By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Nellie Bly in Washington
Poor Harvard. The colossus of wealth, power, championship squash teams, and privilege remains besieged. On the other hand, nothing burnishes its reputation better than the caliber of its tormentors, like long-time Republican hatemonger Rep. Virginia “Shut Up, Girl” Foxx.
We'll get to her. But first, it sounds as if things are still pretty rough in Harvard Yard. No less a personage than Acting President Alan Garber '77 is feeling the heat:
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| Maybe some Jewish students aren't really Porcellian material |
Harvard University’s interim president Alan Garber...is concerned by reports of “social shunning” of Jewish students in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war, and said there “needs to be a discussion about what are the limits” of permissible speech....
Garber said that what he finds “most disturbing of all are situations or experiences students describe where they have felt they could not speak in class because there are attacks on Israel or maybe Israelis.”
“They feel unsupported in contradicting them,” he said....
Social shunning of Jewish students? This is news to Alan? Why does he think that after careful consideration his application to join the Porcellian Club in 1974 was, um, put on the shelf behind the S.S. Pierce Scotch?
So are we to understand that the crisis at Harvard is that students, especially Jewish students, are afraid to speak? That would come as a refreshing change to contemporaries of Alan Garber, who remember that students, Jewish and otherwise, would never shut the f*** up, even when they had no f***in' idea of what they were talking about. A little silence at dinner in Dunster House might even have been welcomed back in the day.
Are today's Harvard students more easily cowed than Alan and his buddies? Let's ask a real journalist who hangs around Harvard a lot these days.
They aren't, reports Jill Abramson '76, former Executive Editor of The New York Times:
Over nearly 10 years I taught 250 students. Some of my students came from privileged backgrounds, like one of my best students, Mary Julia Koch, the daughter of the late David Koch. My students also included lefties, whose doctrinaire comments sometimes annoyed me. But they were willing to respectfully engage with their classmates, like Sophia Downs, a leader of the Harvard affiliate of ...the national antiabortion group. (Aren’t those kinds of class discussions what a university education should be?)....
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| Alan's contemporary John Roberts '76 always shared his views and his weed freely |
During the semester she was in my class, I asked Sophia to take me to one of the Students for Life campus meetings ....Sixty students attended the meeting to listen to the speaker, Kristen Hawkins, head of Students for Life. At a place supposedly infested by cancel culture, there were no disruptions.
You don't say?
By the way, Alan has recently been informed that it's not just the Jewish students who worry about what happens if they run their mouths:
Harvard University faced new challenges Tuesday, from pro-Palestinian and Muslim students alleging the school has not protected them from harassment and racism,...A legal group representing 14 Harvard students asked the Department of Education this week to investigate the school for allegedly failing to protect them from discrimination and targeted harassment due to their Muslim, Arab, or Palestinian backgrounds, or their pro-Palestinian views.
Gee maybe if your views on the current Gaza war involve valorizing the suffering of your compatriots (whoever they are) and ignoring or worse yet exulting in the suffering of your adversaries, maybe you should keep quiet and study your stats problem set. If you are a Harvard student, you can be assured that despite what your parents have told you your whole life, no one wants to hear your opinions. And if the dining room conversation makes you uncomfortable, maybe the whole point of a college education is to have your preconceived notions challenged in ways that discomfort you.
But the hurt feelings of Harvard students, real or imagined, aren't the real crisis facing the University.
The real crisis is that that bad-faith Republican ideologues have decided to jump on the alleged assault on free speech, not to mention former President Claudine Gay's scholarship issues, to attack the entire structure of higher education and free inquiry itself.
Exhibit A: Mean racist old hag Virginia Foxx, previously best known for telling a Black women journalist who asked a perfectly appropriate question to “shut up.” She, like fellow bad-faith blowhard Elsie Stefanik '06, has decided that attacking Harvard and other universities is a sure path to ill-gotten fame if not fortune.
So who is she anyway? It turns out that despite the trailer-trash demeanor, she's a canny well-educated reactionary in the mold of a Phyllis Schlafly with a doctorate in, wait for it, education. She was one of the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election (although not the votes for her in her district).
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| Virginia Foxx has always been interested in education |
Before she glommed onto universities, she had sought to advance bigotry and oppression in America's public schools:
Now Foxx is championing parental rights in schools, a hot-button issue in many states, and recently shepherded a bill through a divided House. She also wants to bar transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams.
“Progressivism and the lies it espouses have devastated our public education system,” Foxx says. It’s hardly radical, she says, to declare “men are not women. Women are not men.”
She knows full well that the path to wrecking American higher education is to attack it at what she thinks she can sell as its weak points: its refusal to take the quantification of white privilege – excuse us, “merit”– at face value and the supposed climate of anti-Semitism on campus (a campaign immensely aided by brilliant comments like Alan Garber's above).
She knows how to generate headlines like:
As her role model Joe McCarthy proved, you can drag out an inquisition with subpoenas forever, generating additional scurrilous headlines of “coverup” should the unfortunate victim not wish to strip naked for her pleasure. We'll bet that somewhere in the documents Harvard, no doubt advised by the crack defenders at WilmerHale, someone said something stupid. That will generate more headlines, more sound bites, and more subpoenas.
If you think that this batsh** crazy supporter of a tangerine-faced bigot and his effort to overthrow democratic government is not really concerned about the well-being of the Jews, just ask her:
Foxx also insisted that her investigation is not being fueled by political or ideological motivations.
“What is driving us is concern for students and for faculty,” she said. “It has nothing to do with ideological beliefs. It’s all about protecting the students.”
Would she lie to you?
Conservative Republicans have long decried higher education in the United States, describing the cultures on most college campuses as being captured by liberal elites who inculcate students with left-wing values and suppress conservative thought. And over time their disdain has deepened.
From 2015 to 2019, the share of Republicans and independents who lean Republican saying that colleges have a negative effect on the country rose from 37 percent to 59 percent, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. By 2022, another Pew poll reported that 76 percent of conservative Republicans said colleges affect the country negatively. Meanwhile, a number of Republican-dominated state legislatures have moved to end what they consider “woke” policies and teachings on campuses.
Democrats on the committee noticed what was happening. “I also want to note that the main point of this hearing should be to identify bipartisan solutions to combat antisemitism, not an excuse to attack higher education, liberal arts education, or important diversity, equity and inclusion work that’s happening at colleges and universities across the country,” said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore).
And the chaos agent behind this well-financed ideological attack on education under the guise of protecting the Jews, Chris Rufo, is a neo-Nazi eugenics freak. By definition, that's not a friend of the Jews.
What's really appalling is how few are willing to speak out in defense of Harvard and other universities, either because they aren't exactly appealing victims or because their defenders don't want to fan the flames of the controversy.
That would be a serious mistake. Letting bad-faith ideologues conduct inquisitions into Harvard and liberal education under the guise of combating anti-Semitism legitimizes these attacks. That's how it worked in the 1950's until Joe Welch finally stood up to Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, after thousands of lives were ruined.
It also worked in other places not that long ago:
That's something that Alan Garber should really be concerned about.
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