The New McCarthyism is Here. Will Higher Ed Say No?

Dr. Uma M. JayakumarIn 1954, Harvard physics professor Dr. Wendell Furry was summoned before the U.S. Senate to answer whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. He refused to name names. He did not invoke the Fifth Amendment. He invoked academic freedom. For that, Harvard sanctioned him. Across the country, professors were fired, blacklisted, or cowed into silence—not necessarily because of their affiliations, but because of the fear that silence itself could be construed as disloyalty. Universities, under federal pressure, were being remade in the image of Cold War ideology.

Seventy years later, history repeats—but with new language.

When the federal government issued a letter to Harvard University on April 11, it was designed to create fear. The letter demanded a comprehensive restructuring of Harvard’s governance, hiring, admissions, and student life. It instructed the University to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs “under whatever name,” and to cease any admissions or hiring practices that consider race, gender, or even proxies for race. It demanded academic departments be ideologically reshaped, student organizations dismantled, and faculty policed for anything considered “activism.” It mandated the surveillance of all admissions and hiring data and calls for annual ideological audits of every academic unit to ensure “viewpoint diversity"—not as a value, but as a numerical target.

This is not race neutrality. It is ideological capture—an attempt to remake the university in the image of political grievance. The federal memo reads like a wish list from those who have long wanted higher education to retreat from efforts to repair the racialized inequality that plagues this country. And it is made possible only by refusing to name the reality this letter ignores: the endurance of racism, the legacies of exclusion, and the structures and practices within higher education that continue to reproduce advantage. 

As Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and I argued in these pages after the Court’s SFFA ruling, so-called “race-neutral” policies often reinforce the very inequities they claim to reject. What’s new is that the federal government is now using that logic to impose structural amnesia—replacing racial literacy with silence, and calling it merit.

The fantasy here is not just that racism has disappeared. It’s that institutions committed to justice are the real danger. That student protests against war, colonialism, or genocide are threats to campus life, while administrative compliance with authoritarian demands is somehow neutral.

The strategy at play—one long in the making—is what legal scholar Cheryl Harris once called the “whiteness as property” doctrine: a legal framework that cloaks white access and advantage in the language of fairness. This week’s memo extends that doctrine by claiming that even acknowledging racial disparity constitutes bias. That naming the conditions that shape unequal opportunity is itself discriminatory.