Yard Time: High Noon on Mass. Ave.

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with intern Marissa Gunner '28

CAMBRIDGE Mass. - As Gary Cooper learned in High Noon, it’s not until the varmints ride into town guns blazing that you learn who’s willing to stand with you.

Harvard University and its President, Alan Garber ‘77 must be feeling pretty lonely on the dusty streets of Cambridge.

The assault of Pol Potbelly on the University reached a new height when PP’s cadres decided to terminate $2,000,000,000 of Federal grants to Harvard, including those awarded and underway, in mid- molecule. The toll on science, medicine and future health is incalculably bad, including cutting off research in matters of life and death like cancer treatment and research, tuberculosis, infectious disease, crippling neurological conditions like ALS, and environmental health threats.

Harvard President Alan Garber '77 is feeling lonely

The alleged basis for this train robbery is Harvard’s suppose failure to grapple with anti-Semitism, because some a**holes yelled anti-Semitic slurs at those crossing the Yard right after the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023. What constitutes an anti-Semitic slur remains open to interpretation, with some tender Semites claiming that any expression of solidarity with the plight of the over 2,000,000 Gazan civilians being systematically bombed and immiserated by the endless brutal Israeli onslaught is anti-Semitic. Others, including plenty of Jews, note that the endless war appears to be designed to accomplish two goals: saving Bibi Netanyahu’s ass from well-founded corruption charges and cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants, for which many members of the current Israeli government have long advocated. This is a war crime, by the way.

Further, the extortion letter received by Harvard (supposedly in error) demanded that Harvard remake its academic programs, its admissions standards, and its belief in once uncontroversial virtues such as diversity and inclusion to meet the demanding moral standards of a depraved sex offender who had been found liable for sexually assaulting a woman in a department store dressing room.

Harvard pointed out reasonably enough that such demands would in effect destroy the University by imposing a Cotton Mather-like regime of ideological rigidity on what is supposed to be an enterprise devoted to free inquiry (as long as the tenured faculty does not actually have to speak to grubby undergraduates)

Pot Potbelly’s mouthpieces have even said that Harvard owes the creep an apology, although for what is never stated. Some Harvard researchers have even been locked up without being accused of any crime because they did not properly declare 100 grams of dangerous frog embryos at Logan Airport. Thus promising research into the scourge of pancreatic cancer has been interrupted but at least millions of Americans will be saved from the plague of uncontrolled frog embryos that has decimated our inner cities and Appalachian hollers [Is this right, Marissa? – Ed.] [Will get back to you. Big problem set due! – Marissa].

Not content with illegally withholding earned federal research grants, others of PP’s goons have threatened Harvard illegally with loss of its tax-exempt status, a crushing blow to Harvard’s finances mostly because the rich finaglers who have previously coughed up serious money will no longer be able to deduct their contributions from their already exiguous tax obligations. We'll get back to them presently.

This mortal threat is untainted by any pretense of legality, which will not stop PP’s corrupt henchmen at the IRS from trying. Tax-exempt status is not in fact something handed out in the grace and favor of the demented tyrant; it is something to which Harvard is entitled under law. You remember law, don’t you?

Now a University with $53,000,000,000 in the bank is not without resources, and Harvard can afford to pay and has paid fancy lawyers, including former Republican mouthpieces, to state their case and even sue to stop the depredations.

That massive hoard has led some idiots to ask why Harvard can’t just replace the $2 billion in lost grants with its own money. Two rejoinders suggest themselves to even the most limited intelligence: the endowment money is mostly restricted for certain purposes and cannot simply be reallocated at President Garber’s whim (even though he is a notoriously whimsical fellow).

The second more compelling response is: why the f*** should Harvard have to replace federal money to which it is entitled? That’s not how any of this works.

But you know this. Today we want to see who is and who isn’t standing by Marshal Garber and his pitiful band of deputies as they take on the desperadoes of Merde-a-Lardo in their lonely fight for academic freedom and justice.

Some of the most notorious loudmouths amongst the alumni plutocrats so interested in purging the University of Black women and other mortal threats are conspicuous by their silence. What happened to Bill Ackman, last seen preening at the Nerd Ball as a supposed “celebrity,” with his wife, the best-selling author of Megan Markle's autobiography? Did he lose his X password?

And what of nefarious skillionaire Ken Griffin, who let it be known that he was a harsh critic of Harvard last year but now is content to hold forth on matters nearer and dearer to his wallet, like tariffs? Or Lloyd Blankfein '75, who trousered billions at Goldman Sachs and is apparently much too busy unfolding all those bills to support the college that propelled him to the heights of ill-gotten gains?

Will Marshal Alan ride off into the sunset?

Not to mention other Harvard-connected supposed champions of free speech, at least when it was threatened by the menace of wokeosity — where is Demented Alan Dershowitz? Did he forget to plug in his web camera? And great Constitutional scholar Cancun Ted Cruz?

And with the exception of the Pritzker family, we haven’t heard tickety-boo from the legions of billionaire alumni who like to throw their weight around University Hall. Their press agents will tell you that they prefer to work behind-the-scenes. That’s great, but Marshall Garber needs guns in the streets now, not craven finaglers supposed to be quietly influencing bats*** crazy weirdos like penis cosplayer Stephen Miller and Illegally Blonde Pam Bondi or carnival barkers like Linda “A1” McMahon.

Then we have a few Both-Sides middle grounders like former National Review mouthpiece David French, who regurgitates the old whines about Harvard being dominated by the hard left, by which he means people who vote Democratic.  As Harvard does not inquire of one's party affiliation in admission or faculty hiring, for reasons that must be obvious even to Mr. French, it's hard to know what he thinks Harvard can do about the political choices made by its community.  [We aren't linking to his pisspoor column for policy reasons – Ed.] 

Similarly, insufferable Harvard faculty bloviators like Steven Pinker, having whined for the past two years about their supposed plight, have now learned that that there are worse things than hearing snarky remarks at the Faculty Club about the dumb s*** they spout.

The support of these Both Siders comes at a high price. Should Pol Potbelly’s gunmen be run out of Cambridge, not to mention Washington, these same hacks will claim to be owed a seat at the table to propound their reactionary and intolerant drivel. No dice. 

Now some have stood up, most recently a number of other universities who had been content to let Columbia twist in the wind, but have now figured out that if the Trump Regime conquers Harvard, none of them are safe.

There's one big exception: in the backwoods of New Hampshire there lives a small college known at Dartmouth.  We are told it is actually a member of the Ivy League, and considers itself to be a bastion of academic freedom and rigorous scholarship.  So of course it has thrown its support to Harvard, amirite?

According to The Boston Globe, not so much:

A Trump-friendly college?  As they say at Dartmouth on days ending in y, “Beer me!”

It's not just wilderness outposts like Dartmouth or demented loudmouths like Alan Dershowitz who have refused to join Marshall Garber's tiny band of deputies.

Consider the world of immensely rich and powerful law firms, stuffed to the gills with insufferable graduates of the Harvard Law School.  Many of them have shamefully caved to Pol Potbelly, promising hundreds of millions in pro bono time for causes congenial to the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, although whether they will actually swallow what is left of their dignity and commit to defending murderers in uniform like Derek Chauvin remains to be seen.

Those firms have leaked to the press that they did so because they were afraid that they might lose their $20 million a year corporate rainmakers and their finagling clients to other firms.  Which makes notable the courage of a few, like WilmerHale (whose predecessor firm Hale and Dorr had stood up to Joe McCarthy and Pol Potbelly's mentor Roy “I've Got a Secret” Cohn).

Their Boston rival Ropes & Gray, which boasts a lucrative roster of private equity tycoons easily equal to that of Paul Weiss or Skadden, in fact rose to the occasion and signed (but did not draft) Harvard's complaint, at some risk to its fisc.  Perhaps the fact that it has provided legal services to Harvard since the days of President Mather made it awkward for the firm to turn its back on Harvard now.

At least as of today, neither Ropes & Gray nor WilmerHale has dwindled away, which puts the greed and cowardice of their obedient rivals into sharp focus, at least among fancy law students deciding which firm to sacrifice their lives to.

But when you're up against the likes of Pot Potbelly, the entire bent Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and Pete “I'll Text You” Hegseth, Garber's posse seems overmatched, whether measured by number of available gunslingers or Jaeger Bombs.

If Harvard prevails against the heavily-armed thugs lined up against it, we wouldn't blame Alan Garber for throwing his tin badge at the feet of the alumni who abandoned Harvard in its darkest hour and riding off into the sunset.  Just not in the direction of Hanover, New Hampshire. 

UPDATE April 29 – Alan Dershowitz is silent no longer.  He apparently retrieved his phone from between the couch cushions and spoke with his usual incoherence to The Boston Globe.  We won't provide a link for his sad stupid vocalizations, in furtherance of our policy against providing a platform to dumb s***.