RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elite-universities-collapse-presents-an-opportunity

If you’ve ever watched a monster movie, you know the scene. The triumphant heroes walk away, the creature they had just vanquished left for dead behind them. And then, in a furious flash just before the credits start rolling, it opens its eyes and pounces, assuring us that evil never truly dies and that the sequel is coming.

That was the vibe at Harvard University last week. No sooner was its purported plagiarist president, Claudine Gay, forced to step down after struggling to find fault with calls on campus for genocide against Jews than the haughtiest Ivy found itself in trouble again. The university had announced the creation of an anti-Semitism task force, but before it could even convene, some critics pointed out that its co-chairman, history professor Derek Penslar, wasn’t exactly the man for the job.

Penslar, wrote the university’s former president, Lawrence Summers, “has publicly minimized Harvard’s anti-Semitism problem, rejected the definition used by the US government in recent years of anti-Semitism as too broad, invoked the need for the concept of settler colonialism in analyzing Israel, referred to Israel as an apartheid state and more.” Harvard, Summers went on, would never appoint anyone who made light of racism, say, to an anti-racism task force, which only proved the existence of a “double standard between anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice.”

Summers and Harvard’s other critics are right about the facts but entirely wrong when it comes to the bigger picture. The problem isn’t really Penslar or Gay, and it won’t be solved by a task force, however honest and well intentioned. The problem is Harvard itself, what it believes, and its commitment to an insidious ideology—best-recognized by its acronym, DEI, for diversity, equity, and inclusion—that is inherently opposed to the notion of free and unfettered exchange of ideas.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-incredible-denseness-of-the-academic-mind/

Dogmatically slumbering in its academic silo, Harvard seems to have missed the hard lessons that increasingly follow from doubling down on illiberal “woke” ideas like DEI. If the fates of Bud Lite, Disney, and left-leaning legacy newspapers and magazines, which are laying off reporters in droves, weren’t enough of a warning, the damage to Harvard’s reputation, donations, and enrollment that has followed the forced retirement of their serial plagiarist and functionally antisemitic president, should have penetrated even Harvard’s dense minds.

But the lessons of experience that the Romans believed even fools can learn, can’t penetrate the incredible denseness of the academic mind, a feature of intellectuals since antiquity. As Cicero once quipped, “There is nothing so absurd that hasn’t been said by some philosopher.” But today’s cognitive elite “brights” have gone far beyond even the silliest ancient philosophers. From the long, bloody scientism of Marxism, to the postmodern “higher nonsense” and preposterous intellectual gimmicks like “systemic racism” and “transgenderism,” our institutions of higher learning have degenerated into satiric parodies redolent of Juvenal and Jonathan Swift.

So what does Harvard do in response to the sorry spectacle of their students protesting in support of a sadistic gang of thugs who have sworn to wipe out the Jews; trading in antisemitic lies and slurs redolent of Der Stürmer, and bullying and assaulting with impunity Jewish students? Do they enforce their existing codes of conduct that the students are violating?

Of course not. They confect a “Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism.” Yes, they’re going to have a gaggle of profs and administrators and other “stakeholders” sit around and talk about “combating” the very behavior Harvard either ignored, rationalized, or approved. And as the Wall Street Journal points out, “Harvard simultaneously announced a task force to fight Islamophobia, in keeping with the new habit on the left that antisemitism can’t be condemned by itself.”

That must be what they mean by “equity,” which is a cant word for the equality of outcomes––even though historically, hate crimes against Jews comprise more than half of all religion-based hate-crimes, whereas those against Muslims are considerably fewer.