Bias makes us stupid, and being disgusted with one’s alma mater makes one likely to prioritize kicking it in the metaphorical nuts when it screws up more than one should, “one” in this case being me.

Harvard grad student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo (above) faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate during an anti-Israel “die-in” protest at the university. He had been caught on camera accosting a first-year Israeli student during a 2023 “die-in” protest held outside of Harvard Business School. Tettey-Tamaklo was removed from his position as a proctor overseeing a freshmen dorm in Harvard Yard after the incident, and he received a misdemeanor assault and battery charge last May. A Suffolk County judge ordered the student to take an anger management class and perform 80 hours of community service as his punishment for the assault.

The Trump administration (stupidly—this is none of is business) demanded Harvard expel Tettey-Tamaklo. So, as its institutional “Up yours!” to the hated POTUS (at least in Cambridge), Harvard’s discipline of Tettey-Tamaklo consisted only of the lost proctor position, and it subsequently hired him for a better on-campus job. His LinkedIn profile says that Tettey-Tamaklo is now a Graduate Teaching Fellow at Harvard and “advise[s] faculty on curriculum design.”

I can confirm that such grad students do the bulk of the teaching at Harvard, holding “section” meetings to go over reading assignments and to discuss course lectures by hot-shot professors too busy and famous to have actual contact with students. The teaching fellows also grade exams and papers.

If I were a Jewish student, I would not want to be graded by this guy.

Fine, if Harvard doesn’t see fit to seriously punish a grad student who accosts a student based on that student’s support of Israel’s right to exist, that’s its choice, and we will regard its priorities accordingly. Rewarding such a student, however, is something else entirely. Whether Harvard hired Tettey-Tamaklo as a cheap way to “stand up to Trump” (you should read the current alumni magazine issue, which is full of letters and essays about Harvard’s “heroic” stance defending racial discrimination, progressive indoctrination, tolerance of anti-Semitism and admitting foreign students over Americans) or because the iconic school has rotten values and incompetent administrators, attention should be paid.

Related note: I have alerted readers to a website that purports to catalogue Harvard’s various scandals, botched and outrages. It’s had the same set of links for a week now. I sent the site this story. If it doesn’t go up quickly, then Yard report will take its place as one more good idea executed badly on-line. The ethics lesson, if this is the case: Don’t start projects if you aren’t going to complete their missions.