WITH CLAUDINE GAY’S resignation, the McCarthyism that has been ravaging public higher education in red states has notched a victory against Harvard. University leaders there and elsewhere must be clear-eyed: The right-wing activists who saw this through will not be satisfied to draw blood from their great nemesis, and they will not rest content with a sacking based on real misconduct.

Of course, there is plenty to do to get Harvard’s own house in order, but merely tidying up corporate governance issues will not work. Higher education must find steady ground, dig in its heels, and push back against its enemies. The task is enormous. The first step, however, is to admit that there are indeed enemies of higher education, and that the whole enterprise needs to be defended.

The invocation of McCarthyism is not rhetorical. We can look first to Chris Rufo, whose recent “how we did it” op-ed in the Wall Street Journal explained that the campaign against Gay was targeted, coordinated, and ultimately aimed at diversity initiatives in higher education as a whole. Beyond his role in this fracas, Rufo’s relentless bad faith and hostility toward higher education are accepted in mainstream conservative circles. Rufo is a fellow of the Manhattan Institute, and he has been appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to the New College of Florida board of trustees to oversee its ideological purge of faculty.

In short, Rufo, DeSantis, Rep. Elise Stefanik, and others are cooperating to paint disfavored institutions like universities (or Hollywood) as cesspools of radical leftism, argue that leftism is a totalitarian ideology that threatens American values, and then use a combination of congressional inquiry, feverish propaganda, and employer crackdowns to censor public expressions of left-wing politics. What word could there be for this but McCarthyism?

While Rufo’s bad faith is evident, it is important not to lose sight of his broader project. He did find real problems in Gay’s academic work, university presidents really did flub their recent congressional testimony, and there are real questions about the implementation of campus DEI programs. Nonetheless, these facts take on a distorted and outsized importance if we accept the hostile framing of them.

In that frame, universities are full of mediocre diversity hires and unscholarly radicals hell-bent on indoctrinating students with the totalitarian “woke mind virus.” A scholarly misstep therefore discredits all Black women scholars; a failure to express campus policies in a media-friendly way means that universities are ignoring antisemitism. It may be distasteful to defend your friends against scandal only because their enemies dug it up, but it is reasonable to insist that offenses be judged against an appropriate standard and not a conspiracy theory.

Recognizing McCarthyism means that universities must ground their defense of free expression in their institutional values, not technical distinctions. It is right to suggest that universities avoid official stances on issues of the day, as free speech advocates have called for.

Nonetheless, universities uphold freedom of research, teaching, and political expression in order to support a democratic public sphere. That civic mission encompasses the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion that their right-wing critics are busy demonizing, and which cannot be thrown under the bus for expediency. When those related values are under threat, universities will inevitably have to take sides, or appear to do so.

In particular, university leaders (typically centrist or center-left, outside of red states) must defend left-wing students and professors against distortions. Rather than concede that students chanting “from the river to the sea” might have been calling for genocide, the university presidents should have stated clearly that they were not doing so, and that such exaggerations only get in the way of combating actual harassment. There was no contradiction between protecting Jewish students from antisemitism and defending the political expression of anti-Zionist activists; but nor was there any way to respect everyone’s interpretation of the facts.

Pushing frankly against propaganda is necessary to fight McCarthyism, because of the ideological reversals by which such censorship operates. As Ellen Schrecker writes in her classic history, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, campus McCarthyites insisted they were acting in defense of academic freedom. They argued that communism was an inherently dogmatic and conformist ideology, and that pushing it off campus was a defense of free inquiry instead of its opposite. Schrecker has extended this analysis to the Bush era in The Lost Soul of Higher Education, and it continues to apply today.

The tactic is schoolyard: Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you. The right insists that any substantial diversity initiatives are actually discriminatory against white people and conservatives, and that campus DEI is the real McCarthyism, instead of a commitment to a core value of a multiracial democracy. While billionaire donors use their money to demand students be disciplined or blacklisted, the right insists that the real threat is students using their political voice to mobilize against invited speakers. Openly racist professors become conservative celebrities when they are removed from teaching duties (but keep their jobs).

Examples of such controversies abound, and there isn’t space here to adjudicate them individually. What’s important is that in each case, the university concerned cannot rest content with a superficial reading. There is no mechanical formula to decide what is acceptable free speech and what is totalitarian, because the enemies of free expression will always find a pretext to reverse the terms. The only response is to make principled decisions oriented toward supporting a community of free inquiry.

It is unfortunate, but unavoidable, that swathes of the right wing are hostile to the mission of higher education, and that they pretend the same is true of the left. Universities should not be hostile to all conservatives in return, but they do need to be honest about who is really pushing illiberal propaganda, and who is really threatening political freedom.

Mounting an effective defense of their mission means being drawn further into politics, not back. University leaders can keep their heads if they acknowledge the urgency of the problem, root themselves in their institutional values, and act with clarity and courage.

John Gee is a podcast producer for the MassINC Polling Group and CommonWealth Beacon. He has a PhD in history from Harvard University, where he studied US intellectual history.