RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/bill-ackman-how-to-fix-harvard?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Claudine Gay’s ouster won’t change things. The college needs a complete overhaul, starting with a resignation of the board and the removal of DEI from every corner of the institution…

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8—before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza—came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw then-president Claudine Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign—it was the “canary in the coal mine”—despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. 

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-presses-on-with-inclusiveness

In her parting shot at Harvard, newly resigned president Claudine Gay has provided a reminder of why she never should have been made president in the first place. Gay stepped down today following months of turmoil caused by her reaction to the Hamas October 7 terror attacks on Israel and by accusations of plagiarism.

Gay got her job because of her race. No white professor, even a female one, would have been elevated to the premier college presidency in the United States on so meager a research record. It is fitting, then, that Gay plays the race card to the end. She lauds her abortive presidency as giving hope to those around the world who saw in it a “vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging.” In other words, without a black president, students “of color” would not be certain of belonging at Harvard. Never mind that for decades Harvard has so enthusiastically sought out black students that it admitted many of them with academic credentials that would have been all but disqualifying if presented by whites and Asians. Now, without a black president, that vision is apparently threatened, even as Gay concedes that Harvard’s “doors remain open.”

Gay’s sense of self-worth is breathtaking. She already has a legacy in mind for her five-month long presidency, the shortest in Harvard’s history. She hopes that her tenure is remembered “as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity.” Before her presidency, in other words, Harvard was deficient in the striving-for-common-humanity department. Never mind that Gay had auditioned for the presidency with a call to infuse the hunt for racism throughout every corner of the university, an academic agenda based on the idea that America remains a perennially white supremacist country.  As president, she was true to her word, introducing what the Corporation euphemistically calls “ambitious new academic initiatives” in “inequality.” 

The mission of a university, however, is the transmission of a civilizational inheritance and the testing of new knowledge. The goal of “finding a common humanity” (or, even worse, of combatting “bias and hate,” as Gay also puts it) serves as a pretext for the therapeutic diversity infrastructure.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/claudine-gays-resignation-wont-solve-harvards-problems/

The new year is barely two days old, yet it has already witnessed a surprise conclusion to a sordid controversy from 2023: Claudine Gay has tendered her resignation as president of Harvard University after her unsuccessful testimony before Congress on the subject of campus antisemitism led to a deeper exploration of her questionable academic background and uncovered a stunning number of examples of plagiarism dotting a publication history only a mere eleven pieces long in the first place.

It is a pathetic end for the first black and female president of such an august intellectual institution, but one that all involved — Gay, the university administration, its faculty, and the unruly student body alike — were wholly complicit in bringing about. Gay’s resignation is richly deserved, but it obviously isn’t going to solve the crisis America currently faces on its elite campuses.

At this point, there can be no denying the gravity of the plagiarism accusations against her. All throughout her academic career dating back to her days as a graduate student, Claudine Gay engaged in serial plagiarism in nearly all of her published writing. It is no exaggeration at all to say that Gay was revealed — by the dogged work of researchers like Christopher Rufo as well as Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon and Ryan Mills and Zach Kessel here at National Review, among others — to have been a phony scholar, one whose very small and uninfluential body of work was itself appropriated from others in a repeating pattern of indifference to the basics of proper scholarship. Gay seems to have been in the university business for other reasons, and (even more shamefully) her peers recognized and celebrated it: Despite having a negligible record of scholarship — and this before it was understood that what little existed contained instances of plagiarism — she was rapidly promoted by her peers from a tenure-track faculty position to a full professorship with tenure, then made dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, then president of Harvard itself. It is safe to surmise now that none of this happened because of her brilliant contributions to advancing knowledge.

https://thedailybs.com/author/brandon-poulter/

Universities offered students in the U.S. the opportunity to enroll in many courses that push gender ideology and left-wing activism during the 2023-2024 school year.

Princeton University offered a class titled “Black + Queer in Leather: Black Leather/BDSM Material Culture” in the Spring 2023 semester, according to the university’s course catalog. The class will survey black BDSM culture via research available in libraries and individuals involved in the groups that participate in the culture.

“We will consider the fragility of archival engagement with these communities by surveying existing BDSM archives in research libraries, community groups, and individuals and their personal ephemera,” the course description reads.

Princeton made headlines in 2022 following the addition of this course to the catalog as well as “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body” and “Anthropology of Religion: Fetishism and Decolonization.”

Tuition at Princeton costs more than $59,000 per year and can cost more than $76,000 including housing and food costs, according to the university’s website.

Westminster College in Salt Lake City offers a course titled “How to Be a Bitch,” according to their course catalog. Students are encouraged to “unpack” the words “bitch” and bossy,” which are “interesting but problematic.”

One course offered at Wesleyan University, titled “Queer Russia,” offers students an overview of the influence of queer people on Russian culture, according to the university’s 2023-2024 course catalog. The course “focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present.”

The university offered another class titled “Bad Sex” which debates the value of sex and questions if modesty in sexual relations is a worthwhile pursuit, according to the 2023-2024 course catalog.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/re-envisioning-the-university/

A few weeks ago, a parent wrote to me asking if I could recommend at least a dozen non-woke and ideologically uncompromised schools for her son to attend in the United States. She, her husband, and her son had been researching for eighteen months. They found only three schools. I thought about her dilemma and began my own investigation.

After two weeks I told her, sadly, that I could not make any good-faith recommendations. Any school I might recommend today could and, in all likelihood, would go the corrupt route in a year’s time. I identified five schools I would have recommended enthusiastically two years ago. Predictably, they are as left-leaning, woke, and egregiously anti-American and anti-Western Civilization today as one could ever have imagined. The idea pathogens suffusing our culture and universities as of today have no fool-proof inoculants. I advised her to find a college whose faculty appeared to have consistently produced old-fashioned scholarly work over time. Look at the syllabi of professors in the discipline your son wants to pursue and keep your fingers crossed, I added. She thanked me, and then asked me if the universities were burning down that fast.

Yes, I responded. I’m afraid the institutions are burning at an unprecedented rate. The radical professoriate, the bloated and totalitarian bureaucratic administrators, and their ventriloquists—the student rebels—have already lit the fires. It is not a passionate creative fire that lights the way and inspires the soul to new and visionary heights; rather, it is a nihilistic and rageful fire that burns everything of value in its path because it is of value, and it is foundational and universal. That raging fire is selectively destructive.

And what is the goal of such intellectual arsonists? To annihilate the social goods, the values and the principles that make us virtuous, and human. The goal is not primarily the destruction of our republic or of Western civilization. It is the destruction of the humanity of each individual and the concomitant creation of the post-human or trans-human. Such creatures are existential antipodes to the concept of civilization (any civilization) as such. Civilization will not die apocalyptically, but it will be bled to death by thousands of tiny scratches via the death of each individual as his or her humanity is slowly eviscerated by the putrefaction, the rot, the corruption, the indoctrination, and the razed agency of those who will not think and dissent from received wisdom and codified orthodoxy.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/02/campus-idleness-has-bred-extremism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

This article appears as “Idle Minds” in the February 2024 print edition of National Review.

The political consequences of campus sloth

‘Don’t these people have something better to do?” It’s a question I’ve been asked repeatedly in recent years as students and faculty at prestigious colleges have beclowned themselves.

In the wake of Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel, the moral turpitude on campus has gotten the lion’s share of attention. But there’s something that gets far less attention than it deserves: How do these people have the energy to carry out this insanity? Where do students at Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Cornell, MIT, and Yale find the time to tear down posters of kidnapping victims, bully fellow students, cheer calls for genocide, conduct sit-ins, and make all those pro-Hamas posterboard signs? Don’t they have classes to attend and work to do?

The surprise is that these students don’t have all that much work to do. Many are bored, and all that time on their hands may give them an appetite for mischief. Many are lonely. The surgeon general recently warned about an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation,” particularly among those ages 15 to 24. In that age group, time spent in person with friends has plunged by 70 percent since 2003, down to an average of 40 minutes a day in 2020. College-age youth are spending five or six hours a day online, surfing videos, gaming, and scrolling social media. And few have jobs. In the 1980s, 40 percent of America’s college students worked full-time (35 hours or more); by 2020, that figure had fallen to one in ten. There’s also been a substantial decline in students working part-time. In 1995–96, 42 percent of undergrads held part-time jobs (34 hours or less). By 2018, that number was down to 30 percent.

The restlessness is less pervasive at regional institutions and community colleges, where students are far more likely to attend part-time, live at home, be older, and have kids or jobs. Among community-college students, nearly a third work more than 30 hours a week and 15 percent have two or more jobs. Students are far less likely to hang out in dorms or on a manicured quad and are more focused on transportation, work schedules, and child care. At these institutions, the vibe is more about getting down to business than gearing up for trouble: Busy students just don’t have as much leisure for performative rebellion. Tellingly, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators’ report on “Advancing Racial Justice on Campus” quoted an official at one “commuter school” who fretted that, absent “formal outlets set up for consultation, support, or awareness of what advocacy can be,” busy students will “just go home at the end of the day.”

The nation’s 200 or 300 elite colleges and universities constitute only a small slice of American higher education, but they have an outsized impact on the nation’s culture — and serve as the pipeline to America’s executive suites, law firms, and elected offices. At Harvard and similar schools, some 98 percent of undergraduates live on campus, basting in a progressive hothouse where there’s a patina of intense busyness but not much actual work. This is a recipe for alienated, aimless students to fuel the toxicity that has seeped out from colleges and into American institutions.

https://thespectator.com/topic/harvard-claudine-gay-boot-plagiarism/

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of Harvard University — as I am of writing about her. As I pointed out a year ago in this space, Harvard’s appointment of Gay, a black woman, was simply the next chapter in the university’s long-running pursuit of its racial spoils system. Gay’s entire academic career has been a testimony to the power of that enterprise. What a prize Harvard had in Claudine Gay: a black female who was an avid proponent of the whole “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” racket. Could there be any doubt that she was being groomed for the top slot?  

When Gay joined the presidents of MIT and UPenn (also female, but unfashionably pale-faced) before the House Committee on Education, she, like her peers, beclowned herself. “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate you university’s code of conduct?” That was the super-easy-to-answer question that Representative Elise Stefanik posed to the ladies. They tied themselves in knots over that one — it all depends on “context,” don’t you see — and Liz Magill, the (now former) president of Penn sealed her fate by producing a truly cringe-making video a day or two later in which she groveled, apologized  and underscored her moral pygmyhood. 

In short order, Magill was shown the door by Penn’s board. “One down, two to go!” was the chant among many critics. MIT seems to have successfully circled the wagons around its president Sally Kornbluth. But Claudine Gay was more or less in the position of someone who gets stopped for speeding and then is discovered to have been driving on an expired license. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/los-angeles-schools-are-funding-for-failure

For decades, progressives have attributed black students’ low academic skills to school underfunding. Attend any graduate education program or sit in on any legislative hearing, and you will hear that stingy white taxpayers deny majority-black schools the financial resources necessary to close the academic achievement gap. Americans are to imagine cash-starved inner-city classrooms that would make a prairie schoolhouse look luxurious—teachers forced to ration textbooks, students lacking pencils and paper, harried principals drowning in administrative duties due to the lack of staff.

A recently announced initiative from the Los Angeles Unified School District, the public school system in Los Angeles County, is a good place to test the underfunding theory. February 5, 2024, will mark the start of a district-wide “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” (Previous LAUSD “weeks of action” have included a week in October 2023 organized around “National Coming Out Day.”) The district has distributed a teacher “toolkit” of suggestions for conducting the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action, compiled, as the toolkit notes, by the district’s “SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE.”

Here is our first clue for assessing the underfunding theory: any bureaucracy that slaps acronyms on its component parts is not a bare-bones organization. The names of its innumerable departmental byways must be abbreviated, lest they take up too much space in print or in speech.

“SMH,” “BSAP,” and “HRDE” stand for the district’s School Mental Health bureaucracy, its Black Student Achievement Plan bureaucracy, and its Human Rights, Diversity and Equity bureaucracy. The HRDE bureaucracy is itself part of the Student Health and Human Services bureaucracy. Possessors of these sinecures are hidden from sight, far from the classroom. Funding such offices requires princely sums; the BSAP just received an additional $26 million in 2023, on top of its existing budget. The BSAP bankrolls counselors, climate advocates, and psychiatric social workers to work with black students in “high priority” schools. It doles out “Innovation Capacity-Building” grants of up to $100,000 to entities that promise to improve black achievement.

Any school system that can afford climate advocates (as part of a black uplift plan, no less) is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Any school system that runs a massive system of subcontracting for “psychiatric social workers” and “counselors” is not hurting for taxpayer dollars. Such a system has more money than it knows what to do with. Indeed, the LAUSD budget for the 2022–23 school year was $20 billion—more than that of some nations. Divide that pot among the district’s 397,623 K-12 students, and taxpayers are paying the equivalent of an Ivy League tuition—over $50,000—for every student, every year. Add “clients” in other functions that the LAUSD has embraced— early education centers, infant centers, and adult education—and the district spends a still-lavish $35,341 per student.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/12/academic-bias-and-censorship-are-huge-problems-and-we-can-prove-it/

A team of researchers measured contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth.

Academic censorship just got accurately measured.

For the prestigious professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a team of top academics — which, in the interest of full disclosure, included Yours Truly as a bit player — recently attempted both to examine contemporary levels of censorship in the American academy and understand the motivations behind it. The results obtained by our team, led by UPenn’s Cory Clark, were interesting and to some extent not very surprising — but deeply unsettling.

Censorship is extraordinarily prevalent across modern academia. Per one large data set reviewed for the project, 34 percent of all tenured and tenure-track faculty members report open “peer pressure” to “avoid controversial research.” Interestingly, the motives of today’s bluenoses seem to be, at some level, positive ones (Clark uses the term “pro-social”). Censors genuinely want to interfere with the spread of ideas that they see as racist or sexist, rather than to simply exercise power. However, the in-practice effects are the same: Since contemporary leftists see almost everything as racist and sexist, the effects of the theoretically moral motivations that dominate on today’s campuses are frequently absurd — i.e., the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers after he noted that men and women are different.

First, let’s look at the data. Drawing on both high-quality, preexisting databases and our own analyses, the Clark Team documented an extraordinarily high level of hard censorship (i.e., journal blacklisting of certain research categories), soft censorship (“cancellation”), and self-censorship (self-explanatory, one hopes) in the modern academy. Simply put, cancel culture is no myth. Overall, “hundreds of scholars have been sanctioned for expressing controversial ideas,” and the rate of sanctioning has increased substantially over the past decade.

This trend can be outlined empirically, using hard numbers. In sum, 4 to 11 percent of current university or collegiate faculty have been threatened with dismissal or other discipline related to some aspect of their teaching or research work, 34 percent have been “peer pressure[d] to avoid controversial research,” and fully 25 percent describe themselves as being very or “extremely” likely to self-censor during the professional research process. Hell, it may be no coincidence that we named the paper “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists,” rather than simply “Censorship Is Everywhere in Academia!”

Disturbingly, the Inquisitional atmosphere of the contemporary campus seems to be supported by a sizable minority of its denizens. Per the data, “9-25% of academics and 43% of PhD students . . . support dismissal campaigns for controversial academics.” Many of these individuals report willingness to behave in a biased fashion against right-wingers and other controversial scholars in the context of “hiring, promotions, grants, and publications.”