RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-20-elite-american-universities-completely-beyond-hope

In a post last week I marveled at the sudden discovery by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT of the importance of freedom of speech when it involves demonstrators favoring elimination of Israel and slaughter of Jews. Yet somehow, at the same institutions, comparable principles just don’t seem to apply in the case of basic dissent from leftist political orthodoxy. When the official party line gets questioned, all the elite universities have multiple tactics to diminish and banish the deviators, whether that be by demanding loyalty oaths (e.g., “diversity statements”) in hiring or admissions, holding mandatory “diversity” or “sensitivity” training sessions, disinviting speakers, conducting pretextual investigations of dissenters, funding the favored and denying tenure to the disfavored, and many other such methods.

So how bad is it out there on elite campuses, really? It’s not so easy to find out. Mostly, the schools keep the worst of the rot fairly well hidden from the public, and for that matter from alumni. The publications sent to alumni (I get several of them) wildly play down the extent of the left wing political orthodoxy enforcement.

But the controversy following the Congressional testimony of the three Presidents had caused the curtain to get somewhat pulled back. The past couple of weeks have seen a few enterprising commenters putting together some collections of very revealing university materials for students, and of statements by university officials.

My first example comes from an unlikely source, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times named Pamela Paul. Ms. Paul is a relatively recent addition to the Times’s stable of regular columnists, having come off a stint as editor of their Book Review. Many commenters at the Times seem to think Ms. Paul is a “conservative,” although I would say that is far overstating things. (For example, here is a November 30 column about the possibility of a second Trump presidency (“[W]e know there’s a bomb under the table — the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency . . . [C]rippling destruction . . . will ensue.”), and another from September 21 defending President Biden against a potential impeachment (“The impeachment inquiry is just the latest twisted Republican abuse of Democratic precedent.”))

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/12/20/a-letter-to-my-harvard-classmates/

Andrew I. Fillat spent his career in technology venture capital and information technology companies. He is also the co-inventor of relational databases. He has two degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard

The following is a letter, edited for relevance to a broader audience, sent to Section D, Harvard Business School (HBS), Class of 1972. The first year at HBS is spent entirely with one’s section. Its purpose was to explain my resignation as section secretary after the Harvard Board affirmed support of Claudine Gay as its president, and antisemitic intimidation remains unpunished.

To my section mates:

On the Dec.4 congressional hearing the university president, its meaning, and its fallout: There is no question it was political theater. But that does not invalidate its usefulness. The state of higher education is now front-and-center and that is very much needed. Too many colleges have devolved into political, social, and ideological activism at the expense of education and training its graduates to exalt open-mindedness, critical and analytical thinking, acceptance of history and classics and the extraction of lessons from them, and a search for truth. HBS, through its case method, is the exemplar of benefits of this approach. But that seemingly ends at the river’s edge. (The HBS is across the Charles River from the university.)  Universities are graduating students with grossly insufficient skills to do productive work; ask anyone you know who is in management at a company how it is to deal with undergraduates that have been hired in the last decade. This does not bode well at all for U.S. competitiveness on the world stage.

On free speech: I believe that the requirement for free expression at universities emanates not from the First Amendment but from the core mission of any secular educational institution. Freedom exists to create an environment described above that is focused on education. Yet Harvard and other universities already undermine themselves with support for “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and speech codes that serve only to shut down exposure to ideas students reflexively do not like. Worse, speech or mob protests that are clearly intimidating, harassing, or threatening are diametrically opposed to open discourse and inquiry, not to mention how they deprive the targeted students free and safe access to the education they are paying for. Leaders of these efforts must be held to account, but to date no punishment has been meted out.

On punishment: I happen to know that President Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended discipline and was rebuffed by the faculty committee with sole authority to punish student behavior. As to Harvard and Penn, it is not known what disciplinary procedures exist or what has been recommended. But the case of Roland Fryer, a black professor at Harvard who was arguably unjustly defenestrated by a faculty committee led by Gay is instructive. The details of this have become public, and it shows that Gay can be extremely forceful when pursuing her convictions.

On DEI: The extensive diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy built at great expense and so avidly supported by Gay during her career exposed its corrupt ideology when it immediately abandoned the Jewish minority in the face of antisemitic demonstrations.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/claudine-gays-dei-empire

Harvard president Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for minimizing Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited her presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay’s career at Harvard—as professor, dean, and president—racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.

Over the course of her career, Gay quietly built a “diversity” empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a “hard day” and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining “steadfast” in her commitment to producing “diversity”—a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.

While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs led by Gay were new. Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, which released a series of recommendations the following year for engaging in the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say—their race and sex alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/12/the_real_claudine_gay_scandal.html

Dr. Claudine, current President of Harvard University, is one lucky woman or, as she might describe herself a “a lucky woman of color.” She first survived her dreadful testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, where she refused to unambiguously denounce calls from Harvard students and faculty to kill all Israeli Jews. It was an embarrassing performance filled with weasel words and amorphous defenses such as “it all depends on context” as if genocide might be legitimate in some circumstances.

Gay’s second lucky break was to survive clear-cut evidence that she was a career plagiarist, and this scholarly dishonesty far exceeded inadvertent sloppiness. Side-by-side comparisons of Gay’s writings with the published work of others displayed smoking-gun proof, and the official Harvard definition of “plagiarism” offered zero wiggle room due to substituting a new word or two for the original. No student or faculty member of Harvard could possibly accept Gay’s excuses and,  ironically, as a Harvard dean Gay had presided over the expulsion of 27 undergraduates for plagiarism. Predictably, she denied everything: “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship,” she wrote. “Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards.” Keep in mind the former Harvard president Larry Summers suffered defenestration for merely opining that men and woman differed in mathematical abilities.

But, once again, luck was with her. The Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, praised her work (blatant plagiarism was referred to as “a few instances of inadequate citations), 700 faculty members signed a letter of support, and a group of former Harvard presidents proclaimed, “As former Presidents of Harvard University, we offer our strong support for Claudine Gay as she leads Harvard into the future. We look forward to supporting President Gay in whatever ways we can as Harvard faces this challenging moment for higher education and the wider world.”

Harvard’s malfeasance runs deeper, namely how did Claudine Gay become Dr. Claudine Gay, Ph.D., and this tale goes to the very core of Harvard’s intellectual integrity.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-rapid-growth-of-educational-freedom-is-unprecedented/

According to the latest ABCs of School Choice  – EdChoice’s comprehensive report about all matters pertaining to education freedom – policymakers in 40 states have debated 111 educational choice bills in 2023, 79 percent of which related to education savings accounts. (ESAs allow parents to receive a deposit of public funds into a government-authorized savings account with restricted, but multiple uses. Those funds can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, higher education expenses, and other approved customized learning services and materials.)

The report continues, “As the months ticked by, a total of seven states enacted new choice programs and ten expanded ones already in operation. As of this writing, eight states have joined Arizona and West Virginia in offering all students choice, making 2023 the Year of Universal Choice.”

Overall, 32 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have some form of private school choice programs, with 80 programs impacting about 800,000 students nationwide.

The teachers’ unions and their fellow travelers are fuming over the turn of events. One of the grinches’ ongoing claims is that any privatization measure hurts traditional public schools. However, when researcher Greg Forster looked at 34 studies on the effects of school choice on government-run schools, he found that in 32, school choice improves academic outcomes in public schools affected by the program, while one saw no visible difference, and just one found a negative impact.

Yes, competition works.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-is-big-business-at-its-worst-tax-exempt-price-gouging-stakeholder-capitalism-fc091443?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Most Americans probably heard of the Harvard Corp. for the first time last week, when it issued a supercilious statement affirming its support for Harvard President Claudine Gay. The corporation, Harvard’s governing body, wrote that Ms. Gay “is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”

The statement was effectively a middle finger to alumni such as hedge-fund titan Bill Ackman, who had demanded Ms. Gay be canned after she equivocated before Congress over whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules against bullying. The corporation wished to convey it wouldn’t bow to outside pressure.

Corporation is an apt appellation for Harvard and other Ivy League schools, considering they operate more like for-profit businesses than educational institutions. Unlike businesses, however, they lack shareholders to hold them accountable. This makes them models of the left’s “stakeholder capitalism” paradigm.

The Harvard Corp. consists of 13 members, including the president. It is self-selecting—members elect new members—and boasts that it is “the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere.” Governing bodies of other Ivy League schools, including Yale and Columbia, are also referred to as corporations, which are structured to limit alumni influence in their affairs.