Monthly Archives: April 2025

My Irony Meter…

Posted on by
Reply

…is pegged. In their letter published in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday Letters section, David Wippman and Glenn Altschuler of Hamilton College and Cornell University, respectively, object to comparisons of Harvard to Hillsdale College, even as they misleadingly mischaracterize the latter’s relationship with Federal dollars (writing that Hillsdale has for decades refused federal funding, when the fact is Hillsdale has never taken Federal dollars at any time in its 180 years of existence).

The letter writers acknowledge that Harvard’s taking Federal dollars makes it “vulnerable” to Federal pressure, citing supposed risks to Harvard’s research capacity. In truth, Harvard still could conduct effective research, were it to get serious about the bigots and terrorist supporters entrenched in its student and faculty and staff populations.

That brings me to the irony of their letter.

[I]t is absurd to compare this Christian college with 1,700 students and 170 faculty with Harvard, one of the leading research universities in the world with almost 25,000 students and more than 20,000 faculty and staff.

Actually, two: Wippman and Altschuler call out Hillsdale as an explicitly Christian college as though that were somehow important to their discussion, while ignoring Harvard’s more religiously and areligiously ecumenical bent—as though that does not matter at all.

The real irony though is that 1:10 faculty to student ratio at Hillsdale compared to that 8:10 ratio of faculty and staff to students at Harvard. Clearly one school is focused on actual teaching, while the other is focused on…nothing in particular, apparently, other than faculty and staff activism, antisemitic bigotry, terrorist support, and condoning when not actively encouraging the same in the student population. That only creates an environment where that vaunted research is merely an afterthought and a source of Federal largesse rather than a serious focal point for the institution.

There should be No Question

Posted on by
Reply

SecState Marco Rubio thinks Iran could have peaceful, energy-producing nuclear reactors so long as Iran uses only imported uranium already enriched for the purpose. Iran insists on doing its own enrichment.

There should be no discussion of this.

For Iran, not having its own enrichment capability is a deal breaker. For us, Iran having that capability should be a deal breaker. Iran has shown itself wholly untrustworthy with its enrichment program, rapidly enriching already to 60%, despite the fact that the 2015 accord expressly limited Iran to 3.7%-ish, and that accord remains in effect. Our withdrawal from it is irrelevant; all the other signatories, including Iran, remain nominally within its confines. Iran, despite its obligations under that accord, continues to deny inspectors access to facilities those inspectors want to see, and it demands untenable advance notice for those few facilities to which it has allowed access.

For all that, apparently unaddressed is what to do about the plutonium that lots of peaceful energy-producing uranium-fueled nuclear reactors produce. Plutonium can be recycled through peaceful energy-producing plutonium-fueled nuclear reactors, but critically, plutonium also can be used separately in nuclear bombs.

It’s rapidly approaching time for a kinetic solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.

A Thought Experiment

Posted on by
Reply

Our so-called “elite” universities are banding together to form a collective to resist the Trump administration’s efforts to withhold grants and contracts from those institutions that aren’t doing enough to combat antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorists, reporting what foreign money they’re receiving and in what amounts, and adequately limiting the numbers of foreign students and faculty to suit the administration.

The collective is centering its resistance on the premise that Government doesn’t get to dictate to them what their practices might be, never minding that all donors get to specify how their donations are used.

What this collective is missing is that colleges and universities have no particular right to government funds, and that government has no particular obligation to send money to colleges and universities.

Hence my thought experiment.

Consider that a large collection of private citizens get together and say to a college or university, “You can’t have any more of our money unless and until you stop doing these things and start doing these other things.”

What legal recourse would that college or university, or any collection of colleges and universities similarly addressed, have against that collection of private citizens? How is their private collective action any different from their collective action through their government? It is, after all, the same money, whether their private money given or withheld directly or their private money washed through government as tax remittances.

A Useful Self-Identification

Posted on by
Reply

The People’s Republic of China has decided not to apply its across-the-board 125% tariffs on certain goods that it imports from the US.

China’s government has exempted some US imports that the country would struggle to immediately source from elsewhere from its retaliatory tariffs, people familiar with the matter said.
Chinese authorities have told some importers of American goods that they would waive the most recent 125% increases in tariff rates for certain US imports. Those products include certain semiconductors and chipmaking equipment, medical products, and aviation parts, the people said.

These, then, are precisely the goods that we should cut off from exporting to the PRC.

On the other hand,

The Trump administration, similarly, announced exemptions on its “reciprocal tariffs” for China-made smartphones, laptops, and other electronics earlier this month, a recognition of the US’s reliance on China for such goods.

This is a mistake if the purpose is anything other than a negotiating tactic. There is a critical difference between the two sets of goods. The goods the PRC is exempting are critical components and component-making goods whose cutoff would severely impact that nation’s ability to make downstream products. The goods the Trump administration is exempting are finished products. Their supply chains can be adjusted to flow from non-PRC sources, including domestic, an adjustment that might be difficult, but an adjustment that both is eminently possible and is absolutely necessary: we should never have ourselves dependent on an enemy nation for such goods.

Harvard’s Professoriate…

Posted on by
Reply

…according to a supposedly conservative professor. James Hankins, a Harvard history professor, had some thoughts on how to cure Harvard of its wokeness. I have some thoughts on his thoughts.

Hankins’ basic idea is that Harvard should reduce its acceptance rate of Federal dollars and rely more on private funds from Harvard alumni.

[W]e should strengthen ties with loyal alumni who know and love Harvard. Alumni are loyal in part because they remember with gratitude the teaching they received as undergraduates. That makes them more closely aligned with the university’s real mission: to teach and to produce high-quality, unpoliticized research. Empowering alumni would carry its own risks, no doubt, but in my experience, they have a much sounder sense than politicians and government bureaucrats of what Harvard should be doing to help the country and itself.

This is naïve, and it misstates Harvard’s—any college’s or university’s—mission. That mission is to teach, full stop. They’re also ideal places to do research, including basic research, but even in an ideal world, research would come second to teaching, not be placed on par with it.

Withal, Hankins exposed the core of his error in a couple of ways.

My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues. They sidle up and say, sotto voce, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this,” then proceed to unload their disgust with the latest activist outrages. They might have identified as leftists in their college years, but a frequent refrain I hear from them now is “this is not what the left used to stand for.”

That silence, that refusal to say out loud what they’ll say sotto voce, however fearfully, is the professors’ cowardice. These cannot be trusted to do any sort of unpoliticized research. They’ll bend to whatever their woke liberal masters tell them to do with whatever dollars come their way.

And this:

Faculty at Harvard for the most part are serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work. They have books to write and papers to publish. … They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time.

Faculty at Harvard openly favor their personal careers over doing a right thing. They resent having their quiet careers interfered with, but not enough to stand up and object out loud. This is the cowardice of immorality. This sort cannot be trusted, either, not with their writing, certainly not with teaching our children.

Hankins has successfully identified his colleagues as perfectly happy to sit on the sidelines, if not all the way up on their porches, in what they see as safety instead of taking a stand, doing a right thing.

Don’t take the Federal government’s—us taxpayers’—money? The question has another direction, also: the Federal government shouldn’t be sending our tax money to an institution like this in the first place.