It’s a rhetorical question. What this says is that the culture of the United States of America, which has been nurtured for centuries to embrace personal liberty and pluralism, is being threatened by its elite educational institutions and the indoctrinated citizens they graduate.
I suppose I should take some satisfaction that I began blowing the metaphorical whistle on my alma mater years ago, and felt sufficiently embarrassed by the ethics rot overwhelming the ivy there to turn my diploma face to the wall and to explain in my class notes that I would be boycotting the class reunion. Simply put, the American college long considered the exemplar for higher education cannot become fascistically woke without dire consequences to the nation. Harvard alumni, many, maybe even most, of whom recognize this, have been negligent in allowing matter to reach this point. But that point has been reached.
Harvard University has been ranked the worst school for free speech in the U.S. – with the Ivy League institution being awarded zero points out of a possible 100.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression releases a ranked list of American institutions’ respect for free speech and academic freedom every year. Harvard has finished below 75% of the schools surveyed in each of the past four years as measured by FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings,
In 2020, Harvard ranked 46 out of 55 schools. In 2021, it sank to 130 out of 154 schools. !n 2022, it was 170 out of 203 schools. But this year, Harvard outdid itself. It’s #1! Harvard was in dead last with the worst score ever achieved by any college: 0.00 out of a possible 100.00. It was the only institution given an“Abysmal” rank for its campus speech climate.
FIRE added insult to injury, adding, “What’s more, granting Harvard a score of 0.00 is generous. Its actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)”
Read the FIRE report: I doubt many at Harvard will. After all, the institution’s priorities are clear: shortly after the Supreme Court properly declared its admissions policies discriminatory, illegal and racist, the school installed a new President whose scholarly obsession since she was a student is “diversity.” Not diversity of thought or political expression, however. FIRE lists some of the examples of enforced ideological conformity the school has engaged in:
- From 2019 to this year, Harvard sanctioned four scholars, three of whom it terminated.
- In 2020, Harvard revoked conservative student activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance over comments he made on social media as a 16-year-old.
- In 2022, Harvard disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from an English department colloquium on campus over her views on gender and trans issues.
- In 2019, protesters interrupted a joint talk featuring former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow and Graduate School of Education Dean Bridget Terry Long by occupying the stage and refusing to leave.
Harvard failed on most of the components of the College Free Speech Rankings. It ranked 193 out of 254 on “Comfort Expressing Ideas,” 183 on “Administrative Support,” and 198 on “Disruptive Conduct.” Only 25% Harvard students reported they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial political topic. About a third think it is “very” or “extremely” clear the administration protects free speech on campus; and another third say that using violence to stop a campus speech may be acceptable, an increase from the 26% of Harvard students who felt this way last year.
Well, I’m not proud to be a “Harvard man,” but I am proud that I was the only one in my class to directly condemn the school for its descent into woke indoctrination over education. I am definitely depressed that while several classmates wrote me privately to say they agreed with what I had written, not one had the guts or integrity to so in a university publication.
They were probably terrified that their Chablis would be poisoned at the reunion….
Ethics Alarms 
What would this do to the value of a Harvard degree?
No adverse impact whatsoever, Michael. See, e.g., the Bud Light brand VP. People hiring people these days want what Harvard and the other elite schools are putting out. After all, they graduated from such elite places themselves.
Nothing. The cognitive dissonance scale is so stacked in Harvard’s favor that it would take tears and years of scandals and institutional corruption to even dent the school’s reputation. My sister, Class of ’74, was at a reunion event in D.C, and kept hearing people talk about how Harvard changed their lives. Her reaction: Utter bullshit, something grads are expected to say because it preserves the brand, so they do.
Only a quarter of Harvard students reported that they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with their professor on a controversial political topic, [FIRE] added.
Moreover, only about a third think it is “very” or “extremely” clear the administration protects free speech on campus, and a staggering 30 percent think using violence to stop a campus speech is at least “rarely” acceptable, an increase from the 26 percent of Harvard students who felt this way last year.
Be consoled; Lori Lightfoot is starting her tenure there as a “Senior Leadership Fellow” and lecturer. I’m sure that will help counter some of the groupthink.
A great lefty tradition: failing up.
Someone should demand to be given an explanation as to how diversity makes a group stronger. I doubt that anyone that espouses that concept will be able or willing to provide a true explanation what is meant by diversity makes us stronger. I have come to believe that the concept means politically stronger than the existing larger demographic subgroup.
In general, when a group of disparate people all work toward a similar goal, they act as one which is stronger. Ther United States is the poster child for this. Freedom from oppression or freedom to take advantage of opportunities was what made us the beacon of light that attracted so many from all parts of the globe. When the unifying goal was freedom, diversity was not an issue and differences added value. Diversity was seen as a strength because it was not at the expense of another segment of society. When local communities became factionalized the people nearly dissolved the fibers that bound us together as a nation.
That which makes diversity a strength has the potential of destroying that which it creates. Diversity of viewpoint undermines the goal of acting as one. The political Left has developed strategies to do just that in order to sow chaos which creates a power vacuum the Left seeks to monopolize.
The concept of diversity today requires assembling groups of disparate people and reinforcing the idea that the larger group oppresses them. From there, the group rallies to attack the larger demographic group. As the larger demographic group falls from power the next larger group will become the target. Ultimately, the Left will assume greater power as each group otherizes each other.
So, when someone says there is strength in our diversity, the question must be asked who or what is getting stronger if we are always blaming some other group for society’s problems.
Oh, this has driven me nuts for decades. There is literally no data or legitimate research that supports the “diversity strengthens management/the organization/performance/results” mantra. It’s just something “everybody” knows is true, and “nobody” has the guts to say, “Oh yeah? Prove it!”
I’d hazard to guess that diversity actually makes groups less effective.
Artificially driven “diversity”* is absolutely corrosive, particularly in hard STEM fields. There simply are not enough women (heh, born as women) nor enough non white, non asians, to meet the quotas. So to meet goals, standards slip. It means there is a bipolar distribution where “diverse” employees are significantly less competent than the “not diverse” employees. The undeniable dichotomy creates issues in many ways. Management is unwilling to give less competent employees difficult assignments and both sides of the divide note this. Performance management becomes hard. Either management uses one standard and has a disparate outcome, or creates two standards. Neither one works and generates resentment among one group or the other. The STEM field is loaded with asians, and they don’t feel guilty like so many whites do, so they can be quite vocal about dissatisfaction with the idea of two sets of standards. Another bad aspect is that it makes life really hard for those women or minorities who are competent. They can get lumped in with the less competent, because creating an actually racial divide increases racism, not reducing it.
*I put diversity in quotes because the woke use the term in a manner inconsistent with the definition of the word. They do this in two ways. Firstly, they are opposed to diversity of thought. Secondly, they see no issue with spaces devoid of Europeans. They really mean “not European ancestry” when they say “diverse.” I actually heard an educator referring to a Indian reservation school as “very diverse.” It was ethnically 100% one tribe. By the dictionary definition, it was the least diverse school in the state.
Great comment. I remember watching a panel discussion about affirmative action hosted at Hamilton College by their political science department head, a woman, of course. Jason Riley was one of the panelists. There was an additional black guy and an Asian looking woman and another woman. I found their ethnicity or skin color added absolutely nothing to the discussion. As Jason Riley sardonically commented, “A panel of one conservative and three liberals is what colleges consider diversity of opinion.”
That is the point I’m making. Diversity only strengthens those wanting to weaken a given power structure.
By claiming the power structure is being monopolized by white heteronormative males the Left strives to alienate smaller demographic groups against the unifying characteristics of a successful social structure.
There is more data proving that an organization that allows competing goals ( not tactics) to run rampant will eventually destroy itself. Businesses managers do not want diversity of thought when it comes to goals and objectives. Further, managers prefer underlings who will not rock the boat.
In the end, it does not matter if you hire a Chinese, Nigerian, German, Irish or Central American if they all agree to serve management in lockstep and never question management so long as they get some power then diversity does not really exist. The desire for diversity is a scam.
I have a hunch…that a lot of people consider “Diversity” to be a proxy variable for something that we can call, for lack of a better phrase, “the career open to the talent.” It’s not a good proxy variable. It might not even be measuring something similar. But the US aspires to be open to talented migrants, and has been in the past. Send us German machinists, Italian stonemasons, Russian agronomists, etc.
For example, here in the Finger Lakes region we only started producing good riesling wines thanks to the late Dr. Konstantin Frank, a Russian immigrant of Alsatian heritage.
The phrase “the career open to the talents” seems to originate from Napoleonic France. The internet has details.
The anecdote that sticks with me is the US nuclear weapons program during World War Two, which was helped along by European emigres. Not just Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, but Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and Leo Szilard–those three were of Hungarian Jewish descent and all attended the same high school in Budapest!
Most of this (about the Hungarians) can be found in Kati Marton’s book _The great escape_. There is an entry in Wikipedia s.v. “The Martians (scientists)” on the general issue of smart Hungarians.
Somewhere (probably in the _New York Times_ about ten years ago) it was claimed that the US is able to “poach” some of the top scholars / scientists in France, but France has difficulty with reciprocal poaching to even the game.
The US is able to do this because it is a relatively open society–open to immigration, open to people who seem “foreign,” and even if immigrants can’t quite become culturally American, the children of immigrants do it fairly well. Or they have, historically.
I have seen it asserted that in any arms race / brains contest “Our Asians will beat their Asians.” It’s been asserted just as a casual hope, either with regards to commercial / industrial competition, or perhaps in high tech combat in a future conflict yet unspecified.
My guess? I suspect that there is no solid evidence that “Diversity is Our Strength”. More likely, diversity lowers social trust and social capital. At any rate, we should work hard to distinguish between “good” diversity and “bad” diversity.”
In my opinion, affirmative action to recruit lower performing minorities to reach any threshold demographic target is probably counter-productive for social harmony. By now it has many “true believers” who attack those who question the policies. As we can tell from the troubles imposed on Amy Wax at Penn.
Anyone who knows anything about large multinational / multi-ethnic countries knows that there are tensions, stereotypes, patterns of ethnic specialization, over- and under-achieving groups, and that historically diversity tends to be “a problem to be managed.” Why is that not well known here in the US? Riddle me that, riddler!
One of the best things I’ve read recently on Affirmative Action is this long article by Russell Nieli, helpfully available at MTC. It mentions “good” versus “bad” diversity, and how competition for status and economic success can actually intensify ethnic animosities.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2015/03/29/25-years-on-the-affirmative-action-firing-line/
Charles W. Abbott
Rochester, NY
Charles, Joe Biden et al. tout their open borders as a way to attract “the best and the brightest,” which is absolute nonsense. I will agree that “open borders” attract people who actually have enough gumption to make the trek, but that’s a pretty darned low barrier. I also wonder whether the best and the brightest Chinese techies are in fact Chinese agents. In any event, although highly skilled people may still be getting recruited to the U.S. by the government, that’s not the 1.8 million “got aways” so far this year.
The consequences of the current open border are unimaginable and unpredictable. I cannot be sanguine, or cheerfully predict that the consequences will be favorable, net, for current residents and our current institutions. It is an experiment on a grand scale. A topic for another day.
Welcome to the discussion Charles
That “light and truth” thing is still current. They’ve just redefined the two as whatever those in power think is true. It’s new and improved light and truth.