“Should I let go of my Zionist friends?” asks an anonymous Harvard student. A Harvard Crimson editor responds: yes, the student is entitled to end those friendships.
What sounds like a thoughtful meditation on friendship and conviction instead reads like a dispatch from a campus that no longer knows what truth is—or what friendship requires. The anonymous student, Jewish and anti-Zionist, worries that his or her friends’ politics taint his or her certainty of their decency.
It’s quintessentially Harvard: polished and cerebral, yet utterly vacuous. There is no effort to test the moral assumptions beneath the question. Is Zionism truly a moral stain? Can friendship survive deep disagreement? What do we owe to truth when feelings conflict with facts? None of this is considered.
The result is bloodless relativism, where ethics are reduced to personal comfort and truth becomes optional. In miniature, it captures the intellectual and moral decay of elite higher education—where moral reasoning has become branding, and virtue is measured by separation, not encounter.
The Death of Viewpoint Diversity
The Crimson column is not just a bizarre ethical thought experiment; it is emblematic of a campus culture that has abandoned its primary vocation. A university’s primary purpose is to pursue the truth. That requires conflict, argument, and exposure to unsettling ideas. Harvard, as with much of higher education, has forsaken that purpose.
The numbers confirm this decline.
FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey found that 94 percent of professors nationwide report suffering negative consequences for expressing their views, ranging from lost professional relationships (47 percent) and workplace shunning (40 percent) to seeking psychological counseling (27 percent) or losing their jobs (20 percent). At least one in five faculty members says they are likely to self-censor professionally. At Harvard specifically, 94 percent of students report self-censoring in conversations with peers.
This is not the culture of a free university. It is a culture of fear. When disagreement is treated as danger, moral inquiry collapses. Students stop testing ideas and start curating identities. “Zionist” becomes not a belief to debate but a contagion to avoid; “anti-Zionist” becomes a badge of moral sophistication. The moral vocabulary shifts from true and false to pure and impure.
Selective Moral Outrage
Can you imagine the Harvard Crimson running a column titled “Ethicist, Should I Let Go of My Radical Muslim Friend?” Or “Should I Let Go of My Queer Socialist Friend?”
Ironically, such hypotheticals would have made for a stronger ethical dilemma. There would be, at least, a clearer moral basis for questioning those friendships, since ideologies like radical Islam and revolutionary socialism have been linked to profound global harm and genuine violence. Yet even then, most readers would rightly recoil from the idea of judging a friend solely by association with a broad label or ideology.
That the Crimson instead reserved this moral scrutiny for Jewish “Zionist friends” reveals the bias at work. The supposed ethicist finds moral complexity only where it flatters prevailing sentiment. Some identities are treated as sacred; others—especially Jewish and Zionist ones—are fair game. The message to students is unmistakable: moral empathy is selective, and truth is negotiable.
Of course, had the target been any other group, the outrage would be immediate: statements from deans, vigils in the Yard, open letters about “safety.” We’ve seen it before. When a professor at Hamline University displayed a 14th-century Persian painting of the Prophet Muhammad in an art history class—with advance warnings—she was fired after student activists claimed the image caused harm. (The professor’s lawsuit against Hamline over the firing was settled in July 2024.) Administrators capitulated instantly, turning the episode into a national scandal and a symbol of the academy’s fear of offending any identity deemed untouchable.
Yet questioning the basic decency of Jewish “Zionist friends” provokes no such institutional outrage. At Harvard, this passes for moral seriousness. This double standard is bigotry cloaked in enlightenment.
Bright students learn to mistake facility with moral language for moral seriousness itself—to confuse the posture of radicalism with its practice. They style themselves courageous truth-tellers while speaking only what their peers already believe, from positions of complete security. The Crimson column, with its elaborate show of ethical wrestling, avoids every hard question while congratulating both parties for their sensitivity. It is philosophy as social signaling—exquisitely calibrated to offend no one who matters.
Moral Education Without Moral Seriousness
The Crimson exchange is a case study in what happens when ethics loses its spine. The student’s question is not illegitimate; maintaining friendships across deep disagreement is hard. What’s revealing is that neither student nor ethicist grounds the conversation in truth or duty. Instead, they treat friendship as a matter of comfort.
That assumption is telling. For many young people today, friendship exists chiefly for ease and affirmation. When disagreements arise—or when a friend faces real difficulty—the instinct is to retreat rather than to endure. Elite universities encourage this disposition: they teach students to curate relationships around convenience, to conflate discomfort with harm, and to mistake withdrawal for integrity. But friendship, like marriage or citizenship, is not meant to be frictionless. It exists to sustain people through difficulty, to test and refine character, to build trust and loyalty. When students lose sight of that, they risk forming relationships as brittle as their moral reasoning—connections that collapse at the first sign of strain.
This brittleness is no accident; it reflects what might be called the therapeutic turn in higher education. Universities now teach that feelings are facts and discomfort is harm. Ethics becomes validation. The ethicist’s answer affirms autonomy but avoids responsibility: you may end the friendship, but need not. The harder question—what you owe to truth and to others—is never asked.
In the liberal tradition, freedom without truth is license. Aristotle, Maimonides, and Mill alike understood that moral growth demands friction between conviction and doubt. But friction is precisely what Harvard has banished.
Why Students Are So Fragile
It’s easy to mock a student who says he or she cannot maintain friendships with certain peers. But we should ask how such fragility took root.
For years, universities have rewarded moral posturing over genuine moral reasoning. Students have learned to fear being wrong more than they value being right. This fragility is not a personal flaw—it is a survival skill, honed in institutions where a single misstep can jeopardize a reputation.
In my own classroom at Sarah Lawrence College, the toll is clear. Bright, curious students preface every comment with disclaimers like, “I might be off base,” or “I don’t want to offend,” as if curiosity itself were a transgression. They are not cynical—they are frightened. They have absorbed the lesson that safety, not truth, is the highest academic value.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once wrote, “The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognise God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals, are different from mine?” The same test applies to universities. When students are taught that proximity to dissent is contamination, the university ceases to be a place of learning and becomes a monastery of moral vanity.
From Harvard Yard to Everywhere
Harvard is not alone in this trend; elite universities across the country prioritize comfort and conformity over rigorous debate and moral inquiry.
At Stanford Law School in March 2023, students shouted down federal Judge Kyle Duncan during an invited talk, while Dean Tirien Steinbach questioned whether the event was “worth the squeeze” rather than enforcing free-speech policies. At Columbia, a large number of faculty members signed a letter calling the October 7 massacre “a military action” and “military response,” while professor Joseph Massad described it as a “resistance offensive” whose scenes he found “astounding.”
These are not outliers; they are the norms on college campuses where anti-Semitism has taken root, and where, within the leftist orthodoxy of the oppressed-versus-oppressor narrative, Jewish students and the State of Israel are treated as villains.
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The Civic Consequences
When universities no longer model dialogue across difference, the civic order pays the price.
The habits of listening, debating, and enduring disagreement are not merely academic exercises—they are the foundations of democratic life. Friendship across disagreement is not a luxury; it is the apprenticeship of democracy. The same habits that sustain lasting relationships—humility, curiosity, restraint—also sustain self-government. Students who cannot engage with those who differ from them will struggle to build workplaces or democracies capable of surviving difference.
Yet friendship—and democracy—also require boundaries. There are moments when differences cut so deep that “agreeing to disagree” is impossible. When opposing sides operate from entirely distinct moral frameworks, coexistence can devolve into paralysis or moral evasion. The North could not have told the South, “We disagree about slavery, but we can still be friends.” Some ideas are irreconcilable with liberty and human dignity, and one vision must ultimately prevail.
The test for universities is whether they still foster an environment in which ideas can meet and compete fairly, so the strongest arguments rise to the top. Increasingly, the answer is no. The problem is not mere disagreement—it is censorship, particularly of those who dissent from prevailing leftist orthodoxies. Conservatives, in particular, often lack the institutional space to present and defend their ideas. A campus culture that claims to value inclusion has, in practice, excluded the very contest of ideas that keeps democracy alive.
This is why Harvard’s failure matters. Ethics, properly taught, is not about affirming emotion but disciplining it. It requires testing our intuitions against reason and evidence. When an institution that trains future leaders cannot distinguish between disagreement and harm, it no longer produces citizens—it produces moral narcissists.
Recovering Courage and Truth
Reversing this decline will be difficult.
It requires faculty willing to trade comfort for conviction, administrators who defend free speech not just in policy but in practice, and students who value dialogue over faction—listening before judging, asking before condemning.
Harvard calls itself the conscience of the republic. Yet its conscience is in crisis: moral reasoning has turned into moral branding, and virtue now lies in separation, not encounter.
Universities were once custodians of civilization—places where intellect met humility, and freedom and truth were inseparable. If Harvard has forgotten this, others must remember: the smaller colleges, classical schools, and local communities that still believe argument is not division but the lifeblood of a free people. Because a nation that forgets how to argue will soon forget how to live together.
The tragedy of the Crimson’s column is not that one student wonders about her friends. It’s that an entire institution has forgotten how to wonder rightly. Until Harvard rediscovers the meaning of Veritas (truth pursued through reasoned debate and friendship across difference) it will continue to mistake therapy for thought and virtue for vanity.
And the rest of us will pay the price for its failure.
Image: “The Harvard Crimson” by victorgrigas on Wikimedia Commons
