The Wall Street Journal interviewed Harvard University President Alan Garber and published “Five Takeaways.” I have five thoughts….
Students at Harvard no longer feel comfortable disagreeing
Upon returning to Harvard as provost in 2011, Garber noticed the spirit of healthy disagreement from his undergraduate days had disappeared. It is something he said concerns him and his colleagues. “Students today find it much harder to have conversations with one another about difficult subjects, particularly with someone they don’t know well with whom they might disagree,” Garber said. “And to me that is a big loss.”
And yet, in all those years he’s chosen to do nothing substantive about any of that. It’s only necessary to see the anti-Jewish and pro-Hamas terrorist physical attacks on Jewish students, protest “encampments” on University quadrangles with associated interference with Jewish students trying to get to class, and above all, his failure to address in any meaningful way those perpetrators and their faculty enablers and encouragers—expulsion of all of the student misbehavers and firing of those misbehaving faculty. He’s done a very few token expulsions while explicitly excusing the vast majority of campers from consequence, and he’s spoken stern words to some of his faculty and masqueraded those as serious moves.
The university wants more diverse viewpoints on its faculty
Garber knows the university has a perception problem with the general public…. …Garber said, “I really understand the resentment that people can feel when they think their problems are not taken seriously enough. That’s something we absolutely must address.”
… “Part of what we need to do is make sure that in the classroom and in other settings, we promote the idea that it doesn’t matter what your personal views are, you need to teach in a way that is fair to multiple points of view,” he said. “And furthermore, you need to enable students to speak up when they have a perspective that is different from the mainstream.”
It’s not perception, it’s fact; this is more Garber downplaying. The rest is empty words. He’s done no substantive hiring, and the nakedly biased teaching and limits on students’ ability to speak differing viewpoints and opinions remain—as he confessed just above.
Antisemitism at Harvard predates Oct. 7, 2023
Garber said he had hints that Harvard had an antisemitism problem but that it hit home for him when he met with Jewish students just after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Two lengthy reports Harvard put out last month detailed the history of antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias on campus, acknowledging longstanding problems.
Here, too, despite knowing of the antisemitic bigots present at Harvard, he’s chosen to do nothing about them. The two “reports” are nothing more than his administration’s moral equivalence sewage, downplaying the real violence perpetrated on Jewish students while exaggerating anti-Muslim bigotry, which is both rare and nonviolent.
Columbia’s actions didn’t influence Harvard’s
Saying that he doesn’t have firsthand knowledge of Columbia’s negotiations, he said: “What I have heard from other people in colleges and universities is that Columbia had still not resolved their issues with the federal government after many weeks of negotiations.[“]
Here he is, relying on hearsay rather than direct knowledge that would come from directly asking the Columbia President. On the other hand, neither has Harvard resolved its issues. His suit is illustrative of his refusal to try.
More is at stake than winning a lawsuit
Federal funding “is not a gift,” [Garber] said, but money that Harvard uses to fulfill national scientific and other priorities.
It is, absolutely, a gift. The government has no obligation to send our taxpayer dollars to the school, and the school has no intrinsic right to it. Our taxpayer dollars are a government donation, nothing more and nothing less. Garber’s claim that Harvard uses the money for national purposes is wholly irrelevant to that fundamental fact; his claim is just more cynical obfuscation.
