The Three Blind Mice of the University Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/the-three-blind-mice-of-the-university/
I wrote on X about the three blind mice college presidents (Gay of Harvard, Kornbluth of MIT, and Magill of University of Pennsylvania).
Recently, one blind mouse has tentatively resigned under pressure, Liz Magill, former dean of the Stanford Law School and lately president of the University of Pennsylvania.
An introductory note and warning: Long gone is the old university practice of appointing the most distinguished teachers and most accomplished scholars as deans, provosts, and presidents, on the theory that they would thus be uniquely qualified to evaluate faculty performance and the university’s intellectual tempo.
In the olden days, such esteemed faculty had to be coaxed from their departments for three to five years to “do administration” as a sort of campus public service. Not so Magill and Gay, (although Kornbluth has a record of medical and biological research).
In the long ago past, there was no ethos of young faculty jumping into junior administrative posts (e.g., “special assistant to the provost,” or “associate dean of Humanities for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) as the stepping stones in their administrative cursus honorum, which prove to be soon exclusive of teaching or research.
The end result is a Harvard President Claudine Gay, whose meager and undistinguished record of publication as an untenured Stanford political science professor should not have merited tenure at any UC or perhaps even a CSU campus (I served on retention, promotion, and tenure committees at CSU Fresno).
The result is that Gay was never in any position to evaluate the relative scholarly merits of her own faculty, or due to long tenure in administration and long absence from research and tenure, intellectually or temperamentally equipped to handle some brilliant House member interrogators (most of whom lacked extensive graduate degrees but knew far more from the real arena outside of the campus).
Watch videos of their lengthy House of Representatives testimonies. They did not really listen to the Representatives’ questions. Instead, they simply gave scripted, canned, and prepped boilerplate answers about “context”—even when asked about eliminationist speech calling for the erasure of Jews. Much less were they aware of how they sounded to those without experience in the gobbledygook gibberish of the campus.
They are so acculturated to the screaming of Middle Eastern students, the radicalism of woke and DEI activists, and the campus demonization of Jews and Israel, that they naturally assumed the only threat to their positions of leadership came from their own leftwing ranks, who on spec play the loud, obnoxious, threatening, active aggressive, only suddenly when challenged to switch to the passive wounded fawn, hot-house plant, and prolonged adolescent.
Ostensibly, the three assumed that they were to dazzle the conservative House rubes, as heroic First Amendment patriots wedded to defending free speech and academic freedom at any cost—however odious and supposedly contrary to their own intolerance of anti-Semitism (that their own laxity has fueled).
But, of course, once the three walked off the cliff by claiming that anti-Semitic campus chants and verbiage to destroy Israel and all the Jews in it did not necessarily violate their own campus speech codes (depending, they said, on the “context”), and thus were only their concern if such mean words led to actual physical harassment (which, of course, anti-Semitic speech has done on all three of their campuses and with impunity), they were exposed as hollow women, and more or less eviscerated, and left embarrassed as dull-witted and morally challenged.
All three frequently and routinely in their current and past positions of university administration have punished students, faculty, and administrators, who, in their views, voiced sentiments contrary to the ethos of woke and the protocols of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion.
So, Claudine Gay, Harvard President, to take one example, has hounded faculty like Roland G. Fryer, Jr. and Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., ostensibly her ideological opponents, for “crimes” like making an off-color joke (but not calling for the wholesale slaughter of 10 million Jews in Israel) or defending Harvey Weinstein in court (but not mobbing and threatening a Jewish student filming a protest).
In sum, university presidents like the three blind mice routinely punish those who violate woke and DEI cannons of speech. They are long enemies not protectors of free speech, and punish unpopular expressions whether or not it leads to actionable behavior.
So, when anti-Semitism had left to physical confrontations against Jewish students or fear of venturing into certain spaces, none of the three had done much of anything.
All know that if one substitutes black, Latino, woman, gay, or trans for “Jewish,” then all three would have suspended or fired or expelled the speaker, without any worry about “context” or whether hate speech actually led to physical harm.
Ronald Sullivan never touched a soul. Had he defended controversial hate monger Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan, he would have faced zero consequences from President Claudine Gay.
In short, prevaricating finally caught up with these elite apparatchiks—and in front of the entire world.
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