In the 1980s, my father, a political science professor, had a colleague who used to ask her students to tell her which communist country they would most like to live in. To their credit, many of them answered “Yugoslavia” because it had the reputation for being the most open in the Eastern bloc. No, corrected the teacher, the answer should have been Albania, “because it had the purest form of communism.”

The fact that the country was also the most impoverished and oppressive mattered little to her because, in principle anyway, it was a regime that divided its resources evenly and ensured that everyone was treated equally. Which makes Albania just a little bit like American universities. There are few institutions whose leaders talk more about championing the rights of the downtrodden and yet practice it less.