose flag pal pays the bill.
For the Department of Justice to use the words “discrimination favoring minority students” against a famous college is a phrase that would have been unthinkable thirty years ago, but the unthinkable has become the federal record. The investigation reaches into the shop of the most powerful liberal gatekeepers in the country, places that have long operated as if the word equality were only a solid gavel to strike against someone whom they do not like. In the afternoon, a parent sleeping in their child’s room looks at the email from the college admissions office. There is the child, a straight-A student in an ordinary city neighborhood, with a score that once was the key to the kingdom, now discarded because the school says tests are a product of privilege. A different child, perhaps with the same grades, but a different anthology of skin, is welcomed with a special programs and a summer scholarship. Both parents know the code. The child whose family has lived in this America only for a generation in the proud, vast, diligent temple of the evaluation, now finds that every ladder of outcomes is closed with the key of racial identity. The university has not only made a mistake; it has reversed the most important command of the American civil rights movement, and called the reversal a virtue. For the mother watching the evening news, the vigilance is no longer a Ted Talk; it is a girl crying in a high school parking lot. The DOJ probe matters not because of a legal brief, but because it reaches into the only subconscious place still holding onto the old idea that a society rewards its young people by what they do, not by the census categories attached to their skin. It is a revival, but a lonely and bruised one, of a principle that hasn’t yet found a name.
The Berkeley mathematics professor’s public call is not the brain of a conservative troll; it is a pain. This is the same university where the revolution of “test-blind” and “holistic review” was celebrated in the staff meetings, and now the mathematics department has to experience the morning after. The professor says many students are badly behind; the word “badly” has a physical weight. In the community of eyeballs behind a fully armed statistic, there is a wide, eerily clean lecture hall of 400 seats. The professor calls a name from the list, the student raises a hand, and then the professor puts a simple differential equation on the board. The student looks at the board the way a traveler looks at a map in an unknown country. Not six months ago, the student was praised as the future of a diverse California; now the future has arrived. You cannot dismantle the test without dismantling the instrument; but you also can’t cancel the instrumental gate and expect the measured undergraduate to be free of the ruin. The professor is not a racist; he is a man who does not teach the ideal with the exact; his official purpose says that if the campus continues this happy sacrifice, the mathematical illiteracy will double. The ideology is called “equity,” but it is an unfair jest in action: the elite class, which has learning in the family and in the imagination, always reads the books, and the new student, only a symbol, is left in the classroom with the impossible essays. If you really love the student, you give them the floor and the sacred tools, not the sound of your cherries. On a full beautiful Monday Berkeley, the professor walks out of the math building, looks at the empty whiteboard, and knows his department is not in the business of selection anymore. It is in the business of a beautiful social charade.
Then there is the California candidate. She is the open member of the cohort that says DEI is not a mistake but a season, and that every job is a social justice–driven duty. A generation ago, the term “duty” in the university all meant the investigation of literature, the creation of a child who could rule herself. Now, in the campaign by her mouth, duty means that every administrator, every teacher, every researcher must submerge their contribution to the collective tribal score. This is a humanized story because the candidate is not an angry outsider; she is a well-meaning, confident woman, probably with a good memory of her own college days, and she, like so many talented people, has come to confuse speech with justice. Her announcement is more than a campaign promise; it is a constitution for the university that refuses to ask whether the student knows the material. In the middle of the speech, she says the phrase “social justice” with the intimacy of a psalm. Nobody announces the grown-up.
The final headline is the Pentagon’s audit deadline, the underlying stone of the institution. This part is odd, because it is not about freedom or equality, but about money, and you might doubt that the coldest accounts can be humanized. But people are still men. Today’s loyal student, who is a new PhD in engineering at a lab at a famous university, receives a grant financed by an overseas corporate scheme. The Pentagon has a question, but not about the trade; it is about whether the college is still an American authority or an international room, in which the most valuable secrets can be sold to the state’s richest customer. Harvard, NYU, Princeton would never think they are compromised; but the audit asks for them, and the paper is a ledger. In the human sense, we meet the top ten platform, a researcher in robotics from South Africa, who has applied for a U.S. military contract; one morning, the university says the deal cannot be processed until a ledger is signed, and the lab tech notices the geometry: the hardware will be licensed to a Chinese conglomerate. Ethics is now a checkbox of the explicit investor. The DEI page and the Pentagon page are exactly the same: when a university sees the profound world first, as an instrument to produce energy for an external fantasy, the mind is gone. The audit is a reminder that if the college does not have the courage to audit itself—to distinguish true ideas from false claims—the truth will come from a worse place, from the state security app on a dark Tuesday.
What does all this mean for 2000 words and a small family? It means that the last reason to be trained in a university—to learn to think honestly—has been slowly replaced by a more urgent mission of building a right-world by left. The shared lesson is a warning against the entire plan. It is seen in the professor who has a good wind but must watch the grand statements of “test-blind” and see that behind “false is money” there is no extra version of the high school’s problems. It is seen in the justification of the DOJ to call for the color census; it is in the course of a nice candidate who says “all of that was a social justice” but never says “all of the small numbers in a child are a social grief”; it is in the Pentagon’s complete report that shows the restless curious academy is now a modern, expensive, planetary pawn. In this adverse time the human being is still the mother, who tells the student to read the bad book and do the math anyway, and the father, who tells the anxious college “be ready to fail, but fail with a sturdy reason.” In the end, the college was a place where a poor boy from anywhere took a test, stood in front of the board, and showed the world his equal. That human older place has not disappeared. It has gone underground. It lives in the small afternoons when the professor is teaching around a few students, when the young women of a different ancestry are writing the solution of a problem without notice of clans, when the university, at the bottom of its arms, knows that the money and the law and the flights are all temporary, and the only charts are still the same as the original: the quiet courage of a student who was allowed to solve a decimal and to decide, in her own language, whether that math is for the good or for the bad. That is the perfect humanized count; the rest is a holding breath.
