Harvard University has just fired a resident dean, Gregory Davis, for his views. Davis was never accused of any wrongdoing in his job. But old social media posts written before his current job at Harvard were denounced by conservatives who objected to his hateful remarks about Donald Trump and the police. The right-wing website Yardreport exposed his posts and declared that his comments “disqualify him from serving in his role at Harvard. They reveal an ideology unbefitting of American society, let alone its most elite institution of higher education. The university must fire him immediately.”

Davis’s firing bears a strong resemblance to Harvard’s 2019 dismissal of a faculty dean, Ronald Sullivan (and his wife), because he joined the defense team for Harvey Weinstein. The Sullivan purge was a shameful episode condemned by the ACLU, FIRE and many other groups, and often cited as evidence of Harvard’s evil wokeness by the National Review (“Harvard Launches an Attack on the Culture of Liberty”) and many conservatives. Let’s hope there’s similar outrage about what just happened to Davis.

The Davis firing exposes a problem of repression at Harvard that transcends ideological borders and threatens everyone’s freedom. But while Harvard has silenced both conservatives and liberals in the past, today the target is aimed squarely at leftists accused of the new academic crime: activism.

Harvard’s newly permanent president, Alan Garber, was recently interviewed on the Identity/Crisis podcast and revealed disturbing views about activism and academic freedom.

Garber blamed campus censorship on the younger generations: “Students came to us that way, with a set of expectations that they would not hear language or thoughts that would be offensive to them,” he said, which Garber (correctly) called “inimical to the exercise of free speech.” Garber claimed that among faculty, “there has been a generational shift” in “free speech”: “If you were to speak to older faculty, around my generation, the idea that some views should not be expressed, or that certain speakers should get priority because of historical grievances of some kinds … that’s anathema … but that changed with young generations of faculty.”

Yet it’s not the young faculty and students but the old administrators like Garber who are doing the repression at Harvard. It’s almost laughable to hear Garber say that “I have long been a believer in pretty much unfettered free speech” in the wake of Davis’s firing and so many other examples of repression at Harvard.

In December, the Garber administration purged Mary T. Bassett, director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, and announced that—despite the literal name of the center—it would no longer be allowed to address human rights and instead will focus solely on the less controversial territory of children’s health. The center’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights had drawn attacks, and although Harvard rejected the explicit Trump administration demands for an external audit of the center, Harvard officials on their own went much further than the Trump regime and imposed this ban on controversial ideas at the center.

This is a warning to all programs and all faculty at Harvard: Engage in activism and advocacy at the risk of your careers.

In the podcast, Garber reminisced about his time teaching at Stanford: “We had a rule that the faculty … in their teaching, they had to be completely objective.” He added, “That’s what had shifted, and that’s where I think we went wrong.” But complete objectivity is more of a delusion than a dream. Garber declares, “I’m pleased to say that I think there’s real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.” Garber mentions that as part of Harvard’s fight against antisemitism, “we’re hiring new people”—and it doesn’t take much guessing to figure out which views those new hires are expected to have.

The irony is that Garber is Harvard’s most powerful political activist. Anti-activists like Garber are the worst kind of activists—the ones who delude themselves into thinking that they are the purveyors of objective truth, purely logical and immune from the evils of having a point of view—because their point of view is simply the facts. When an activist like Garber is unaware of his own biases and imagines himself to be objective and incapable of bias, that sense of superiority makes him feel entitled to silence the “activists.” And his position of power as president gives him the ability to punish his ideological enemies in the name of objectivity.

Garber makes a cartoonish dismissal of activism, claiming that education “is not about how to sling slogans.” There are reasonable critiques of what some left-wing activists do in the classroom—but claiming that they just “sling slogans” is such a dishonest dismissal that it shows Garber is ignorant of what academic activism looks like, and this helps explain why he’s unable to see his own activist presidency.

Garber is fond of proclaiming his devotion to institutional neutrality, but a university truly committed to neutrality cannot punish activism (and should not even condemn it). The neutral university must protect the freedom of all scholars and students, whether they engage in activism, oppose activism or try to avoid controversial issues. A neutral university judges scholars based on their scholarly achievement and never presumes that all activists are inherently unscholarly, as Garber believes.

Garber wants to paint a scarlet A on activists and purge them from the university: “Our mission is not to provide advocacy about an issue,” he says, “it’s to provide scholarship, it’s to provide an accurate view, as objective a view as possible.” But telling the truth in a biased world sometimes requires advocacy and activism. Accuracy often violates the “objective” ideal of telling both sides equally. Even if you personally refrain from advocacy on everything, academic freedom requires a college president to respect and defend faculty who disagree and engage in advocacy.

Garber is free to reject these principles and argue for his delusions of objectivity. But when he seeks to impose his biased viewpoint on the entire university and violate the academic freedom of those who disagree, then he’s no longer a mere advocate for flawed delusions of objectivity. Garber is an activist president abusing his power to silence those he opposes.

The Trump regime’s demands of Harvard were so extreme that Garber was forced to reject a settlement. But Garber’s latest words and actions send a clear message to the Trump administration: Trust me. Garber and the Trump regime share a common enemy in left-wing activists. All the government needs to do is back down a little, and Garber will do their bidding. Garber is setting the terms of a settlement where he will implement most of Trump’s demands. It appears Garber will gladly sacrifice the academic freedom of Harvard’s faculty, staff and students as long as Harvard’s autonomy and money are preserved.