100% totally original content by Yard Editor Larry Lowell with Finance Editor Samuel Insull
For Harvard these are the best of times and the worst of times. It's enough to try persons' souls.
On the one hand, the Harvard Corporation remains a bastion of wealth, power, and privilege, sitting on an endowment well in excess of $50,000,000,000. Yet at least if you believe what you read in the media, the great and the good of Harvard have never been more subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with only their $2,000-an-hour lawyers to protect them from the likes of Elsie Stefanik '06.
The University stands accused of taking sides, or not taking sides clearly enough, with respect to the Israel-Hamas War and the deeper problems of the endless bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:
First school officials said nothing when a pro-Palestinian student group wrote an open letter saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence. Harvard followed up with a letter to the university community acknowledging “feelings of fear, sadness, anger, and more.” After an outcry, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, issued a more forceful statement condemning Hamas for “terrorist atrocities” while urging people to use words that “illuminate and not inflame.”
What's a President to do? Should she bear nobly those slings and arrows, or should she take arms against this Dead Sea of troubles?
It is a truth universally understood that a billionaire having made his pile deserves to be heeded and obeyed in all pronouncements. Some (but by no means all) billionaire hedge fund finaglers have piled on the University and urged it to do – what exactly?
Don't worry; they'll tell you and then jabber about it to anyone who wants to hear it. Or not:
If you hit 22 twice on the Wall Street roulette wheel and trouser $3.8 billion for your troubles, you too think you get to decide whose uneasy tuchus sits on the throne in Massachusetts Hall.
But muses let's not sing just of the anger of the finaglers of Wall Street sulking in their Fifth Avenue triplex tents. Let's give a decent respect to the opinions of Harvard Professors, deserved or not:
Have you ever met a Harvard Professor who said they didn't know something? You might sooner move the mist on the Malvern Hills.
But we don't want to keep you in suspense any longer. How can Harvard Professors turn dark night into day and make their blazing chairs into torches that will light the way?
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| Just listen to Harvard Professors! |
[Harvard] should foster an intellectual climate where dissenting viewpoints are better tolerated, the faculty members said, while describing two cases in which Harvard academics had faced backlash over their views on same-sex marriage and biological sex.
Hmmm. “Backlash?” What does that mean? Does it mean the offenders were tarred and feathered in front of University Hall? Were their parking spaces were moved to Allston?
Or does it mean that members of the Harvard community who expressed bigotry, homo-, or transphobia were called out for their very bad views, as they should have been?
By the way, if members of the Harvard community express bigotry against Jews, Asians, Palestinians, or Muslims, how should the University handle that? “Better toleration?”
Speaking of which, whatever happened to those tenured Harvard Professors who supported the idea that IQ was mostly inherited (based upon obviously forged data) and then used that fradulent data to justify racial and other forms of inequality and mistreatment? Were they hounded out of their aeries in William James Hall?
But it's not just two loudmouths with bruised feelings that represent Harvard's dark and stormy intellectual climate. There's more:
Harvard should rein in its diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, which, they contend, launched with virtuous goals, but has since expanded to include influencing faculty hiring decisions and policing speech in ways that have damaged the academic enterprise.
Imagine thinking that decisions on faculty hiring should be made by any criteria other than who manages to best brown-nose the existing tenured faculty, or in the case of Henry “the Mad Bomber” Kissinger, the Dean of the Faculty. Next thing you know, Harvard will stop taking advice from academic worthies like Larry Summers, who explained away the lack of women in the economics and science departments on the grounds that the ladies weren't too good with math.
Even worse, imagine seeking to build a faculty reflective of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. It's the thin end of the wedge!
It turns out that these the glittering prizes that are Harvard Professors are not necessarily representative of the full range of the faculty, some of whom contend that the whiners doth protest too much:
Critics of the council[the aforementioned gasbags], including Harvard professors, have questioned whose interests the group seeks to advance and what kinds of conduct it wishes to protect. After the council’s launch, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the[sic] student newspaper, said that some of its members had faced “reasonable backlash” for, in one case, teaching an “unethical course on policing [that] completely disregarded racial concerns” and, in another, for serving as a defense attorney for Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein's Harvard Professor mouthpiece? We remember this tale of woe rather differently. We remember a law professor named Ron Sullivan, who, like other Harvard legal giants up to and including Alan “Counselor Underpants” Dershowitz, trade on their expertise and Harvard credentials to pocket huge bucks for defending the rich and loathsome, was hired to defend the former chief of the Filmmakers Breast Inspection force (the FBI), Harvey Weinstein, better known today as Prisoner 1192234.
In addition to his sinecure at Harvard Law School, Sullivan then held another cushy no-heavy-lifting job as Master of Winthrop House, which involves living in a luxurious house on Memorial Drive and periodically talking to disgusting undergraduates, something no self-respecting member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be caught dead doing.
When the students learned that he would be defending one of the most notorious and powerful sex criminals in America, presumably by smearing his victims and casting doubt on the severity of the harm they suffered, undergrads wondered whether they might be some tension between speaking up for the mad rapist of Soho and protecting undergrads from – sexual harassment and exploitation.
They asked whether Sullivan could cynically denigrate victims of sexual abuse on Monday for $1,500 an hour and then protect students from those deeds on Tuesday. It was an entirely fair question. And it had nothing to do with “free speech,” but extremely well-paid speech on behalf of a character unsavory enough to have been represented by Counselor Underpants himself.
Harvard after due consideration saw the obvious and irreconcilable tension between the two tasks and asked Sullivan to step down as Master of Winthrop House. He remained (and remains) a tenured (and chaired) Professor at the Harvard Law School, free to express his views that the women whose careers and lives were ruined by Weinstein were asking for it. Or not.
Here he is on Harvard's website today:
Speaking of Harvard Law Professors, during Harvard's current travail, Counselor Underpants himself whined that his free speech was threatened when the Harvard Crimson, one of many student publications, exercised its constitutional right not to publish some piece of crap he submitted. It was the worst attack on free speech since Larry David snubbed him on the porch of The Chilmark Store.
We recount all this not to praise the whining Professors seeking to define what speech is and is not acceptable and then demand that the Corporation go out and enforce their views, but to bury them.
As we have said before, the whole Cancel Culture debate on campus is really about who gets to define what speech is free and who gets to say it. Of course, President Gay foolishly relied on idiot lawyers in refusing to condemn genocide, but why should a weirdo like Steven Pinker get to determine what's OK to say?
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| Looking for Minerva's owl in Cambridge? Don't bother. |
Here's a little selection of Pinker's sound and fury. He called murderous racist Bernard Goetz “mild-mannered.” He joined Larry Summers' idiotic opinion, supra, that women aren't genetically cut out for adding and subtracting. He denied falsely that Blacks were not disproportionate victims of police violence. And of course he still entertains the data-free notion that intelligence is heritable.
No one suggests that Pinker be stripped of his epaulets for promoting such trash. But why should such nonsense be immune from criticism? Because a Harvard Professor says it? Because any criticism would “damage the academic enterprise?” We think that a decent respect for the opinions of mankind demands just the opposite: whenever a Harvard or other Professor spouts dumb s***, he should be called out for it.
And we can't help but notice that behind the ragtag band of mouthy billionaires and insufferable faculty lies a huge reactionary enterprise: to bring down not just Harvard, but the entire apparatus of liberal higher education. That, plus racism, is behind the continuing pressure on the Corporation to make President Gay walk the plank for omitted quotation marks on page 297 of her Ph.D. thesis, found by bad-faith wreckers like Chris Rufo through use of modern language comparison software.
By the way, if you ran the theses of all tenured faculty, not just the Black women, through that machine, what would you find out?
Harvard's notorious insufferable arrogance and air of indifference to the concerns of its community, like the undergraduates (whose careers are normally solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short), this one time is, as we say at the Porcellian Club, a mechiah. Their stalwart refusal to listen to anyone ever remains the best guarantee that a liberal education will not vanish from the face of this Earth or at least Cambridge.
Meanwhile President Gay and the Corporation will continue to have to put up with pressure from faculty bloviators and Republican plug-uglies. We hope they remember that while the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk, in this country, it's perpetually High Noon.
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