PrintSo who wants to go to Harvard now?
Much has been written over the last several weeks about Claudine Gay and her fellow witnesses, who testified before the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce about the explosion of antisemitism on their respective campuses. It soon became clear that not one of them had a problem with those student protesters calling for the genocide of the Jews of Israel. For each of them, it was all about “context,“ as if there is a context in which such vitriol directed to a particular group is acceptable. McGill of Penn stepped down as wealthy donors spoke out and withdrew massive financial gifts. But Harvard’s board and Gay resisted calls for her resignation. How dare lesser beings tell Harvard what to do?
It quickly became obvious that Gay was a DIE hire, so her scholarship was not an issue. She is no scholar, and no one cared. No one cared that she plagiarized numerous actual scholars perhaps as many as fifty times. She was granted tenure at Stanford with only a few articles under her belt — unheard of at the time. She refused to share the data she used in a paper, “The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation,” probably because they were either stolen or fabricated.
Why on Earth would an institution like Harvard sully itself by appointing a person not only unqualified but who criminally plagiarized the work of others? Because the truth and merit no longer matter to the woke left. Only appearances matter, the appearance of diversity and equity...oh, and skin color. Skin color matters most.
While there are many, many qualified black American scholars, Gay is not one of them. But Harvard would never hire the likes of a Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Carol Swain, John McWhorter, Larry Elder, etc. Those people, scholars all, are not race-hustlers like Claudine Gay. They do not buy in to the racist victimization ideology of the virtue-signaling DIE crowd. It should be obvious to all now that it is the left that is racist; leftists believe they must “make allowances” for those less intellectually endowed. As for all those brilliant black conservatives? They are condemned for their apostasy, ignored.
Who will want to go to Harvard now? Its reputation as one of the three finest universities in America has been shattered. Its most famous professor emeritus, Alan Dershowitz, is not even allowed to speak there for the crime of mildly defending Donald Trump as per the Constitution. There is no such thing as tolerance when it comes to persons who hold any remotely conservative opinions, just as there is no such thing as freedom of speech if it deviates from the anti-American radical left (Harvard) party line. Perhaps many young people who might not have been considered for admission will now be accepted; early decision applications are down by 17% already. Harvard will likely take many more students on full scholarship. It’s been said that Harvard could provide every student with full scholarships with just the interest on its endowment. But a Harvard education will never again mean what it once did.
A Harvard education (or Penn or MIT) will never again have the same cachet it had for the last couple of hundred years unless its powers that be decide to dump the whole DIE-CRT wokery agenda that led to a person like Claudine Gay being appointed president. She is likely the tip of the iceberg of equally unqualified faculty who were hired for all the wrong reasons.
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
—Nietzsche
Now everyone knows that our most prestigious universities are nothing more than indoctrination centers. Essential to higher ed these days is that there are only two kinds of people: the oppressed and their oppressors. No critical thinking allowed. How else do we explain those three college presidents’ acceptance of monstrous antisemitism on their respective campuses? They too have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they thought their views were part of the acceptable mainstream on the subject of Israel’s right to exist and the genocide of Jews. Who now will spend $100K a year to send a child to Harvard? No one who cares about actual education.
Claudine Gay has resigned. That was inevitable, but she did it in a most pathetic way. She’s a victim of racism, of course. Her resignation letter made no apology for her many thefts of the work and research of others. She apparently believes she was entitled to steal their work without attribution. Her defenders agree, even though any student caught plagiarizing another even once would be expelled from Harvard. She will keep her nearly $1M salary and continue to teach undergrads. Now we know what she will be teaching them: to hate whites, Jews, and Asians, all deemed oppressors. If black, gay, trans, etc., they will learn that they are victims who can never succeed without the help of pandering liberals.
The entire sequence of events, from the congressional testimony where the three university presidents seemed to defend the antisemitism of their students to the discovery of Gay’s flagrant plagiarism, has been a wake-up call for Americans interested in academia. It is sick and dying, thanks to the slow but definitive efforts of the anti-American left to control what is taught at universities that began at least fifty years ago. Their takeover has been complete.
Gay has an op-ed in the NYT again defending herself, her scholarship, and academia in general. She writes, “College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root.” But it is people like Gay who have purposefully transformed universities into battlegrounds of political grandstanding, canceling those with differing opinions, “pursuing self-serving agendas.” Gay and her defenders live in a bubble of their own making; no outside perspectives penetrate it.
“Most plagiarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared, from the hive.”
—Charles Caleb Colton
