By Meta-content Generator A.J. Liebling with additional reporting from Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell and Twin Cities Correspondent Murray Slaughter
We start this New Year in exactly the same place we left 2025: with liberal democracy under relentless attacks from fascists, bigots, and plutocrats, while institutions that were supposed to protect it continue to fail miserably.
No less than The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser, wrapping up the miserable year just ended, commented:
Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen. Trump has always been a mirror for other people’s souls, an X-ray revealing America’s dysfunction. If this was a test, there were more failing grades than we could have imagined.
Preach. And maybe you can deliver your powerful sermon to an audience that includes your husband, New York Times conventional wisdom geyser Peter Baker and his many colleagues who have failed (unlike Ms. Glasser) to write the objective truth about the crisis we are in.
We’ll get to the Times another time but we start today closer to home, on the front page of our local rag, The Boston Globe. Recently, it churned out thousands of words about why Harvard is under relentless attack from the Mad King and his regime.
To the Globe hacks, it’s simple: Harvard, like the freshman in the miniskirt at the fraternity party, was asking for it.
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| According to the Globe, she had it coming* |
It’s worth deconstructing the Globe’s bad faith and unpersuasive effort at victim blaming not just as an illustration of the failure of the press to do its job of reporting the truth and protecting free thought. It also opens a window that allows us to view the current assault on Harvard and other institutions of higher learning as the culmination of a 70 year Republican campaign to demonize universities as hotbeds of godless Communists who have the nerve to question insane reactionary bigoted views.
The Globe put it rather more euphemistically:
But [since 2014], Harvard paid less attention to other issues, including a growing intolerance on campus for any views that might seem to challenge its egalitarian mission. Students and professors alike became increasingly afraid of speaking their minds, especially if their ideas clashed with the progressive ethos. By 2024, Harvard found two out of three graduating seniors feared sharing their beliefs about controversial subjects in class.
While Harvard was embracing the ideals of racial justice and global involvement over this decade, many Americans outside the university’s ivy-clad walls were turning away from those values. Or perhaps had never supported them in the first place. A conservative narrative rose that Harvard was full of itself and worse, in ways undermining what was best for America.
How did this intolerance manifest itself? Were members of the Harvard community assaulted or punished? Or were they told by other members of that community, in the exercise of their own equal freedom of speech, that they were full of s***?
Being told that you just said something stupid may be one of the most valuable experiences any Harvard student will ever have. If what you said was in fact horrible and stupid, then the shame you feel is warranted. Don’t worry; it’ll pass. If what you said was not horrible and stupid, then you are entitled to tell your interlocutor (unless of course it’s a faculty member you need to suck up to) that they are the ones who are full of it, and you need not feel any shame.
By the way, if two out of three Harvard students have kept their mouths shut to avoid being called out for their garbage takes, that might be a good thing. Indeed, up until 2024 it was hard to find anyone who thought that the problem with Harvard was that people talked too little. Rather the opposite.
The Globe then hints that maybe it’s not all Harvard’s fault that the nation does not universally share its commitment to once-uncontroversial virtues like diversity, equity, inclusion, and free thought. Why Harvard is supposed to be bankrupted for that is unclear.
Indeed, the available evidence supports the conclusion that the attack on universities is largely attributable to white racists like the Mad King and his bent minions, including a dumbbell proprietor of rigged wrestling matches who now has a chokehold over the money supply to higher education in America.
Another count of the Globe’s indictment against Harvard was the lack of “balance” in the political affiliations of its faculty:
There were signs the balance was even further tilted away from conservatives among faculty, instructors, and researchers. Between 2011 and 2014, a separate Crimson analysis found, 84 percent of federal contributions from those groups went to Democratic campaigns and political action committees. The number rose to 96 percent among people affiliated with the faculty of Arts and Sciences.
This whine has been a standard talking point of right wing attacks on academia for decades. Here’s a typical example:
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| Right-wing professors feel muffled by Harvard |
On too many college campuses today, ideas are muffled and perspectives are one-sided.
At Harvard University, for example, new data reveal that the faculty’s ideological leanings are growing increasingly skewed to the left. Results from The Harvard Crimson’s annual spring faculty survey show that 37 percent of the 1,100 professors polled indicate that their political views are “very liberal”.... Forty-five percent of respondents characterize their political views as “liberal,” while only one percent indicate that their views are “conservative” and no faculty identify as “very conservative.” Moreover, only 16 percent of Harvard faculty members classify their political views as “moderate.”
Harvard is hardly alone in its political bias. University faculty identifying as “liberal” consistently outnumber their “conservative” colleagues. This trend has accelerated in recent years, with left-leaning professors rapidly displacing their right-leaning counterparts on college campuses nationwide.
But of course there is no connection between the political affiliations of faculty and supposed muffling of ideas. Why should anyone care about the private political views of your Archeology, Applied Math, or Mechanical Engineering professor?
We’d submit that the reason the professoriat leans to the left is because intelligent people are repelled by the orgy of greed, plutocracy, bigotry, and corruption that constitutes “conservative” political discourse. More simply, the more you think, the less likely you are to accept idiotic conservative “ideas.”
By the way, who finances these endless smears against college professors?
FEE’s mission is to inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society. These principles include: individual liberty, free-market economics, entrepreneurship, private property, high moral character, and limited government.
So it’s a dark money front for pushing right-wing ideas? Doesn’t sound like they’re suffering from too much muffling.
Another sad tale of literal muffling at Harvard comes from a senior tenured white male member of Harvard’s historically pisspoor History Department, James Hankins, who announced he was leaving Harvard for the paradise of academic freedom that is Ron DeSantis’ Florida because of the intolerable restraints the University had imposed on him:
[In] the fall of 2021,...I decided I no longer wanted to teach at Harvard. We had just endured almost two years under the university's strict Covid regime. This was a form of emergency governance that mirrored to a fault the whole country's uncritical acceptance of The Science and its...tyrannous invasions of private life. At Harvard, professors were told we had to lecture in masks and give seminars on zoom[sic]. Neither practice accorded with my idea of liberal education.
If he really found lecturing with a mask on (which thousands did during the pandemic that claimed over one million American lives) impossible, he could have emulated Socrates, who lectured outdoors. There’s plenty of trees in Harvard Yard Prof. Hankins could have held forth under.
His other gripe was that Harvard, unlike the Grapefruit League institutions of higher learning in Florida, supplemented teaching of “Western civilization” with learning about other civilizations on this planet. This he concluded made Harvard undergraduates uncivilized (so that explains it!).
By the way, Harvard first began offering courses in East Asian Languages and Civilization in 1879 and has done so continuously since 1928. The eponymous department was founded in 1941, long before the delicate Prof. Hankins ever set foot in Harvard Yard.
Like his fellow “conservatives,” he found the atmosphere at Harvard uncongenial to expressing his “conservative views” like this 1991 production he dumped on his History 10a students:
During the lecture, which centered on the age of chivalry and courtly love, Hankins allegedly said "'Feminists have invented sexual harassment and date rape in order to gain dominance in our society,'”
For freely expressing these conservative views, Hankins was driven from his position and punished harshly.
Nah, we’re just s***in’ you - nothing happened until he decided more than 30 years later he just couldn’t take the assaults on his free speech anymore.
To return to the larger point, that the victims of the Mad King’s attack on democracy and human life itself got what they were asking for is a frequent theme struck by apologists for Fascism, by which we mean Republicans.
This week, after an unarmed and innocent woman was gunned down in cold blood by an ICE goon busily creating content for his version of Der Stürmer, the regime and its apologists reacted as usual: she had it coming.
The video evidence definitively proved otherwise, but by platforming the regime’s lies as if they were credible, our beloved mainstream media gave those lies a patina of credibility, not to mention visibility.
Rupert Murdoch’s bulls*** volcanoes erupted on schedule. Here’s the cover of his New York Post.
On his crapcan “news” network, Jesse Watters told us that the innocent victim was not only LGBT, but had pronouns in her bio.
Clearly she deserved to die young.
We’d expect this sort of evil victim-blaming drivel from anything owned by the Dirty DiggerTM (apologies to Private Eye).
We expected better from The Boston Globe.
*Yes we know this is Columbia, another victim of government tyranny that was also begging for it. – Ed.
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