In ancient cultures, the symbol of the ouroboros, which depicts a snake eating its own tail, can represent life, death, and rebirth. But the image comes to mind in a different context when learning about Harvard’s recent castigation of its own educational efforts. 

Late last month, the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias released a report that uncovered “politicized instruction that mainstreamed and normalized what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.”

An example cited in the document consists of an illustration labeled the “Pyramid of White Supremacy,” which is possibly the most deranged and all-encompassing attempt in academia to label virtually every aspect of life racist. 

The graphic, which was distributed to students in the Graduate School of Education, illustrates a spectrum of overt, coded, and covert forms of white supremacy along one side, and the spectrum between genocide and normalization on the other. 

Covert forms of white supremacy include calling the police on black people, tolerance (!), deportation, “English Only,” Columbus Day, and holding an “Anti-Kaepernick” view, although the mind strains to imagine how someone can be “anti” a person. (What could it possibly mean to be “Anti-Kaepernick”?) 

Racial slurs/jokes, hate crimes, Japanese incarceration, and Muslim bans meet at the fulcrum of “overt” and “genocide.” 

Though the Task Force acknowledges the graphic is “conceptually incoherent” for pairing slavery with free trade and neoliberalism with McCarthyism, they took issue with components that students said made them feel demonized for “support[ing] Israel’s right to exist.” 

“The graphic labels opposition to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as considered ‘coded genocide,’ placing it alongside the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),” the Task Force wrote. “Both are positioned merely one step removed from ‘overt genocide,’ which includes examples like lynching and the KKK.”

According to its official site, the BDS Movement is “a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality [which] upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.” 

The report states that when a Jewish student “raised concerns about the graphic’s antisemitic elements” during class, the instructor referenced a land acknowledgement made earlier in class, stating: “I am so grateful that we could acknowledge the land we are on right now is not rightfully ours and this [rule] must apply to other places.” 

Perhaps the concerned student and the Task Force overlooked the fact that antisemitism is listed at the top of the pyramid, marking it an “overt genocide.”

Let’s review: even though antisemitism is listed as an example of out-in-the-open mass murder, covert examples of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias were perceived in a graphic designed to convince students that covert white supremacy infuses virtually all aspects of American life. 

Now we return to the image of the ouroboros, which has never been a more delicious symbol of irony. 

Harvard, along with other elite institutions, has been poisoning its students into misperceiving racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, et. al., ad infinitum for decades now. Now that this postmodern neo-marxist way of thought has fully captivated their way of thinking, Harvard is now in a position where they have to condemn themselves. They have to eat their own tails to spite themselves. 

I, for one, commend the Task Force for biting the hand that feeds them. This naked act of senselessness — condemning the university for antisemitism “that may not exist — is an instance of genius beyond satire. I’m here for it.