RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://americanmind.org/salvo/wretched-of-the-university/

Postcolonialism rivals Jacobinism and Bolshevism in its systematic destruction of civil society.

In the summer of 2020, decent Americans found themselves overcome by a torrent of propaganda besmirching the United States as a nation racist to its core, with “white privilege” making life intolerable for anyone but its immediate beneficiaries. A fanatical moralism demanded that all right-thinking people sign on to an anti-racist catechism that was as simplistic as it was absurd. And plead “guilty” untold numbers of people did, with a whiff of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the air.

Civic courage was hardly to be found, and accommodation to ready-made lies provided a momentary reprieve for those, especially on the Left, afraid of being “cancelled” by their censorious peers utilizing social media as the weapon most ready-at-hand. The ritualistic self-loathing that had long been present, even institutionalized, on college campuses became the norm in journalism, the entertainment business, corporate culture, professional sports, and in many churches and synagogues, too. As Andrew Sullivan has strikingly observed on more than one occasion, we are all living on college campuses now.

Naïve liberals and suburban housewives joined the hardened Marxists and Maoists (and grifters, too) of Black Lives Matter in demanding the radical revolutionary transformation of a country still largely free, decent, and self-critical. The police became targets of angry mobs (and Antifa terrorists), and pressure grew to withdraw police protection from the weak, aged, and vulnerable, especially in minority communities.

The revolution was driven in large part by white progressives, trust fund babies, and the like who marched as they bandied about tired and stale revolutionary slogans. In the name of “anti-racism,” whole groups of people were stigmatized for belonging to the wrong race or “gender,” an ugly word that has become meaningless as it has been weaponized. Everything was racialized, and it became verboten to judge people by “the content of their character.” Those blacks, not a few in number, who wanted to think for themselves, who refused to define themselves as helpless victims and nothing else, were subject to endless vituperation. The loud, the angry, the uncivil, and the massively uninformed were lauded for their so-called courage and social consciousness. For months, the most “privileged” Americans playacted at revolution, as if any ideological revolution can ever end well.

For all intents and purposes, America had gone mad. Grown-ups took their bearings from 18-year-olds repeating mindless and extremist slogans (and finding “systematic” violence and mass killings against black Americans where they didn’t exist). In their “socially constructed” world, an ideological Second Reality took the place of the common world where citizens debate and deliberate, sometimes contentiously but never violently, about matters of public import.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/artificial-intelligence-learning-panacea-or-progressive-trojan-horse/

Barak Obama’s Administration first reported on the future of Artificial Intelligence in an October 12, 2016 summary. A new battle is being enacted against our conservative way of being. At the center of this battle is the widespread support for and increased use of artificial Intelligence (AI). Its intrinsic values are myriad but nonetheless secreted. James Giodano, Chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program and Scholar-in-Residence in the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University cautions that “The brain is the battlefield of the future.” He believes that neuros are weapons that can be used “against humans in directional ways that can be harnessed for what’s called dual use medical purposes, the ethics of those individuals who may be competitive if not combative to us, so in other words, this can also be weaponized against others and this is where we get into the idea of novel neural weapons.”

For example, after the Arab massacre of Israelis on October 7th, there has been a concerted effort to polarize through AI’s visual propaganda functions targeting especially the younger generation using photorealistic, generative artificial intelligence. Such visual propaganda, on its surface, appears authentic but was created by a machine to use against Israel and its supporters. This effort is based on the belief that AI learning is the suasory equivalent of a second educational coming. In fact, Gruetzemacher and Whittlestone argue that AI is presently having a genuinely “transformative” effect on society at large, but in clandestine and unobvious ways.

The Foundation of AI

Stanford University’s Hoover Institution provides a succinct and useful definition of AI: “Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a computer’s ability to perform some of the functions associated with the human brain, including perceiving, reasoning, learning, interacting, problem solving, and even exercising creativity. In the last year, the main AI-related headline was the rise of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 (Generative Pretrained Transformers), on which the chatbot ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, and its most recent derivatives [the soon to be released GPT-5] are based.” The same article cautions that even the most advanced AI today has many failure modes that can prove to be unpredictable, not widely acknowledged nor easily fixed; inexplainable, but capable of leading to harmful unintended consequences.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-12-24-claudine-gay-update-now-its-data-falsification

It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.

Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject. My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”

In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day. First, some big donors ramped up threats to pull their funding. Then came a handful of allegations of plagiarism found in a few among Ms. Gay’s small number of academic papers. On December 12 the New York Times reported that the Harvard Corporation had appointed a special committee to investigate the allegations of plagiarism, and that the committee had cleared Ms. Gay. Then it emerged that a source had given the allegations of plagiarism to the New York Post back in October, and the Post had sent them to Harvard for confirmation — only to get in return a threatening letter from the Clare Locke law firm (the same firm that had recovered over $700 million from Fox in the Dominion Voting case) asserting that the accusations of plagiarism were “demonstrably false.” Then (December 19 in the Washington Free Beacon) there emerged a new dossier now with some 40 instances of alleged plagiarism — almost four for each of Ms. Gay’s eleven academic articles — many of the new allegations much more serious than the ones that the special committee had just deemed minor.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/whats-really-at-stake-with-harvard-5548875?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

The appalling testimony by the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania before the House Education Committee earlier this month has been the subject of widespread criticism, ridicule, and head-shaking surprise.

Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) whether calling for the genocide of Jews would contravene their institutions’ rules of conduct, all three temporized that it would depend on the “context.

Clearly, they had all been prepped by the same lawyers, or at least lawyers who themselves had been prepped by the same head office.

The public response was quick and brutal.

The president of UPenn, Liz Magill, was forced out within days, as was the chairman of Penn’s board.

When Harvard’s board of overseers met in an emergency session, many predicted that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, would suffer the same fate.

I could have reassured them that that wasn’t going to happen.

Why?

For the same reason I believe Ms. Gay was appointed president: because she’s black and ideologically on page with the progressive—i.e., anti-white, anti-American—mindset that has taken over elite education like a parasite inhabiting its host.

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.