Harvard’s president Alan Garber invaded my email yesterday with a “message to the Harvard Community,” of which, alas, I am a long-time member. It arrived on the same day that the University, with its almost 55 billion dollar endowment, announced that it was suing the government for having the audacity to withhold about 2 billion dollars in federal research grants. Here is Garber’s letter—-you can skim it or jump to the end: it is easily summarized as “How dare they?” …

Harvard’s Harvard Law School-raised lawyers cleverly if unethically decided that the letter should focus primarily on the Trump Administration’s emphasis on the university’s failure to properly protect its Jewish students and its tolerance of anti-Semitism, as if this was the main thrust of its April 11 letter. As I made clear in the post linked above, the letter was a lot more damning than that.

Harvard’s framing is an excellent example of the logical fallacy called cherry-picking, or what is also known as “argument by half-truth.” I had concluded long before the Hamas-Israel war that Harvard had betrayed its values, students, alumni and duty to American scholarship. Garber says that Harvard is addressing its anti-Jew problem. Great. The iconic school is still a blight on higher education that needs massive reform.

How pleased I was, therefore, when I saw that Prof. Turley had written a slam-bang indictment of Harvard that also served as a rebuttal to Garber’s propaganda. In a column at The Hill that he cross-posted to his blog, Turley mocked the Harvard faculty signing a letter embracing the ludicrous claim that the university was standing up to Trump to protect free speech and academic freedom when it has been undermining both for many years. He writes in part,

There is an almost comical lack of self-awareness among Harvard faculty members who express concern about protecting viewpoint diversity and academic integrity…

Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education. Harvard ranks dead last for free speech, awarded a 0 out of 100 score last year by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. There has been no outcry about this from most of these professors.

There has long been a culture of intolerance at Harvard. Just last month, Harvard Professor Timothy McCarthy called upon the university to fire any faculty who do not support the use of “gender-affirming care” on children.

Just last year, the president of the Student Advisory Committee of Harvard University’s Institute of Politics called for the express abandonment of nonpartisanship as a touchstone of the institute after President Trump’s second election.

Dean of Social Science Lawrence Bobo recently rejected the notion of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies is now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”

The Trump Administration is right to focus on Harvard as an example of all that is wrong with higher education today. Like most universities, Harvard’s faculty runs from the left to the far left. For years, the university has been criticized for extreme ideological bias in hiring and admissions.

Later in the essay, Turley points to facts that are appropriate for his blog, which is titled “Res Ipsa Loquitur”:

In a country with a plurality of conservative voters in the last election, less than 9 percent of the Harvard student body is conservative. Less than 3 percent of the faculty identified as conservative…Harvard faculty have purged conservative faculty for years and created one of the most hostile environments for free speech in all of higher education. Even with the virtual absence of conservative faculty and an overwhelmingly liberal class, only 33 percent of graduating students feel comfortable speaking their minds freely at Harvard…At the law school, only a tiny number of faculty members agree with the views of the majority of the Supreme Court and roughly half of the federal judiciary…

For years, these administrators and professors have shown an abundance of arrogance and a paucity of concern over free speech. They showed little concern for how they were damaging this historic institution. In just one generation, higher education is in a free fall across the country as professors pursued ideological over institutional interests. If universities were conventional corporations, virtually every university president and board in the country would be removed for violation of their fiduciary duties.

Later still, Turley quotes Harvard’s Kennedy School professor Archon Fung as saying  that “It is a very predictable pattern that authoritarian governments go after two institutions first, which is the media and universities.” Ah, yes, again with the Axis “authoritarian” ad hominem attack that I see so frequently from my Trump-Deranged Facebook friends. A President using Presidential powers to combat what the Left holds dear is sinister and threatening. Turley writes of the pairing of journalism and education, “It was a telling argument. Much like academia, journalism schools abandoned objectivity and neutrality in favor of advocacy journalism.”