By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Archivist Aula Minerva
In case you haven't been paying attention, or, just possibly, you don't give a toss, things still aren't going Harvard's way, except they managed to screw the grieving survivors of corpses whose body parts were sold like merch by Harvard Medical School staff, thus proving the continuing viability of free-market economics.
Other than that, it's all bad. The poor struggling hedge fund that runs a university on the side continues to be, like Joe Biden, beleaguered.
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| With the team of Garber and Manning, Harvard has returned to its wise 400-year policy of entrusting its governance to white men |
The University's response continues to be tepid and tentative, much to the surprise of those who remember what a hell-raiser interim President Alan Garber '76 was back in Dunster House. This week Garber, no doubt with the 1,000% backing of the Corporation (and you can ask Claudine Gay how much that's worth), appointed, after the proverbial worldwide search, a new interim Provost, who was found across Cambridge St. in the Dean's Office at Harvard Law School.
If you guessed that Garber chose a white man with multiple Harvard degrees, you win an all-expense-paid trip to Allston!
Garber's choice is one John Manning '82, J.D. '85. Manning declared in the official Harvard newspaper, the Gazette:
“A great university must be a place of great humility, curiosity, and openness...”
Humility?
Openness?
Curiosity?
At Harvard?
This guy has his work cut out of him.
Fortunately, his resumé is replete with instances of his service in humble, open, curious places:
Manning, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard College, also held various notable positions earlier in his career, including serving as a law clerk to the Hon. Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court of the United States and to the Hon. Robert H. Bork on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Additionally, he served as an attorney-adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice and as an assistant to the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice.
Scalia. Bork. Why do those names sound familiar? And by the way, when did he “serve” in the Department of Justice? You'll be shocked to learn that he did his stint in the Office of Legal Counsel, an agency devoted to arguing that the President can do whatever the f*** it wants, during the twilight days of the Reagan Administration, 1986-88. No word on whether he worked on the memo confirming that the “arms for hostages” scam was well within the President's inherent power to sneak guns to the Contras.
We're going to go way out on the ivy here and speculate that Manning was put into the job to give Harvard desperately-needed credibility with its Republican tormentors. After all, he's one of them. I mean, if you're willing to kowtow to the guy who fired Archie Cox and the guy who boasted about his law-free rigging of the 2000 election, you've got to be comfortable dealing with Republican a**holes, right?
But Garber's move only shows how out of touch Harvard is with their persecutors. In the old days, a well-connected Republican white man like Manning could place a few calls, jet down to DC for a quiet lunch at the Metropolitan Club, and all would be well.
Those days are over. We doubt greatly whether his brilliantly-crafted arguments will cut much ice with the hooligans, crooks, Nazis, and thugs who make up today's Republican base. But maybe it's worth a try, if he's willing to take Lauren Boebert out for a, um, matinée.
Let's just say he's got a big stable to clean out.
A recent example of the task that awaits him appeared in one of Harvard's two hometown papers, The Boston Globe:
A group of Harvard Jewish alumni is scouring the school’s course offerings, critiquing diversity and inclusion policies, and lobbying top administrators in an attempt to root out what they view as pervasive antisemitism plaguing the university....“There are entire Harvard courses and programs and events that are premised on antisemitic lies,” [said] Dara Horn, a writer and Harvard graduate....
Pervasive anti-Semitism in the University of Larry “Gals Can't Add” Summers and Counselor Underpants, former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz? Entire courses premised on antisemitic lies? Huge if true.
Of course, Ms. Horn, a gifted writer with a, shall we say, unusual perspective has her own hot takes on truth. She once wrote a novel intended as a historical survey of generations of supposed anti-Semitism, including a long chapter on how the Viet Cong were bad for the Jews.
If we were going to make inflammatory statements terming whole swaths of the Harvard academic enterprise as “premised on antisemitic lies ”we'd want to bring some receipts.
We'd at the very least want our organization, supposedly representing Harvard's Jewish alums, to be a shining model of free discourse and respect for dissenting views.
Um, not so much:
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| Prof. Feldman knows anti-Semitism when he sees it |
One early member, Marc Bodnick, an entrepreneur and 1990 Harvard graduate, was kicked out of the chat forum after clashing with other members there about Elon Musk, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israel-Hamas war. In messages, Bodnick was sharply critical of all three, prompting pushback from other members and, eventually, his expulsion.
Free discussion and debate is all well and good, as long as you toe the group's Likudnik/neocon Republican line, as set forth in the Tanakh, of course.
But we were talking about pervasive anti-Semitic content in Harvard's academic offerings. Like what?
In WhatsApp messages and in planning documents reviewed by the Globe, some HJAA members articulated the view that antisemitism is exacerbated by Harvard professors teaching students certain worldviews, such as those that divide the world into “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Some argue these viewpoints lead to demonization of Jews and Israel — a claim that has led to fierce campus debates and pushback.
So could viewpoints expressed by Plato, for arguing that a state should be ruled by secular philosophers, for that matter. Sounds like advocacy of a one-state solution in which Jews could be a minority!
Or of course a theory that emphasizes the struggle between oppressors and oppressed might be philo-Semitic, depending on where you put the Chosen People. Or even worse, the historical record might allocate them to both sides to some extent, depending on the evidence (like the remorseless 60-year Israeli occupation of the West Bank.) This would seem to be a paradigm of the kind of open debate for which a university is dedicated, even the lesser ones – like Yale.
You might think that but if you do you're just another Jew hater. Big thanks to Harvard Law Professor and happily married man Noah Feldman for enlightening us:
The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists.
Well, are Israelis on the West Bank or Gaza oppressors or not? If you think that universities or even just ordinary folks in Dearborn, Michigan should have the option to explore this question in light of, you know, facts, you're a new-style anti-Semite, according to Prof. Feldman.
But there's a deeper intellectual failing in scouring the Harvard course catalog for examples of ideologies you don't like. The enterprise proceeds from the fallacy that Harvard has fallen from its former glory as a purveyor of objective non-ideological knowledge to which it must be compelled to return by deep thinkers like Virginia Foxx and Bill Ackman.
But has it? We happen to have on our shelves the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Courses of Instruction from 1973. Let's take a look back at the days before Jew-hating ideology infected the purity of Harvard's intellectual pursuits.
Back then, the History Department offerings were refreshingly free of all that anti-Semitic oppression stuff. Instead, eager young minds, including jocks looking to fulfill their pre-1600 distribution requirements, could take three, count 'em, three full-year courses on the “Great Age of Discovery” (History 136, 137 & 138).
As oppression is nobody's idea of greatness, we're going to guess that in that halcyon era, any discussion of the possibly oppressive treatment of indigenous populations and imported Black slaves was avoided. Since, unlike the football team, we didn't take “Boats,” we can't be sure.
Over in the Government Department, where oppression as a political phenomenon might be discussed, the totally non-ideological offerings included Gov. 148, taught by clash of civilization gasbag Sam Huntington, asking how long the American political system might last and considering its “viability and future.” Fortunately, there's no oppression in this topic.
And of the six courses offered in International Relations, none explored issues like colonialism, oppression, or racism, because as was well known back then those issues play no role in international relations.
You can go all the way back to 1636 to learn that Harvard was founded as a sanctuary of wide-open and unfettered inquiry, free from any taint of anti-Semitism. Actually, it was founded to train Puritan ministers. That sounds a wee bit anti-Semitic to us.
The point is that for 388 years, Harvard's offerings have reflected some ideology or another, whether it was training future witch hunters in Salem or future war criminals like Henry Kissinger. There is no single objective model of a suitable curriculum, despite what you might have been told in Gov. 106a, Ancient Political Theory. Looking at the history of the world and deciding that the oppression of some groups by others is a worthy organizing principle seems as valid as the former principle that white men conquering a New World already full of people not in need of conquest was “great.”
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| See any oppression here? |
And none of it is either a cause or effect of anti-Semitism.
Speaking of oppression, David Ignatius, a very mainstream Washington Post pundit, reported on the reason Gaza is starving:
But in late January, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir told police to allow demonstrators to close the main border crossing at Kerem Shalom to protest Hamas’s refusal to release all hostages.
With the crossing blocked, panic began to spread, U.S. officials say. Food supplies in Gaza soon became scarce, triggering hoarding and looting. United Nations relief workers were attacked by armed gangs as they tried to bring trucks into Gaza. The trucks had been accompanied by Gazan police. But the police were affiliated with Hamas, and after Israel began targeting them with drones, the U.S. officials told me, the police backed away.
Is that oppression of a hungry civilian population by an extremist hatemonger with a senior position in a heavily armed state that denies to West Bank Palestinians the rights of free movement and self-determination, among others?
Discuss.
If Noah Feldman and Dara Horn will let you, that is.
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