Tag Archives: culture

Five Thoughts on Five Takeaways

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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.

Another Privileged University Entity?

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The subheadline says it all.

Members of Kappa Alpha Theta, one of the country’s oldest sororities, are fighting for their chosen philanthropy to get its federal funding back

“Their” Federal funding isn’t theirs, or their charity’s, at all. It’s our money, which our elected representatives are pleased to send to them. This is the entitlement attitude of far too many entities associated with our higher education institutions.

According to an April 23 statement by CASA/GAL [KAT’s charity partner], the organization lost its funding because its work did not uphold the department’s new priorities.

That’s reason enough to stop the taxpayer dollar transfers. Donors get to call the shots on how their donations get used, and if the recipient doesn’t want to align, the donations should stop. That includes the Federal government with our money.

Privileged or entitled—or both. It needs to stop, and one way to do that is to withdraw our tax dollars from these spoiled Precious Ones.

Still too many Leakers

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Here’s the lede and second paragraph:

The US is stepping up its intelligence-gathering efforts regarding Greenland, drawing America’s spying apparatus into President Trump’s campaign to take over the island, according to two people familiar with the effort.
Several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a “collection emphasis message” to intelligence-agency heads last week. They were directed to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island.

This was a classified message.

There is no excuse for blatting about to other nations our national security efforts, efforts that must by their nature be secretive. These are two persons who must be tracked down, fired for cause, and investigated for the potentially criminal nature of their “leaks” and for their mishandling of classified document(s).

A Correct EO

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In early March, President Donald Trump (R) wrote an Executive Order that rescinded the security clearances of the law firm Perkins Coie and its lawyers individually. The EO also barred Perkins Coie from access to a number of Federal buildings and instructed other Executive Branch agencies to exam contracts with Perkins Coie with a view to ending them.

Last week DC District Judge Beryl Howell ruled the EO unconstitutional. Among other things,

Howell wrote that the text of the executive order, and Trump’s statements about it, made clear that he targeted Perkins Coie because it represented clients he doesn’t like, and clients challenging some of his actions.
“That is unconstitutional retaliation and viewpoint discrimination, plain and simple,” wrote the judge, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

She’s not far wrong in that, and this is a case where Trump’s rhetoric contaminated the legitimacy of his move. Perkins Coie made an argument in its suit, though, that is and should have been so considered wholly irrelevant.

It told the court it was at risk of losing its most lucrative clients, as they frequently work with the federal government, and many are major government contractors. In fact, the firm told the court, it did lose clients.

That confers no obligation on the government to grant or continue security clearances to Perkins Coie or any other enterprise. No business must be allowed to arrange its business model in such a way as to compel our government to grant it a security clearance.

The President of the United States is the final arbiter of security clearances, of what is classified, and of who has declassification authority.

From that, this: a better—and entirely constitutional—Executive Order would require all Departments and agencies in the Executive Branch, including the President and his White House, that have security clearance authorities to rescind all security clearances of personnel who leave their Departments or agencies on the day of their departure—even if those employees are transferring to another Department or agency. The new Department or agency, and any nongovernment entity who employs the departed person, if they want the person to have a security clearance, must do a de novo background investigation before granting a clearance, and the Department, agency, or outside entity must justify the level of clearance requested.

The EO should do this, as well: recast security clearances, extant or newly granted, held by nongovernment enterprises and their employees as for the duration of the particular contract with automatic rescission on the end of the contract. New contracts must have de novo background investigations of all enterprises and individual employees contemplated for work on the contract. If an existing contract is extended for a second time, those security clearances must be explicitly renewed via de novo background investigations.

Security clearances give access to our nation’s most important secrets, and no person and no entity has an intrinsic right to one. No person and no entity has any sort of Constitutional right to a security clearance. Neither does our government have any obligation to grant a security clearance, of any level, to any person or entity. This fundamental concept is one that is too often unconsidered in disputes over clearances.

My Irony Meter…

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…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.