Before I get to the known and celebrated intellectual pundits, let me begin with what I wrote about Harvard in January of 2021. It is my blog, after all, and people kept telling me I had “drunk the Kool-Aid” and slavishly followed the Fox News narratives. In fact, I have correctly documented the abandonment of ethics by journalists and educators as they chose to become full-time propagandists and allies for the extreme progressive mission to dismantle American values and liberties. I had warned about how far Harvard was straying from its original mission for years before this, but the passage has a nice ring to it this morning:

“Harvard, beginning approximately during the regime of the previous president, Drew Faust, has been infested with serious ethics rot, and it continues to progress. I have documented some, but far from all, of the most disturbing aspects of this process, like the University’s practice of discriminating against Asian-American applicants (as well as whites, of course), which they are now defending in court. What is supposed to be the role model for the entire higher education system in the United States continues to give credence and respectability to unethical practices and values, spreading its own affliction to other institutions far and wide. Worst of all, it is indoctrinating its students to be anti-American, anti-individual rights, anti-Western civilization and culture allies of the radical Left, while attempting to demonize opposing views on campus and off.”

I’ll admit that I didn’t foresee the passive acceptance of anti-Jewish, genocidal hate on Harvard’s campus (Jews are the oppressors now, see, and non-traditionally cast as theNorth America-stealing whites, with Palestinians and Hamas playing the roles of Native Americans), but those who have followed the Harvard saga on Ethics Alarms were better prepared for this revelation than most. I announced in 2021 that I was boycotting my big class reunion in 2022 and wrote why in Harvard’s published compendium of class member updates. Mine was the only such protest: I suppose my reward is that I don’t have to wear a paper bag over my head now.

Andrew Sullivan, the natural conservative who tries so hard to be acceptable to the Left because that’s where all of his LGTBQ friends reside, delivered his ethics quotes in a substack essay, “The Day The Empress’ Clothes Fell Off.” He begins,

It may be too much to expect that the Congressional hearings this week, starring the three presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn, will wake people up to the toxic collapse of America’s once-great Ivy League. But I can hope, can’t I? In the immortal words of Hitch (peace be upon him), as you listen to these people, “You see how far the termites have spread, and how long and well they have dined.”

The mediocrities smirked, finessed, condescended, and stonewalled. Take a good look at them. These are the people who now select our elites. And they select them, as they select every single member of the faculty, and every student, by actively discriminating against members of certain “privileged” groups and aggressively favoring other “marginalized” ones. They were themselves appointed in exactly the same way, from DEI-approved pools of candidates. As a Harvard dean, Claudine Gay’s top priority was “making more progress on diversity,” i.e. intensifying the already systemic race, sex and gender discrimination that defines the place.

Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.

In the hearings, President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.

This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.

Well, in fact this is not the same Harvard president responsible for the Ronald Sullivan disgrace, but Gay is undeniably cut from that same metaphorical cloth as her two immediate predecessors. Andrew’s proposed solution to Harvard’s rot:

End DEI in its entirety. Fire all the administrators whose only job is to enforce its toxic orthodoxy. Admit students on academic merit alone. Save standardized testing — which in fact helps minorities, and it’s “the best way to distinguish smart poor kids from stupid rich kids,” as Steven Pinker said this week. Restore grading so that it actually means something again. Expel students who shut or shout down speech or deplatform speakers. Pay no attention to the race or sex or orientation or gender identity of your students, and see them as free human beings with open minds. Treat them equally as individuals seeking to learn, if you can remember such a concept.

Like that’s going to happen….why even bother suggesting it?

Our final ethics quotes come from Victor Davis Hanson, one of the rare outspoken conservatives in academia, who writes in part,

Jewish students are…stereotyped as “white” and “privileged” — and thus considered as fair game on campus. At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities. Huge numbers of students have entered universities who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.

Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs. Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading — or all three combined.

The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement. And, presto, an epidemic of antisemitism naturally followed.

He concludes,

…At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.

These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.