The President of Harvard and 'Her Truth'

Was she hired because of  the 'intersectionality' of her race, sex,  and surname? Story here.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay has apologized for her widely condemned Congressional testimony on campus antisemitism, which she said "failed to convey what is my truth."

Her truth?  My ass!  There is no such thing as her truth, my truth or yours or theirs, multiply your 'pronouns' beyond necessity and sanity as you will. But I have made this point before. Go to my truth category. True and True For  is a representative  post.

Vito sends the following tweet from that indefatigable quill-driver and purveyor of insights, Victor Davis Hanson. I have been following and promoting this guy for many years, and so it is with great pleasure that I see him at the top of his game, with the influence he deserves. Hanson's tweet below the fold.

Seeing your short post on the genius who is Harvard's president, I thought that you would appreciate the long tweet that VDH posted on X this afternoon:

Our Three Blind Mice

​​​​​​“Three blind mice. Three blind mice. See how they run. See how they run…”

The recent testimonies of the three university presidents (Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and [soon to be departed?] University of Pennsylvania’s Liz McGill) concerning their inaction about endemic anti-Semitism on their campuses have probably done more damage to higher education than any recent event in memory. (And note there was not a white, male, heterosexual supposed oppressor to be found among the enlightened).

We know they know they failed because two at least clumsily tried damage repair over the next few days that only confirmed their initial stupidity. And a herd of other scared university presidents suddenly have now issued their own memoranda professing their supposed zero tolerance politics for anti-Semitism on campus.

Still, do not believe that any are too sincere given they remain for now still more afraid of their DEI/woke/hard left faculty and students than they are of alumni, donors, or us the taxpayers.

But note the following:

1)    The three blind mice could not even lie well. Like nearly all contemporary university presidents, they have long revoked admissions, suspended students, or relieved faculty from teaching for any language, expression, or advocacy they considered incorrect, which translates as anything not compatible with wokism or DEI.

 Invoking ‘freedom of speech’ to disguise their moral cowardice is pathetic when they have never on their campuses believed in freedom of speech. One incorrect word about someone trans, a misplaced pronoun, or a clumsy reference to a non-white student, and the offender would be punished immediately—followed by the usual performance-art, virtue-signaling, “this is not who we are”/“there is no place for such hatred on this campus” memo from a careerist dean or bully provost. Instead, they have excused their censorship by arguing that in their campus enclaves, as in a corporation, they have the right to set their own codes of behavior—without taxpayers subsidies.

 But the issue is not so much “free speech”, but the equal application of rules and laws. These presidents adhere to systemic prejudice, in which free speech and rules of behavior are predicated on ideology as well as race and ethnicity. Worse still, they cloak such neanderthal reactionaryism in gobbledygook progressive platitudes.

In their ridiculous white-oppressor/non-, white-oppressed reductionist world, advocating the destruction of Israel, and the Jewish people with it, is no big deal. Indeed, it pays dividends among their DEI and foreign student constituencies.

So they are upset not that they have de facto institutionalized anti-Semitism to such a degree that it is now inviting physical assaults on their own students, but that they have been caught and called out on it.

Bottom line: the nation learned that these people don’t care about their own campuses cheering on mass rape, mutilation, and beheading or calling for the extinction of Israel and all the Jews in it, because Jews as whites are on the wrong side of their victim/victimizer DEI binary, and suffer the additional wage of anti-Semitism.

There is no career upside in their twisted worlds in defending Jews in Israel—or anywhere—from precivilizational barbarism.

2)    All of these elite university presidents supposedly were once top scholars, seasoned faculty, and experienced deans and provosts. In other words, they are the purported best and brightest of what academia now has to offer us.

And it turns out to be not much at all.

Note in minutes they were utterly eviscerated by Republican congressional representatives with no such academic credentials, but with plenty of intelligence, logic, street smarts and common sense acquired from politics or business or non-academic experience.

When the president of Harvard or MIT is rendered a moral pygmy and intellectual lightweight by our local congressional representatives, it warns us of what higher education has become and perhaps reminds why academics should be kept as far away from governance as possible. (Professors—e.g., a Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama—usually have proved poor if not dangerous presidents).

After such skilled grilling, we owe a great deal of respect for the abilities and moral sense of these Republican House members.

3)    The only reason the three showed any remorse or the next day tried to reset, was transitory fear of financial consequences, as in being blamed for a temporary drop-off in donations.

But that reality underscores that we the people do have power over even our elite and private universities and can rescue them from themselves, if we understand that those who feign a supposed disdain for money are the most eager to acquire it, as we saw with the Bankman-Fried trio.

In other words, the taxpayer can reign in a Harvard or MIT—should the U.S. government condition billions of dollars in annual subsidies to campuses on non-discriminatory policies, reconsider tax-exemptions for university giving, tax their endowment income until higher education is truly disinterested and non-partisan, and remove the government from the $2 trillion student loan racket that ensures tuition inflation, administrative bloat, and generations of youth suffering from arrested development.

Comments

[DaveB]

Love me some VDH. I intended on enumerating the epithets he employed in the essay, but they speak for themselves in situ.

[Vito B. Caiati]

"All of these elite university presidents supposedly were once top scholars, seasoned faculty, and experienced deans and provosts. In other words, they are the purported best and brightest of what academia now has to offer us.”

On the “not so much at all,” Christopher F. Rufo yesterday offers evidence that Gay repeatedly violated Harvard’s rules on plagiarism in her 1997 doctoral dissertation: “Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?” (https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist).

And Bill Ackerman, the billionaire and public enemy of antisemites of whatever stripe, offers the opinion, although anonymous, of a “a senior member of the Harvard” that these allegations are “credible” (https://twitter.com/BillAckman, tweet Dec. 10, 8:52 PM).

[BV]

So Gay is a plagiarist? Why does that not surprise me? On the wrong side of the River Charles sits Boston University where Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized portions of his dissertation. (I am NOT suggesting that King and Gay are morally equivalent: King towers above her.) So perhaps Gay thinks: If a black man can get away with it, why not a black woman?

Perhaps Gay is like Biden. Biden, bereft of a moral compass and rooted in no principles, sees others (Bill, Hillary, Obama, et al. get away with bad behavior (lying, bullshitting, grifting, chicaneru of all sorts) and thinks to himself: that's what politicians do, so I'll do it too. Everybody does it! That's how you play the game.

[BV]

Going a bit deeper:

Truth is not a value for the Left

and even worse, on the 'woke' Left:

There is no truth.

[BV]

Make of this what you will. I take no position on it. https://www.aol.com/israel-sent-suitcases-cash-gaza-162531699.html

Some people have an authoritarian personality structure. They will believe damned-near anything the authorities proclaim, as witness the recent ovine capitulation of useful idiots to the pronouncements of the now-discredited Fauci.

Other people have a conpiratorial mind-set: they see or suspect conspiracies everywhere. One of the latter sent me the above link.

On yesterday's date, Tom Merton died near Bangkok. A man sent me two books he published alleging that Merton was assassinated by the CIA.

Could be! The more I know about the Deep State, the more I am inclined to smell a globalist-anti-liberty rat behind what they do via their puppet Joey B.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Also of interest, Rabbi Dov Fischer on the other "bastard," the one at Penn, who was fired and the national resistance, Jewish and Christian, to antisemitism: https://spectator.org/jews-goodbye-liz-magill-and-good-riddance-you-bastard/

[oz the ostrich]

Aristotle's definition of truth should be taught in every High School.

“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”. Metaphysics, 1011b25

[BV]

Thanks for the link, Vito. Fischer is my kind of writer. He reminds me of myself, the parenthetical pirouetters, e.g. But he did misspell 'et al.'

Since I sometimes use terms of abuse to refer to our political opponents, the question arises for me: is it ever morally acceptable to treat our opponents/enemies with utter contempt assuming that they are all sons and daughters of the same Father?

At the moment I don't have the energy to set forth the problem properly, but it is a difficult and important one.

[BV]

Oz,

I agree. Unfortunately, your nominalism prevents you from properly explicating the Aristotelian definition.

[BV]

I said above that Rabbi Fischer misspelled 'et al.' But I just now noticed that above I wrote 'piroutters.' But in my case it was a mere typographical error, not a misspelling! (GRIN)

[BV]

The rising tide of ant-semitism is yet another argument for civilian possession of the AR-15, especially among Jews.

But among Christians as well. 'First they came for the Saturday people, then they came for the Sunday people."

And non-religious conservatives to boot. A liberty-inimical government infiltrated and controlled by leftist totalitarians cannot be effectively opposed with mere words, or appeals to conscience or to sweet reason. A reasonable man knows that there are times when the hard fist of unreason is the only effective antidote to evil-doers.

The reasonable know that reason has limits.

[BV]

Niall Ferguson on the Treason of the Intellectuals. https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich

Carol Swain on Claudine Gay's plagiarism. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/12/12/scholar-carol-swain-on-breitbart-news-daily-if-harvard-president-claudine-gay-was-a-white-male-she-would-be-fired/

Harvard is getting exactly the president it hired. https://freebeacon.com/campus/harvard-is-getting-exactly-the-president-it-hired/

DEI and Jews https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-dei-complex-will-never-protect-jews

The politics of tribal nonsense https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/politics-tribal-nonsense-wilfred-reilly

[BV]

I expect more from Asians that this: https://nypost.com/2023/12/13/news/boston-mayor-under-fire-for-secret-no-whites-christmas-party/