The Yale Medical School and Yale New Haven Hospital announced yesterday that they will no longer prescribe gender-affirming medications for patients under 19. Interestingly enough, much less wealthy and smaller healthcare institutions continue to provide medication and care to trans youth.

In conjunction with Columbia’s decision to suspend or expel or revoke the degrees of over 70 pro-Palestine students, it’s hard not to think of Yale’s decision in light of the canonical literatures on sacrifice. In all these cases, these institutions are undoubtedly thinking that they have to sacrifice the smaller, more marginal, and more vulnerable, for the sake of preserving the larger, the more advanced, the whole. 70 pro-Palestine students in return for hundreds of millions of government research dollars. Trans kids for hundreds of millions more. That, of course, has always been intrinsic to the logic of sacrifice, from the scapegoat of ancient times down to our own. We call this the neoliberal, post-modern academy, but it looks increasingly like the most archaic, pre-modern institution.

Agamemnon murders his daughter Iphigenia in order to appease the gods. He does so hesitantly, at least in Aeschylus’ account, but he has matters of realpolitik to consider: if he doesn’t appease the gods by killing Iphigenia, they won’t calm the winds that have grounded his fleet, preventing it from sailing to Troy. The entire empire that he has so carefully built could collapse. Iphigenia must go.

Joseph de Maistre, in his essay on sacrifice, argues that sacrifice is critical to the development of civilization itself. I’m sure Yale and Columbia think similarly about their decisions here: they are defending institutions of civilization against a primitive god, who must be appeased. There are victims who suffer, but better that a few be hurt than that the whole of the Beinecke Library be lost.

In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt looks closely and carefully at the Jewish Councils whose leaders consistently drew up lists of Jews to be slaughtered, hoping that by cooperating with and appeasing the Nazis, they might preserve some remnant for the future.

In her book on neoliberalism, Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown argues, in her brilliant epilogue, that sacrifice is intrinsic to neoliberalism. Government workers, Social Security and Medicare recipients, employees in the private sector—everyone must sacrifice, tighten their belts, take cuts, for the sake of the economy. Traditional notions of sacrifice were supposed to transcend the realm of market exchange and the economy; one was given up not for one in return but for the preservation of the whole. But since the sacrifices of neoliberalism bring so little return to the community as a whole, since the sacrifice is so incommensurate with the return, Brown suggests that neoliberalism’s sacrifices are like the religious sacrifices of old. One is sacrificing not for something, but to something: a god, a demon, a monster, a snake.

And, of course, hovering over all of these decisions, as the Columbia economist Suresh Naidu pointed out in the Times the other day, is the fact that Trump is not someone who can be appeased. Every sacrifice just encourages him to demand more.

These institutions style themselves as bastions of reason and research, but they increasingly seem like some small, ignorant, superstitious community that sacrifices virgins to appease the angry dragon of the mountain.