These days, there are two broadly accurate stereotypes about who makes up the Ivy League: There’s the sort of tweedy ivory tower eccentrics unreasonably invested in Cervantes or quantum physics. And then there’s the wide-eyed spittle-flecked activist ideologues steeped in critical theory, driving themselves to fury as they rant at captive audiences, a distinct type spanning all ethnicities and genders.

Members of this second type tend to be obsessive, monomaniacal crusaders for sweeping social justice reform to be imposed by people like them, wounded visionaries whose pain and persecution will righteously redeem the better world to come. Thoughtful people retain the capacity to minimally concede the basic humanity and best intentions of at least the better sort on the other side, but that sense of grace and grayscale has grown increasingly scarce among tenured intelligentsia as of late, let alone the bombastic cranks whose whole gestalt is big promises and furious scapegoating. The Ivy League rewards a Manichean mindset today, not the practical wisdom of meliorism and compromise and nuance. The incentives all pull toward a totalizing view of the world as a battle between good and evil ideas, represented by good and evil vocabularies.