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When taking office, former University President Claudine Gay declared she was rejecting the old idea of academia as the Ivory Tower. Henceforth, Harvard would be not above society, but rather “as part of it.”

Some would argue such a Harvard would be more democratic. The old Harvard arrogance I rather liked, beginning from my first arrival as a freshman in 1949, would be abolished. We would stop thinking so well of ourselves, perhaps even stop looking down on Brown. After all, Harvard and Brown aren’t special — they are merely parts of society.

So, was Gay right to distance Harvard from the Ivory Tower?

“The Ivory Tower” is often invoked to dismiss its value and rarely examined for its virtue. Ivory is a natural substance: rare, precious, and pure. It is also fragile: an ivory tower probably wouldn’t stand without a mix of concrete with ivory. It signifies a university that is in society but towers above because it seeks truth beyond what society takes for granted.

As I have argued, Gay’s leveling of a distinction that divides society is typical of Democrats. The university would no longer tower above society. But Harvard (and other universities), in her understanding, would play a special role within American society. It would, I think, be leading the Democrats to change what most people regard as normal.

It used to be thought that society depends on and enforces normal thought and behavior. Instead of towering above society and studying it impartially, this new regime would have Harvard work within society, transforming it to make it more democratic.

The transformation would be to replace what is normal with an awakening from normal to woke. So, what is woke — at Harvard and everywhere else?

Woke appears to be an attack on the distinctions that normal people make and live by. Examples include the distinctions between man and woman, educated and ignorant, and honest and criminal — more generally, differences of quality or quantity. Democrat egalitarian souls might resist, as I argued in my first piece, but such inequalities seemed previously to be accepted by most Democrats. President Gay’s planned transformation of the University seems to require that these “binaries,” as they are often called, are not to be considered real.

Woke shows a degree of arrogance rather than equal fellowship. It has found a home in universities and wants to have us question what is “normal,” oftentimes so radically so as to deny the possibility of normality altogether. A “norm” is a mere arbitrary decision, a temporary bump that does not deserve elevation to anything so permanent and valuable as “normality.” Somehow, however, people cannot live without some sense of what is normal, so proponents of woke make the abnormal normal. There is no more obvious example than the emergence of transgender identity, now presented as normal, not despite, but because so few claim it. They are the definition of gender because they stand for it’s not being definable.

When President Donald Trump first ran for the presidency, he shattered the prevailing norms of civility. Former President Joe Biden ran against him in order to return, people said, to “normality.” But what did President Biden do but introduce the university norm of woke in violation of normality — and what did President Trump do but run against Kamala Harris and win as the candidate of normality!

Trump stands for the “common sense” of two sexes and no racial preferences. His electorate was the non-college educated as opposed to college graduates — which means those who speak for common sense versus those who suspect common sense.

What does one learn at universities? What do many courses in the catalogue teach? It seems like many teach that there are no qualities or distinctions that matter; that every alleged difference is a “stereotype.” There are no types, only stereotypes. If you want to get a college education without wasting time in classes and paying tuition, all you need to know is that one word — “stereotype.” When I retired, all courses appeared to teach that everything normal people believe is a stereotype. I saw this most clearly in social science courses especially, but also in humanities courses.

Modern natural science has little respect for normality and still less for common sense, its inveterate enemy. Altogether, the university is by its very nature open to the difference between its thinking and the society that it towers above. But the traditional university is aware of its dependence on the society it lives in and the normality society lives by.

What is new to our time is the hostility of woke to normality and the ambition to transform it. No longer will students graduate and hit “reality” in the form of hostile normality. No more apologies for going to Harvard!

It should be no surprise that other parts of society, namely Republicans, should come to the defense of normal distinctions, such as that between men and women. It is certainly strange that President Trump should be the one to lead the charge.

If Harvard should choose to fight back, it cannot claim the independence that goes with the Ivory Tower. It would have to admit that its politicized woke diversity, carefully prepared over the course of decades, has been democratically rejected by the society of which it is but a part. To help us out, maybe AI can supply us with a tower made of less costly, non-animal plastic that we can cherish and live by.

Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 is the Kenan Research Professor of Government at Harvard.