The elevator keeps going down; Harvard can get off at any floor.
Merit used to be sacrosanct at Ivy League Universities, with Harvard as the gold standard. Harvard hired the best academic minds to teach, and only admitted the best of the best students. Now, merit is far down on the list. Harvard’s priority initiatives include DEI, affirmative action, antisemitism, progressive ideology, and switching out American students for international students.
Harvard has created an ideological bubble within which the students, faculty, and staff exist and live this realignment of priorities as the catechism of their universe. Any newcomers to the bubble must align absolutely with those priorities and ideology. Over time, this has resulted in the faculty becoming almost entirely liberal. New faculty are no longer the “cream of the crop”, they are, at best, the cream of the liberal crop.
It’s much worse for the student body. Harvard proclaimed its commitment to diversity so strongly that it lowered its admission standards for some ethnic groups and raised them higher for others. This resulted in very highly qualified Asian applicants being rejected so other underqualified ethnic groups could be admitted. Not only is this practice eviscerating meritocracy in Harvard’s admissions process, it is also illegal. Harvard was sued for racial discrimination and was found guilty by the Supreme Court in 2023.
Unbelievably, that is only the tip of the iceberg in Harvard’s disgraceful conduct. Antisemitism, with which Harvard has a sad and storied history, has been running rampant again on Harvard’ s campus. The latest episode began shortly after the October 7th, 2023 terrorist attacks on Israel which resulted in the deadliest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. It’s hard to imagine anyone condoning this kind of butchery and hate, but that venom is on full display on Harvard’s campus among both students and faculty.
You might expect antisemitic hate speech from a few radical extremists in the student body who lack maturity and crave attention. But it isn’t just a “few”. And it isn’t confined to the student body. The antisemite faculty supports, and even rewards, student Jew haters with both money and eminence.1 In a feckless performance while under oath in a congressional hearing, Harvard president Claudine Gay could not answer the question of whether or not “calling for the genocide of Jews violated the schools’ codes of conduct”.
It has gotten so bad for Jewish students attending Harvard’s schools of law, divinity, and public health that they sued the university. Their lawsuit alleged that students and faculty members have “harassed, intimidated and assaulted Jewish students in classrooms, in on-campus activities and on social media, including by calling for the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel”.
Harvard has done little to address this rampant antisemitism. The Biden Administration did not intervene at all, even in the face of obvious violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Freshman applications began to drop, with top talent choosing to enroll elsewhere rather than be associated with the very public ugliness at Harvard. Several law firms said they’d no longer be recruiting Harvard law graduates and some judges refused to employ law clerks from Harvard.
During his campaign last year, Donald Trump signaled to Harvard in the most obvious of ways that he would take executive action against them as soon as he assumed office if they did not substantively address on-campus antisemitism. Harvard not only ignored Trump’s threats, they doubled down and defended their vile behavior on campus as “academic freedom”.
That refusal resulted in a string of consequences for Harvard designed to force them to root out antisemitism and discrimination on campus. It began with modest cuts of federal research money to the university as a shot across the bow. When that elicited no action (except for a retaliatory lawsuit by Harvard against the government), more money was cut. Ultimately, more than $2 Billion in federal grants to Harvard has now been cut along with a promise from the Secretary of Education that no future grant requests from Harvard will be entertained.
Still, Harvard did not act (except to sue the federal government again). Next, President Trump announced all contracts the government had with Harvard would be terminated – more than a $100M loss to the school. In the midst of all this, The Department of Homeland Security had determined that some of the antisemitic activity on campus was coming from foreign students, prompting a request to Harvard to provide the government with incident reports or any other information documenting violent and/or harassing behavior on campus by international students.
Harvard again refused to comply, resulting in DHS eliminating Harvard’s ability to host any international students on its campus. Again, Harvard chose to sue rather than clean up their act or negotiate a compromise with the government. While this action has been temporarily stayed by a district court while litigation proceeds, enormous damage to Harvard from this action has likely already been done. Current and perspective foreign students at Harvard must immediately consider/execute other options for themselves because of the possibility that Harvard could lose this court battle (they’ve already lost once at the Supreme Court). If that happens, it would result in the instant revocation of their student visas, forcing them to quickly transfer to another US school or return to their home country.
If all this self-inflicted damage to Harvard’s reputation and competence wasn’t bad enough, their transition from meritocracy to mediocrity was embarrassingly demonstrated with three other incidents during this same time:
- The discovery of plagiarism (50 instances) in eight of the academic writings of Harvard President Claudine Gay. This led to her dismissal after only six months in office.
- Fraudulent data used in at least four research papers by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. She was being paid more than $1M per year before being fired and stripped of her tenure. This was the first time in over 75 years that a Harvard Professor was stripped of tenure.
- Cedric Lodge, the manager of the Harvard’s Medical School morgue, was indicted with five others for selling human remains from the school’s morgue to buyers across the country.
If all this sounds like an exceptionally poorly managed organization that is continuing headlong down a path of even greater destruction – it is. The one thing keeping Harvard afloat, and a likely explanation for their ill-advised hubris, is their $53B endowment, the largest of its kind in the world.
But all that money can’t bring back foreign students who can’t get a State Department visa to attend Harvard (foreign students currently represent almost 30% of Harvard’s student body). Nor can it change the minds of the brightest high school graduates in the country who are choosing to avoid the malodorous stench of Harvard and do their learning elsewhere. It’s amazing how even just a modicum of discipline, common sense, and morality could have avoided all of this. What a shame.
1 A student who assaulted a Jewish classmate was recently given a $65,000 fellowship from the Harvard Law School to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Another student who also assaulted a Jewish classmate (during an anti-Israel protest) was appointed class marshal for the graduation ceremony of the Harvard Divinity School.
One Response
The liberal violence and justification for evil really makes me sick. They are so ignorant. They are listening to the evil one evil 👿. VENGEANCE is mine saith the Lord.
Well written.