The gift link to the NYT article at issue is here.
I’m not going to quote it or summarize it. I will characterize it: the opinion piece, Gaza’s Rubble Is the Grave of Our Future, by Ghada Abdulfattah, “a writer who lives in Gaza,” is anti-Israel, pro-Hamas propaganda that the Times has handed a large amount of space to promote. This is a “poor Gazans being victims of genocide by those inhuman, cruel Jews” essay. The writer never comes right out and says that, but her chronicling of the devastation in Gaza since the Israeli assault began three years ago is definitely aimed at conveying that misleading message.
All right, I will offer a quote:
“It isn’t just the sadness of what was demolished. Seeing endless piles of concrete brings a second layer of violence — the violence of being forced to live with destruction. Rubble doesn’t just destroy the past; it erases the future. It forces your mind to stop imagining, to stop thinking, to stop dreaming about life after today.”
Gee, I guess launching a sneak terror attack on civilians in your neighboring state, killing over 1200 people, including infants, raping woman and taking 250 hostages isn’t such a good idea, eh? Huh. Who knew?
“Colorado appears hellbent on maintaining its dubious status as the most anti-free speech state in the union. Citizens will continue to subsidize this effort to defend laws compelling or censoring speech.”
Professor Turley, whom conservative pundits like to describe as a “liberal academic” but who exemplifies the red-pilled progressive who suddenly realizes he had been on the wrong side of logic and ethics, has a full-on brief against Colorado up on his blog today.
He chronicles the continuing assault on the First Amendment in the state, which is now typical of the conduct of all the extremist Democratic states as well as the anti-democratic aspirations of the Democratic Party itself. A sample…
“Colorado is now arguably the most anti-free speech state in the union, pushing an array of measures attacking those with opposing social and political views…Now, the Democratic legislature and governor are back with new unconstitutional measures, including a requirement that lawyers not share information with federal immigration officials as a condition for filing with state courts…
In the last election, the state attempted to strip President Donald Trump from the ballot with the support of a majority of its Democratic-controlled state supreme court. (The effort was later declared unconstitutional in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court. Colorado could not even get any of the liberal justices to support its actions).
The state is responsible for the efforts to force business owners to create products celebrating same-sex marriages. That effort led to the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and then the 303 Creative case. Even after losing earlier efforts against Masterpiece Cake Shop owner Jack Phillips, the targeting of its owner continued for years. That litigation proved to be a tremendous victory for free speech.
Colorado has also been leading the fight to limit the speech and associational rights of professionals and parents on “conversion therapy.” Recently, that effort led to another massive loss before the Supreme Court in Chiles v. Salazar, resulting in a resounding 8-1 rejection of Colorado’s position. It could only secure the vote of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
After that near-unanimous ruling against the state, Colorado responded by doubling down with legislation to expose any counselors engaged in conversion therapy to heightened legal liability, including waiving any statute of limitations. That case could also result in legal challenges as Colorado continues to spend a fortune on seeking to curtail free speech rights.
Now, the state is defending a new public accommodation law, HB 25-1312, that defines “gender expression” to include “chosen name” and “how an individual chooses to be addressed.”
Amanda Lynn Tully, pictured above and one of the subjects of a New York Times article (gift link!) about people so troubled by the legal and ethical requirement of living up to their student loan agreement that they move out of the country to avoid paying up. More than 40 million borrowers have federal student debt to pay back, and 7.7 million have defaulted on their loans, according to recent data from the Education Department. Anecdotal evidence and conversations on Reddit and other social media indicate that some borrowers, like the dislikable young woman pictured above, think moving to another country is a dandy way to solve their problems.
Harvard has issued a102-page draft document to persuade investors to buy a new bond designed to raise funds to replace the billions being withheld from the school by the Trump Administration. The Administration has pledged that those funds are lost until Harvard agrees to comply with “both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.” In other words, Harvard can eschew federal funding until it stops being a leftist indoctrination and propaganda tool and starts educating again.
Harvard has used Massachusetts’ municipal bond authority, overseen by hard-left Bay State governor Maura Healy, for $1,169,075,000 in bond offerings in 2024 and 2025. The proposed 2026 bond offering is for $675 million, which would bring the total to $1.8 billion in three years. You wouldn’t want Harvard to have to dip into its approximately $57 billion endowment, would you?
One eye-catching item in the draft: “First-year student applications received” by Harvard dropped more than 21 % to 47,893 for the 2025-2026 academic year from a high of 61,221 in 2022-23. This is below Yale with 54,919 applicants , Brown with 47,937 applicants, and Columbia’s 61,031 applications.
Harvard won’t release its application numbers for students entering in the fall of 2026 until it is required to by the federal government, the Harvard Crimson reported. Hey! I thought democracy dies in darkness! When an institution refuses to disclose something, one may fairly presume it has something to hide.
The Washington Free Beacon notes that while it is complaining that King Trump is endangering potentially life-saving cancer research with its suspension of federal funds, Old Ivy employs 12 vice presidents, a bit of an extravagance since, for example, MIT somehow survives with a mere seven.
Harvard’s applications drop, I suspect, comes as it becomes increasingly clear that it fosters a culture antithetical to a full education and freedom of thought, all while remaining committed to anti-white, anti-male, anti-American objectives and is actively hostile to large sectors of American society. This has been in evidence for many years; the campus anti-Semitism and Claudine Gay debacle only brought into the open the ethics rot that was already well underway. Veteran readers here know that Ethics Alarms has been pointing to Harvard’s revolting conduct continually.
If my efforts have had even the most minuscule role in diverting a single vibrant young mind from attending this destructive institution, in the eloquent tradition of Lena Lamont in “Singing in the Rain,” it makes me feel as though my “hard work ain’t been in vain for nothin’.”
1. The Great Stupid won’t go down with out a fight! Especially in California. The University of Southern California canceled a debate among candidates for governor less than 24 hours before it was supposed to take place this week. The reason was that there weren’t any non-white candidates. I kept seeing that in headlines and couldn’t believe it. I just assumed it was right-wing spin, and really dumb spin at that.
Nope. Eight Democrats and two Republicans are currently leading a typically huge field running in the Golden State June 2 primary. The debate was scheduled to include the six candidates who were leading in the polls, plus an extra Democrat, the Mayor of San Jose, who has been raising a lot of money for his campaign lately. If he had been black or Latino, that may have saved the debate, but he’s just another white guy. Students objected, and the school, being run by cowards and woke weenies like most universities today, chickened out.
The controversies over who got a place on the stage “have created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters,” the university said. And so rather than hold a debate that would help voters distinguish between the candidates who currently have a chance to win and maybe teach students something, the fact that none of the candidates are “of color” means that there won’t be a debate at all.
The above ahistorical, moronic and infuriating cartoon was posted by a long-time friend and—believe it or not!—a tenured history professor at Georgetown. I am reaching the end of my patience with once smart people deliberately making less-educated people stupid, and for the second time this week (the first was prompted by this Facebook meme) I couldn’t wrestle my fingers to the floor fast enough and responded to my Trump Deranged freind, “Now, you KNOW this is untrue. I know it’s untrue, and I know you know it’s untrue.”
And this is Trump Derangement! People who actually have the education, wit and critical thinking skills to reject false framing and imaginary facts, yet who nonetheless betray their own principles and integrity in order to attack the President. I’m hoping Steve-O-in NJ will gift us with one of his excellent historical retrospectives about how the United States was, at great risk to FDR, aiding Europe in fighting the Germans well before Pearl Harbor, and what the U.S. sacrificed in lives and treasure to indeed rescue Europe as well as that civilization thingy. We also rebuilt Europe with the Marshall Plan and have been bolstering European military defenses ever since.
It’s bad enough for a UK cartoonist to issue that crap, but for a U.S. historian to endorse it? Truly despicable. OK, for me, long friendship plus Trump Derangement and aging brain cells equals forgiveness.
Barely.
UPDATE:There is hope! My old friend the professor reacted to my mild rebuke with a “thumbs up.”
“The correct ask in this report is not the ask of an institution being condemned. It is the ask of an institution being held to its own standard by people who still believe it can meet it.”
That authentic frontier gibberish—I’m still not sure what it means, and I’ve read it a dozen times—is in “A Narrowing Gate, Jewish Enrollment at Harvard and its Peers | 1967-2025,” a report by the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance. The report found that that Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard University has dropped to about 7% in 2025, its lowest level since before World War II and the lowest among Ivy League schools with reliable data.
I was going to write about the report itself, but if Jewish alumni of Harvard end up writing like that, maybe its a good thing not as many Jewish students are attending Harvard.
This is the Executive Summary. The report seems to be implying that anti-Semitism at Harvard has to be the reason for the unexplained drop, because none of the other possible factors it identifies explain it. Apparently Jewish applications to the school haven’t fallen off sufficiently to cause a 50% reduction, though I don’t know why. On national television Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay told a Congressional committee that she considered anti-Jewish demonstrations in Harvard Yard to be acceptable free speech, and was unable to articulate a basic truth, which is that anti-Semitic demonstrations on a college campus constitute unethical and intolerable conduct that creates a hostile environment for Jewish students. Gay’s eventually firing for scholarly misconduct (not mealy-mouthed acceptance of campus enmity toward a minority) could not have provided aspiring Jewish applicants much confidence.
We also learn from the report that Jewish alumni had to gather the data for the report because Harvard no longer compiles data on Jewish students.
All of that is interesting, but when I read that statement, I lost interest in examining the report further, and lost any confidence in the people who prepared it. Maybe it’s a hangover from listening to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for four years and Donald Trump for a decade, but if someone can’t communicate clearly, I can’t have confidence that they are thinking clearly either.
The story that the great radio story-teller Paul Harvey would now tell us the rest of was the subject of the post below, from August 2024. As you will see, it made my head explode, but there has finally been a resolution, and ethics and common sense prevailed. Review the horrible case. Will voters really hand power back to the party that not only responsible for such things, but that still wants to establish them as our national standards? Really?
But I digress. Here is the original post, and I’ll add the recent developments at the end…
That crude, ambiguous drawing above got a first grader—we’re talking six-years-old here—suspended. That’s almost all you have to know for your head to explode if it is properly wired.
The Ethics Villains and Dunces are so thick in this fiasco you could use it to lay bricks. I’m almost embarrassed to tell the story, which I first saw at Reason…
In March of 2021, a first grader referred to as “B.B.” ” drew a picture we are told was intended to show people of different races, representing “three classmates and herself holding hands.” (I’d save the money the family was planning on spending on art school for B.B., if that was their intent.) Above the drawing, B.B. wrote “Black Lives Mater” (Latin!) with the words “any life” stuck in-between the slogan and the jelly beans, or whatever they were. B.B. then gave the drawing to a black classmate, as what B.B. testified was intended as a friendly gesture. But the classmate either ratted out B.B. or the principal was told about it by the teacher, or something (because school administrators don’t have anything better to do than to police the political correctness of kids’ drawings).
The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, admonished B.B., saying that the drawing was “inappropriate.” B.B. was ordered to apologize to her classmate, prohibited from drawing any more pictures in school, and prevented from going to recess for two weeks.
A brief “The Unabomber Was Right” update: yesterday I explained how changes to my Apple phone caused me to miss a planned appointment because I couldn’t figure out the new “improved” alarm setting process. Later, the phone creeped me out. I had intentionally not put my email account on my phone because of security concerns, because people scrolling through their messages when I’m with them annoys the hell out of me, and because I didn’t know how to install it even if I wanted to. At exactly 5:47pm, my email inbox appeared on my phone anyway, without any directive from me, at least not a deliberate one. I’m sure there’s a rational explanation, but I don’t think I’ll like it.
Meanwhile…
1. Professor Turley is alarmed at the quality of faculty members elite universities are hiring now. “Welcome to the party, pal!” He writes in part,
“Professor Muhammad Abdou, who until recently taught students at Columbia University, appeared online this week to spread calls for religious-based violence and glorify the murder of Jews. He did so as part of an event at the Union Theological Seminary, an institution associated with Columbia. While the university recently ended Abdou’s teaching, it is important to remember that this unhinged fanatic was previously chosen by Columbia faculty and administrators to teach their students. Those individuals remain at Columbia… The Islamic studies scholar called on students to “be a threat” as part of the event titled “Death to the Akademy: How to be a thorn in their throat amidst snakes in the grass.” …Abdou told the students: “Let us engage in jihad, and there are rules for jihad, and Muslims know that Allah has commanded rules. We don’t engage in wanton violence, but we don’t accept the negative peace either.”…He praised Elias Rodriguez, the man facing multiple charges for the murder of a young Jewish couple. In what Abdou called the “assassination of two Zionists,” Rodriguez is accused of murdering Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Lynn Milgrim, 26, the two Israeli employees in 2025 in Washington.
“He then reportedly praised their accused killer: “God bless him. He took action. … Take action. Not only that kind of action, just to be very clear, because there’s also building. We need to destroy. We need to create alternatives.” [His speech] is reminiscent of the speech of other radical faculty like Cornell Professor Russell Rickford, who celebrated the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7th. Their extremism was not a barrier to being hired. It was likely an enhancement.
“They are examples of why faculty members are unlikely to change the overwhelmingly liberal appointments. Conservatives and libertarians have been largely purged from most departments. While even a moderately conservative faculty candidate will often face organized opposition, radicals like Abdou and Rickford find an eager audience on faculties….Abdou offers just pure hate. There is no discernible intellectual content or insight. Just rage masquerading as scholarship.”
Back in 2015, in an earlier grade- and recognition-inflation post, I wrote in horror about the growing tendency of high schools to name up to a third of the graduating class “valedictorians.” I observed in part,
“…this atrocious practice is obviously catching on. Integrity is such a chore. Excellence, superiority, achievement…they are all chores too. As for the genuinely superior students, they are out of luck: this is the high school equivalent of all the gladiators standing up and crying “I’m Spartacus!,” except now it’s “I’m the smartest one in the class!” This Maoist denial of the fact that some of us earn more success than others and that there is nothing wrong with doing so is all the rage…”
In a cover essay in the current issue of Harvard Magazine, Lindsay Mitchell writes about “The True Cost of Grade Inflation,” focuses not on the costs of deceiving employers and flooding the job market with young sufferers of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but on student self-esteem and stress. The former Harvard instructor writes in part,
“…As Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education who authored the October grade inflation report, told me, “One might expect that a world where everyone got A’s would be a very relaxed world, but actually, it’s the most stressed-out world of all.”…The psychology driving this grade-frenzied atmosphere stems from the way A’s flooding the marketplace changes their value as a currency, rendering them both essential and trash at the same time. When you feel that everybody’s got an A, then you must get one, too—every time—or you have failed to keep up with the mainstream. Yet all the A’s in the world will still do zilch to get you ahead…
“…the swelling fear of not keeping up with the perfectly graded masses discourages students from taking academic risks. On campus, stories abound of introductory classes populated by enrollees who don’t need them—many have already taken a version of the same class in high school—but who are willing to repeat the material to have their A outcome in the bag. In those classes, if there’s a curve set by the highest or median score, students taking the class to actually learn the material are often left to claim the lower grades.
“And instead of picking courses that might prove challenging or just exploratory, many students aggressively seek out “gems,” the new Harvard slang for “guts”: easy classes without rigorous grading schemes. Meanwhile, the number of students taking classes pass-fail drifts upward, as students cower before intimidating subjects and elect the route that obviates grading altogether…terrified students would often email me their revised drafts repeatedly to get me to say they were “okay” before I graded them. On occasion, someone emailed me every couple of hours when I didn’t respond immediately. With one abject soul, I was able to track her miserable night by looking at the string of messages she dispatched through the wee hours, while I was sleeping. She had sent me her thesis statement over and over—with each successive iteration showing an almost imperceptible tweak—pleading with me to tell her if it sounded like an A thesis…When students become this obsessed with grades, the student-teacher interaction is reframed in crudely transactional terms…I, as the instructor, acted merely as a giver of A’s, and my willingness (or lack thereof) to grant them in turn defined the value of the student, who would go out into the world and make money or attain status in proportion to her graded value. With this mindset, my students mostly received solid A’s with an attitude of relief rather than joy. Any grade below that, on the other hand, landed as deflating or even ruinous, depending on how GPA-dependent that student’s future plans were…
“In my own classes, I frequently encountered reading comprehension issues serious enough to hamper the putative goal of a writing class—and even seemed to witness students’ reading skills degrading in real time. In my early Expos days, I liked to bring an old Lampoon parody of a Harvard student essay into class to read aloud together—with each person taking the next sentence round robin at the seminar table—as a lighthearted way to kick off a discussion of my students’ own papers. After several years, though, I noticed more and more students seemed unfamiliar with the vocabulary in the parody, with many now stumbling over words like “penchant,” “motif,” and “preponderance.” I finally stopped bringing the Lampoon piece to class, since by then the laughs had turned scarce and the faces had turned red with embarrassment…These students were not puffed up with unjustified praise, like the entitled Harvardian of the grade inflation think pieces. They showed awareness that they were not performing as well as they should…Many students feel the inflated grades they’ve received compose a smooth edifice that surrounds them and could crumble at any moment to reveal the pockmarked reality of their performance. For some, this can become a source of shame, because their inflated A’s suggest their faults are unspeakable and must be hidden, whereas, for all they know, other students’ A’s are entirely deserved. Grade inflation then becomes a dimension of imposter syndrome that reflects other aspects of this generation’s coming-of-age experience. It is similar to looking repeatedly at a friend’s social media posts portraying her life as perfect, while knowing that your own posts were curated to obscure a multitude of flaws…
“Most of the students I talked to about the grade inflation report, even while admitting grades are too high, took a defensive stance. They were already being worked to the point of exhaustion—and now Harvard was talking about making things harder yet? These conversations confirmed how entrenched grade inflation is in the modern educational landscape. To reinstate strict academic standards, Harvard will need to help students see how a world with fewer A’s could be a better one for all involved…”
Ethics Alarms 