Olivia Woo, Contributing Photographer

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who is departing to teach at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy this fall, spoke at the Unitarian Society of New Haven on Wednesday.

In the first installation of the congregation’s author series, Stanley spoke on the global movement away from democracy and the role that education plays within it. Stanley began by evaluating the mission that U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has laid out for her department, stating that the Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion educational policies is evidence of a campaign to America’s youth.

“To battle the ‘toxic’ ideology that the United States was based on slavery,” as McMahon envisions, is to “erase factuality,” said Stanley.

More broadly, the lauding of American democracy and American exceptionalism through patriotic education is to “install the ideology that the United States could never fall to fascism at the very same time at which it is falling.”

According to Stanley, the federal government is targeting programs that address gender and critical race theory in order to obscure the roles that patriarchy and racism play in inhibiting democracy. By claiming that these programs divide society into the oppressor and the oppressed, such targeted policies ignore that the systems they study were instituted with the intention of brewing division.

Stanley recalled W.E.B. DuBois’ ideas on how racism was “used by the northern industrialists to split poor whites and poor blacks apart.” He added, “patriarchy, too, is a method to split us apart.”

To understand the current global movement away from democracy and the construction of a mutiracial far-right, Stanley said, the concept of a scapegoat must be understood. In both America and Western Europe, scapegoatism has led to the proliferation of bigotry and the growth of authoritarian structures as political coalitions build in opposition to minority groups.

Specifically in America, historical antisemitic stereotyping has underlined the attack on elite institutions such as Columbia University. The media is complicit in this mischaracterization, Stanley argued, pushing forth messaging that ultimately harms the groups it claims to defend.

“Henry Ford wrote a book called The International Jew about how Jews supposedly control the institutions. [Today,] the administration is saying, we’re going to destroy the universities and tell you it’s because of the Jews,” Stanley, who is Jewish, said. “But if you look at the anti-war protests on our campus and on other campuses, you’ll see that one of the largest identity groups were Jewish students and faculty. It took months for the media to recognize that.”

Public media, according to Stanley, is complicit not only in the mischaracterization of protests on campus, but also in the criticism of leftist influence within elite universities in general.

Recent assessments of Ivy League universities have touted a lack of intellectual diversity due to an overabundance of liberal voices on campuses. This rhetoric, according to Stanley, is markedly influential.

“The media has been the engine behind the attack on the universities. They’ve been the one pushing the narrative that Marxists run Yale University,” Stanley said. “[There is] no mention ever of the Buckley [Institute], talking about Yale Law School, the power of the Federalist Society … We’ve been in a panic about leftists by a media that doesn’t seem to be aware of the fact that they are targets, too.”

Stanley laid out his thought process for leaving Yale, a choice that has garnered extensive media attention.

Though he held an offer to teach at the University of Toronto, Stanley had not planned on making the move to Canada until Columbia agreed to changes Trump demanded to protest and security policies on March 21, along with the establishment of oversight over the University’s Middle Eastern Studies Department.

He said the decision came to him when he “saw Columbia capitulate in this humiliating way.”

Stanley continued by setting up a comparison between the Trump administration’s current policy decisions and the Nazi’s process of “gleichschaltung,” by which federal workers were vilified as Marxists and communists and replaced by party loyalists.

“What our democratic institutions are doing is not recognizing this,” Stanley said. He added that in the past he has been ridiculed and labeled an alarmist, recalling being told that the government has “legitimate objections, and all of this is normal … there’s no war against universities like this.’”

Stanley has previously criticized the threats to freedom of speech encountered by international faculty members at universities nationwide, and reiterated his disapproval on Wednesday. 

“Even the ones in political science departments … can never speak about politics again,” Stanley warned.

In the Q&A segment of the event, Stanley recounted the former confusion of colleagues to whom he had expressed a desire to leave Yale for the University of Toronto. Recent events, he said, have led to a shift in their view of his departure.

Stanley said he recognizes that faculty at universities like Yale are generally better paid and better resourced than those at other institutions and in other countries, and that leaving, if even a possibility, is a “strong statement.” Still, the magnitude of the Trump administration’s attack on universities is not something to overlook.

“You have to ask whether there will be a Yale University or a Columbia University,” Stanley said. “There might be some buildings and a name, but the university is a democratic institution, and if you yield that, it’s no longer a university, even though it might have that name.”

Those present at Wednesday’s event, which included both congregants of the Unitarian Society and local visitors, expressed concern about the administration’s impact on the institutions that make up civil society.

Bob Congdon ’72 said that it felt “heartbreaking” to see many “things that were anchors” in his life and values being shredded.

Congdon’s wife, Mary Beth Congdon, was employed at the University under Rick Levin and Peter Salovey. She wished “strength and courage” to the current president, Maurie McInnis.

During the talk, Stanley urged attendees to remain informed of the Trump administration’s actions and reject complacency. 

“When you’re in a war, appeasement is surrender. If you do not know you’re in a war, you’re going to lose.”

Stanley’s most recent book was published in September 2024.