Mitt Romney gets a revelation on the ski lift to Damascus

By Andrew Mellon
Tax Correspondent

Whatever happened to Mitt Romney, millions were not asking?

Last week, we found out: he landed on the terrible New York Times Op-Ed pages with a stirring call for...higher taxes on the rich!

Wait a minutes, this Mitt Romney?  The Mitt Romney who told his plutocratic funders in 2012:

Mitt Romney's back! 

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for [Obama] no matter what. [They] are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it....And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax....[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. 

It was hardly the first time that the Mittster showed his contempt for the lowly peons whose suffering had made a fortune for him in his career as a flipper and stripper of once-great enterprises.  He was one of the pioneers of the private-equity formula for success: find some old company, buy it with mostly-borrowed money, strip it of its assets, cash, and workers, and then flip the carcass to some other sucker.  Repeat as frequently as needed to amass $270,000,000.  

Don't believe us?  Here's what well known lefty Maureen Dowd said just before her retirement from journalism:

Romney may have been a Wall Street predator, looter and vulture gnawing at the carcasses of companies and plotting a White House bid in diapers to finish what his dad started, as his Republican rivals have portrayed him. “Make a profit,” a younger Romney laughingly says in the attack film financed by supporters of Newt Gingrich. “That’s what it’s all about, right?”  

Lighten up, Emma Goldman.

What caused Mitt Romney, surveying the world from atop his mountain of loot, to have a change of what we'll call for argument's sake heart?

It's not that he was moved by the plight of the less affluent 90% of America who, except for a brief period during the Biden Administration, enjoyed none of the huge gains in national income since oil prices stabilized in 1980.

No, he's worried about the projected shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund, an artifact of Roosevelt's genius idea to prevent Republicans from slashing Social Security.  This 23% shortfall would have to be made up from general revenues.  Like the trillion-dollar defense budget.

This in turn, combined with the generations of tax cuts for the rich championed by plutocrats like the Mittster, would according to him lead to higher debt and hyperinflation.

Now we're getting somewhere.  If you've got a, to use the technical macroeconomics term, s***ton of money, nothing scares you more than the prospect that you money might become next to worthless.  And you can't eat car elevators.

This terrifying possibility (ridiculous according to anyone who actually knows economics) has led Romney to embrace the fearful alternative: higher taxes.

What's on his menu?

First, he wants to raise or remove the current limit on payroll taxes (currently $176,000).  This tax increase would fall most heavily on upper middle class professionals like doctors and lawyers.  But they vote Democratic anyway, so they deserve it!  The tax might not affect the ultra-rich plutocrats who don't rely on wage income, or if it does, it would be not even a grain of sand to the likes of Ketamine Leon Musk and his $500 billion hoard, on which he has paid precisely zero taxes.

Even a mind as clouded as Mitt's realizes this.  So he goes on to propose tax increases, not on plutocrats, but on their mouth-breathing offspring.  He points out that under the current tax regime, Ketamine Leon can pass on his $500 billion without ever paying even capital-gains tax due to an obscure loophole which provides that the basis of such windfalls is valued on the date of death.

This means that Ketamine Leon's 563 children, or whoever inherits his wealth, should they sell their $500 billion (or whatever its value on the holiday of Leon's demise) windfall for cash, would only owe taxes on the difference between $500 billion and what they sold it for (if higher).  If they got less than $500 billion, they pay nothing.

The ostensible rationale for this pro-Don Jr. windfall is that it is too difficult to apply the dead guy's basis to calculate tax due on sale.  We still remember brilliant tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg telling us some 40 years ago that this was, to use his hypertechnical jargon, “bullshit.” 

There's another tax though that might hit Leon's Master Race offspring: an estate tax which plutocrats have tried to repeal for decades.  This is a tax levied on the value of very large estates. Mitt doesn't mention it, although he knows about it.

We know this because he has avoided estate tax liability on untold millions through a loophole he pioneered.  Under this scheme, when Mitt or one of his fellow plutocrats sets up a new fund for flipping and stripping – excuse me, private equity, he takes one simple step on day one.

“A wealth tax?  On one million dollars?”

Although he expects the fund to raise billions of dollars and his own partnership interest to be worth tens if not hundreds of millions, on day 1 he and his co-conspirators “seed” the new fund with say $1,000.  He then contributes his, let's say, 30% partnership interest into an IRA for his kids.  The contribution limit for IRA's, intended for small savers, is $3,000.  On the day of contribution, his interest is nominally worth 30% of $1,000, or $300.  

He knows full well that it will be worth more like $50 million, but by then it's safely tucked into the IRA tax-free until his heirs many years from now take relatively small taxable distributions from it.

Funnily enough, he doesn't mention closing that loophole.

There's a similar scam involving putting interests in early-stage companies and funds into a Roth IRA with similar huge tax-dodging benefits for the truly greedy.

Romney also doesn't mention the straightforward wealth tax, which would require those with huge wealth (say at least $50 million) to pay a modest amount (between 2% and 5% of that total) as a wealth tax, in recognition of the outside rewards such plutocrats garner from a government that protects their property and their necks from the guillotine.

This proposal has garnered furious opposition from those subject to it, who have threatened to flee to Florida or Mars to avoid paying it.  We suspect they're not leaving their Woodside compounds anytime soon.

So while Mitt gets a caffeine-free cookie for admitting that he and his ilk need to pay more, he hasn't quite been able either to admit the reason: so that all Americans can enjoy some level of economic security without worrying about how to pay for fripperies like staying alive when they're sick.

He also hasn't been able to embrace the fairest solution: the wealth tax.

Finally, having written one column, Mitt seems content to rest on his skis.  He could go on to do the hard work of advocating for tax equity, and even funding that advocacy. You could call it “missionary work.”  Mitt knows about that too.

But we should applaud his baby steps. Maybe someday other New York Times hacks like David “My Dinner With Jeffrey” Brooks will be inspired to take a step into the light.

You'll pardon Mitt if he doesn't bet even a minuscule percentage of his $270,000,000 on it, though.

 

Good and Dead: bigot, warmonger, and self-proclaimed intellectual dead at 95

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

The front page of the December 18 New York Times announced the death of Norman Podhoretz at the age of 95.

The reaction was immediate, with almost all Times readers asking: “Who?”

Followed by “who cares?”

Both good questions.  By coincidence, both can be answered simply: “no one.”

Norman Podhoretz was known for being outspoken

While it’s true that he died in well-deserved obscurity, the terrible ideas, to use the term generously, that he articulated and tried to legitimate animate too much of today’s current discourse, especially among his beloved extremist Republicans, and for that reason alone cannot be dismissed so cavalierly.

The Times offered a few of Podhoretz’s intellectual gems in their obit:

One of his last publications was bluntly titled “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” (2007). It was a book, according to a Times review, that “furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine.” 

The Bush doctrine, you may recall in spite of the efforts of Podhoretz’s ideological (and biological) children to memory hole it, was that it was A-OK to invade a foreign country which had nothing to do with 9/11 if it was a dictatorship and the population were Muslim.

That’s the doctrine. There’s no more to it than that. By which we mean there’s nothing more intellectually to it, but there’s plenty more death, agony, suffering, torture, lying, and perversion of all American values to it, none of which bothered ol’ Norm.

The idea that over a billion Muslims, by virtue of their great ethical monotheistic religion, are somehow a monolithic threat to civilization (whatever that is) finds near unanimous support in today’s Republican Party, whose Mad King as recently as this week banned immigration (including by adoption) from mostly Moslem countries.

Another of Podhoretz’s spiritual children, a schondeh named Randy Fine, a Republican Congressman from the great state of Florida, recently said that mainstream Muslims should be “destroyed” and U.S. citizen and Muslim Ilhan Omar should be deported. Norman would be so proud. 

He also was a fervent supporter of the disastrous Vietnam War (until he realized in 1971 that the game was up) and an even more fervent opponent of those smarter and less bent than he, who pointed out correctly that it was a pointless effusion of blood and treasure that did nothing to make the world a better or safer place.

And most of all he was a wild if hypocritical Likudnik, blasting Labor-led Israeli governments who dared to consider peace with the millions of Palestinians living among them and under occupation. When Israel was governed by rejectionist Likudnik governments Norman turned his wrath on American Jews who dared to criticize Israeli government policies. No foolish consistency for great minds like his!

Today he’d surely be pleased at the Mad King’s addled endorsement of the Israeli Government’s illegal and autocratic rule over every Palestinian in the Occupied Territories and its depraved indifference to the lives and fates of Palestinian civilians.

His U.S. political judgments were equally acute:

“I hereby declare,” he said, hinting that he was deliberately needling some conservative intellectuals, “that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.”

As the statement has no intellectual content, it is impossible to refute. It is worth pointing out though that he has precisely outlined the governing philosophy of today’s Republican Party: better an ignorant idiot in the Oval Office than a Democrat who might make things better for people in America and around the world.

We’ll get to the needling bit later.

He first attained fame, or at least notoriety, as a supposed literary critic. Here are two of his early judgments:

His anti-feminist views were well-received

He won notches on his critic’s belt by going after big reputations, disparaging Saul Bellow’s early novel “The Adventures of Augie March” in a 1953 review and writing off the Beats as “young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can.”

That would be wrong and wrong. But Norman soon learned that you could go far by being angry and wrong, as long as what you wrote pleased the right powerful people, especially rich reactionary Jews. Like the board of the then-respectable American Jewish Committee, which published (and for all we know still publishes) a little read magazine called Commentary.

Norman became its editor in 1960 and over the years managed to run it into the ground. To celebrate his success, he published his first memoir in 1968, Making It. In between boasting of his college grades, he dropped a bunch of names and settled some of his many scores.

The reviews were, let’s just say, Nuzzi-esque:

Podhoretz, who has been where much of the action is for more than a decade, and has been editor of one of the country’s most serious journals of opinion for nearly that long, tells us very little about anything that has happened in his life except as it affects his self-esteem or concerns his quest for class, status, and power....But Making It may also be just what its author says it is: a bid for literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package. If it succeeds, we may surely hope that successive volumes will permit us to follow the career of this remarkable, still young man. And they may be more mellow; sometimes, as we age, memory softens our perceptions of reality. In Podhoretz Returns and Son of Podhoretz, the monster may turn out to have a heart of gold. 

Spoiler alert: nope.

In addition to his terrible ideas, he is survived by his one contribution to the art of rhetoric. Until he was turned loose in the marketplace of ideas, thinkers and writers used public fora to argue for their views, in the hope that listeners or readers would be persuaded by the cogency of the arguments.

Podhoretz’s unique contribution was to spout forth geysers of dumb s***, not to persuade, but to anger those he didn’t like (usually “liberals”). The point was not to convince but to outrage.

Making a jackass of yourself in public by churning out drivel was once thought pointless, if not self-destructive. Now it is an accepted and even respected mode of discourse, used to justify broadcasting ever stupid and more hateful crap. Outraging smarter, better people with your horrible, usually bigoted, ideas has become the principal, if not sole, offering of self-described “conservative intellectuals” (kind of like a married bachelor or a Dutch treat).

In fact getting savaged for stupid insulting ravings has become a point of great pride to today’s reactionary provocateurs. If you don’t believe us, ask Norman Podhoretz’s spiritual grandchild, Kevin Dowd.

So with Podhoretz’s long-overdue demise, we come to the end of a generation of loud boorish and wrong neoconservative gasbags who for reasons still unknown (although likely arising out of their ability to please rich powerful reactionaries who underwrote their “institutions” and “intellectual journals”) were accorded a level of respect their work did not merit. Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, Pat “I’ll just take the bottle” Moynihan, Midge Decter, Diana Trilling, Hilton Kramer – the good news is that they all now sleep the sleep of the eternally remaindered. 

The bad news is that their hateful ignorant spiteful bigoted “thinking” lives on in today’s Republican Party and its apologists

Merry Christmas.  

U.S. foreign policy, RIP

 By Spy Diplomatic Correspondent Tess Harding

People may find this hard to believe, but for the 80 years ending in 2025, the United States had a foreign policy. 

After the Second World War and until 1990, the foreign policy was structured around the belief that the Soviet Union must be thwarted to the extent possible without blowing up the world.

This fundamental principle had a number of consequences.  Some aged pretty well, like supporting Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe while using massive US military might to backstop Europe via the NATO alliance.  It also led to a surprisingly lenient occupation of Japan, which created a powerful prosperous peaceful nation anchoring Northeast Asia.

Other times, the theology of a monolithic Communist enemy led us into disaster.  This led to a multi-decade (failed) effort to isolate what American white men of both political parties chose to call “Communist China.”

This demonization led directly to the pointless slaughter of Vietnam, on the (ludicrous) grounds that the indigenous Vietnam anti-colonial revolution was nothing more than an instrument of Chinese aggression. 

In 1969, the crooked Republican bastard who led the effort to demonize Democrats as “soft on China” decided to turn on a dime and embrace China as a counterweight to the USSR.  This obviously sound policy helped fracture the supposed Red Alliance, weaken the USSR, and build China up as an economic and political superpower.  Maybe that's bad and good. 

After the USSR collapsed of its own internal decay in 1990, U.S. foreign policy was guided by a more nuanced constellation of principles, from human rights to development to containing Iran to free trade.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

After 9/11 U.S. foreign policy pivoted again, inventing a Global War on Terrorism and then using that intellectual structure to justify attacking a country that had nothing to do with terrorist attacks in America.  Thank you George W. Bush and Dead-Eye Cheney. 

But however wise or idiotic the foreign policy was, there was an apparatus for creating and legitimating it, and various mechanisms, sometimes loud and angry, for providing some democratic oversight over it.

That ended on January 20, 2025, thanks to 77 million white and Hispanic voters.

Architects of US foreign policy: then...

Now we have no rational foreign policy and our political branches are incapable of producing one. The fact that one marginally qualified individual serves as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser (not to mention, as noted political scientist Stephen Colbert pointed out, while moonlighting as the National Archivist) is an admission that the process of formulating and executing foreign policy has collapsed.

What's replaced it?

There was a lot of supposedly hilarity generated by Rubio's bold path-breaking decision to return to use of Times New Roman in State Department documents (replacing the woke lefty Calibri), but that may have been among the more rational foreign affairs decisions made by the new regime.

It is now clear that U.S. foreign policy is really nothing more than the caprice, often corrupt and sadistic, of a demented vicious bigot who also seems to be acting as a Russian agent when he is not lusting after an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize as if it were another underaged pageant contestant.

We'll start in Europe, where the 75 year old alliance with European democracies has been destroyed and replaced by insult comedy and toadying to Russian aggression.  Why?  Who knows?

Speculation has it that the Mad King is either being blackmailed or paid off by Putin or both.  The evidence goes back to 2016, when Russian agent and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, then not in jail, first excised support for Ukraine from the Republican platform and then shared polling data with Russian agents.  There is but one reason why anyone would do that: so that Russian disinformation campaigners could use the data to target critical swing voters with lies about Trump's opponent.  It worked, and the Tangerine-Faced Traitor has, unusually for him, been grateful ever since.

To serve his boss Putin, the Mad King has bounced around various ridiculous surrender demands on the brave Ukrainians who have resisted Russian aggression for over a decade.  To the defeatists courtiers trying to justify Trump's insane, unworkable, and evil efforts to give in to Russian aggression on the grounds that a nation of 44 million cannot stand up to a much larger power, we remind them that once upon a time another nation of about that size stood up to a larger power most effectively.  It was called Vietnam. 

In the Middle East, where to be fair U.S. foreign policy has long been a confusing and often disastrous muddle, the Mad King launched a war on Iran apparently because he thought that Bibi Netanyahu was getting too much press coverage for Israel's own bombing campaign and then almost immediately stopped it, having achieved nothing except subverting careful diplomatic efforts to restrain the Iranian nuclear program (unleashed by the Mad King's disastrous first term decision to break the Iran nuclear agreement).

We give Trump a shred of credit for leaning on Bibi to halt his savage assault on Gaza in exchange for the release of all hostages.  But the Mad King's inability to focus and lack of competent diplomats have led to an uneasy non-peace in Gaza, continuing suffering for the millions living in tents in the cold winter, and no realistic plan to resolve the conflict by installing a responsible Palestinian government.

Instead, the Mad King with the support of his fellow despots has installed himself as the King of Peace, putting himself over another well-known Middle Eastern figure known as the Prince of Peace.  

The only other aspect of the Mad King's approach to the Middle East is to enrich himself and his miserable mouth-breathing family by trading U.S. national interests to local despots in exchange for naming rights to unbuilt resorts.  His unqualified stupid son-in-law is busily trousering millions from these desert plutocrats in exchange for influence over U.S. foreign policy, and, more recently, over what's left of the U.S. free media. 

Just today, The Guardian reported that the usual finaglers are trying to get rich with nonsensical plans to imprison Gazans:

The Guardian has learned that two former Doge officials – once assigned to Elon Musk’s effort to slash government and fire federal workers in bulk – are leading the group’s conversations about humanitarian assistance and the postwar reconstruction of Gaza. They have circulated slide decks with detailed plans for logistics operations, including prices, financial projections and the locations of potential warehouses.

US companies are gathering for the spoils. One contender, the Guardian has learned, is Gothams LLC, a politically connected contractor that won a $33m contract to help run the notorious south Florida detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”, where immigrants are housed in tents and trailers.

Documents and three people familiar with the plans say that the contractor had an “inside track” to secure what might be the most lucrative contract it’s ever had. But in an interview on Friday, after questions from the Guardian, the company’s founder, Matt Michelsen, said he had reconsidered his company’s participation and was pulling out, citing security concerns.   

That's not foreign policy; that's bank robbery.

In Asia, US foreign policy has been reduced to try to bulldoze China and when that doesn't work, give up.  Rinse, repeat.

...and now

But we save the hottest mess for last: Latin America.  Here we are told there is a foreign policy, in which “America First” (which means isolationism, an idiotic failed policy but at least a policy) now means Americas First, in which the United States gets to lord it over the entire Western Hemisphere (so isolationism plus its opposite).

In practice this has meant trying to bully powerful states, like Brazil, and when Brazil tells us to pound sand, pretend we were just joking.  It has also meant a campaign of high seas murder in violation of U.S. and international law.  We are told that this program of summary execution is aimed at Venezuela, although no one has yet explained how murdering mariners in the Pacific targets Venezuela, which, as many people (not working for the Mad King) know, has no access to the Pacific. 

The violent unprovoked attacks on boats that may or may not be involved in smuggling Don Jr.'s favorite marching powder, like the bombing of Iran, also satisfy the Mad King's sadistic lust for inflicting agonizing violence against those who cannot effectively resist. 

Lest you think that the regime has not put forward any document setting out its foreign policy, last week it released a lengthy statement of U.S. policy toward Europe.  The normally staid New York Times described it:

The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”

Now, that hostility is official White House policy.

Hostility to our most important allies is not really a policy.  It's more like a feeling, inspired by the Mad King's hatred and contempt of democratic states and his corresponding embrace of cruel dictators like his buddy Vladimir Putin. 

Another way to describe it, according to foreign affairs commentator Anne Appelbaum, is a “long suicide note.” 

In practice this so-called policy expresses itself in support for racist neo-Nazi European political parties and adopting Russian policies for ratifying its violent illegal aggression against Ukraine as if they were American.  The abandonment of Ukraine not only sucks up to Putin, it provides (once again) corrupt business opportunities to the Mad King's bumbling plutocrat courtiers, who have replaced professional diplomats in vital negotiations. 

Once we had a foreign policy.  Now we have a Mad King ruling by whim and indulging his insatiable greed and sadism to the detriment of American national interests.

Just a reminder: in this insanity he supported by every Republican and meaningfully opposed by none.

And in media outlets supposedly devoted to careful analysis of inter alia foreign policy you get trollbait like this:

It certainly is working for Vladimir Putin. 

Another reminder: all this is being done in our name.  As with so much of the Mad King's assault on democracy and civilization, silence equals consent.

What's really got everyone hot and bothered at Harvard?

By Larry Lowell
Yard Correspondent

This week The New York Times published its 925th story claiming that Harvard was so, so close to “settling” the Trump Regime's bogus allegations against it, which have been laughed out of court time and again, with the only sticking point being that the proposed $500,000,000 tribute to the Mad King be styled as a “fine.”

The story (per Spy policy, no link to pisspoor content), like all the other pos's, seems to be based largely on leaks from billionaire buttinski Steve Schwarzman's highly-paid flacks.  Schwarzman, desperate to ingratiate himself with his liege, has (according to his shills) been telling Harvard that paying half a billion in fines is no biggie, because finaglers like him do it all the time and they're still regarded as sages by the likes of The Times.

We doubt every f***in' word.  Harvard, notoriously tight with a buck, has no intention of blowing half a billion to ingratiate itself with a demented corrupt goon when it has gotten most of its grant money back through litigation.  Harvard knows that future grants, on the other hand, may be held back on the whim of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, but may well wait for future legal action before it makes a revenue-maximizing decision.

With the fight between the University and the Regime still raging, we wondered what the undergraduates thought about the effort by a depraved Fascist regime to destroy Harvard and more generally academic inquiry and freedom of thought.

Here's what's on their minds:

 

What a surprise.

By the way, here's a quiz for all you little overachieving grinders, a/k/a Harvard undergraduates: how many of the objects in the drawing can you identify?  For extra credit (catnip to this crowd), identify the proper use of each object you name.

That Harvard undergraduates are more interested in poontang than the pronouncements of Steve Schwarzman should not come as any surprise to anyone who remembers college.  We'd only note that most of the objects drawn are generally intended for solo use.  That sounds about right for Harvard undergrads.

The actual contents of the issue are less salacious than the cover implies.   One notable omission though is the most recent sex scandal at Harvard involving University Professor, fired President, and Ladies' Man Larry Summers.  Summers, regarding as one of the most brilliant economists of his generation, at least by Larry Summers, was recently revealed to have sought the advice of his BFF, Jeffrey Epstein.

Summers had sought the wise counsel of his child rapist buddy because Faculty Lounge Lizard Larry was trying to bang a (much) younger economics professor whom he had mentored.  The younger less powerful academic apparently was not overwhelmed by the ruggedly handsome and charming 70-year-old senior professor for reasons unknown, at least to anyone who has never had to share a meal with this bulvon.

Perhaps the student editors of The Harvard Independent neglected to feature this hot story in their annual sex roundup because to all 20-year-olds, the idea of anyone over 30 having sex is risible, if not inconceivable.

So Summers has to comfort himself with his lucrative no-heavy-lifting University Professorship, his second wife, and perhaps some of the devices pictured on the Harvard Independent's cover.

But sex isn't what Harvard undergrads are getting hot and bothered about.   It's something much more important.

More important than sex to an undergraduate?  Hard to believe, amirite? 

Disgraced Harvard Prof. Larry Summers
and his mentees

But as every Harvard College student (which Larry Summers never was btw) knows, the point of going to Harvard is not to learn great truths or even how to use the devices on the cover of the Sex Issue; it's to get your ticket punched to some greater glory usually involving a graduate degree.  And that requires good grades.

But

“Our grading is too compressed and too inflated, as nearly all faculty recognize; it is also too inconsistent, as students have observed. More importantly, our grading no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission,” the report reads. Data from the Office of Institutional Research showed that 60.2% of all College grades awarded in 2025 were As, compared to 24% in 2005.

“Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work,” the report wrote. “It’s a farce.”  

Ruh-roh.

Now it's time for the midterm.  This one's an essay question: why is a 60% rate of A grades a farce as compared to 24%?  What is the proper level of non-farcical A grades?  Explain your reasoning.

It may come as a shock to Harvard undergrads and even administrators, but grade inflation, like sex, was not invented by current students.  Like sex, grade inflation has been a topic of enormous controversy for at least half a century (or at least since the days when the (white male goyische) children of the elite could go on to splendid graduate schools coincidentally also named Harvard just by being “clubabble.”)

The issue in 1975 was not too many A's; it was too few C's.  Then as now the professoriat sought to invent and then elevate an imaginary elite by whining about inflated grades.  Then as now the undergrads fretted about losing the futures they had imagined for themselves.

The reactionary professors imagined they were returning Harvard to the Platonic ideal of a small elite thinking great thoughts in the groves of academe.  Oddly enough, Socrates and Plato never felt the need to grade their students.  Anyone willing to listen and think was welcome.  Then and forever, that was an exceedingly small slice of the polis.

What would be so bad about returning to that grade-free Platonic ideal?  The only problem with abolishing grades is that consumers of Harvard graduates will always demand some way of sorting the little darlings.  If that's not grades, it's the subjective assessments of deeply flawed and often horny academics (like Summers!).  Abolishing grades would lead to even more sucking up to (or if Larry had his way, sucking)  professors and other generators of recommendations.

The issue of grading is a bottomless pit.  Any solution is going to be at best very imperfect.  Perhaps for that reason proponents of one position or another should stop pretending that they and they alone occupy the moral high ground from which they can gaze across at Plato, or at least University Professor Larry Summers attempting to buy some new toys to impress the ladies. 

Actually we have a suggestion for Harvard professors and administrators with time on their hands.  Instead of worrying about grading the students, how about worrying about grading undergraduate education?   In recent decades, Harvard has made some effort to improve the lamentable standard of teaching undergrads, which traditionally involved some old tosser reading from crumbling lecture notes in front of a thousand bored undergrads in Sanders Theater.

One incentive for reform is that the professors are cranky because they are not attracting an audience with formerly boffo ramblings.  Who wouldn't rush to attend lectures from a distinguished economics professor telling Ec. 10 students that the reason that Appalachia was poor was due to a depleted gene pool or a great philosophy professor opining that while most of ethics was worthless, he was “pretty sure” that intentional murder was wrong?

If you think that Harvard College will be like this,
boy will you be disappointed

These days, students are treating these entertainments like episodes of Stranger Things: to be streamed on demand:

“Some of the classes I’m taking have recorded lectures, so a lot of my classmates feel like there’s no need to attend lecture especially when they can watch the lecture back on 2x speed." 

Honestly, who can blame them?

Perhaps if Harvard, like colleges that actually focus on educating undergraduates, replaced its big lectures with small discussion groups led by professors (not by untrained and often weird grad students), Harvard students would show up.

The senior faculty, who regard College students as gnats, would be appalled at the idea that they would have to neglect their magnificent research in favor of wasting time teaching 19-year-olds.  But they should follow the example of University Professor Larry Summers who found time to teach undergrads while still conducting path-breaking research with his colleague Prof. Epstein on the separation of junior economics faculty from their gattkes. 

Maybe if Harvard College poo-bahs spent as much time worrying about undergraduate education as grading, they could actually someday earn an A.  At least for effort.