After 11 long years at Columbia, I’d had quite enough of sugarcoating elite academia. In early 2023 I launched The Ivy Exile, a journal published on Substack recording the ugly truths of what it takes to project the reputational false pretense that makes up so much of supposed Ivy excellence, aimed at puncturing the prestige bubble. I would love to believe my whistleblowing is a helpful part of the story, whose first act we’re still players in, of how society can come to acknowledge and embrace the imperial disrobing of such leading institutions. But, gladly for my project and sadly for my ego, it was and is not to be. All on their own, by their own volition, the Ivies are exposing their deep-seated fraudulence.

In just a few hours of testimony before Congress, and with a handful of compelling sound bites, a few petulant university presidents, including those of Penn and Harvard, discredited themselves far more than I’d accomplished over many months of work, as they jarringly deferred to lawyerly pedantry when asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the policies of their universities. The answers may well have amounted to some strained version of technically correct, and the questions were no doubt framed uncharitably. But no amount of parsing and “steelmanning” can edit out the underlying truth the hearings revealed, which was that the very universities that had for so many years strained to manipulate language and policy to find means to punish students for unprogressive things ordinary people believe are now at pains to manipulate language to find ways not to punish students for things ordinary people think are downright evil — and that progressive dogma as expressed in the institutional and social forces at play on shaping Ivy League undergrads now incorporate a certain degree of mandatory antisemitism. It was unintended community service on their part, inadvertently highlighting the rot at the top I’d been striving to reveal.

[Be sure to follow The Ivy Exile on Substack, too. Jesse has been spending a lot of effort to warn about what was coming. — Ed]