Maybe the President’s assault on partisan colleges and universities is having the desired (and necessary) effect.
A new NBC News poll claims that only 33% of American agree that a four-year college degree is “worth the cost.” 63% believe that it’s “not worth the cost” because “people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.”
Four per cent don’t know what college is, are too dumb to compose any answer, or answered “Fish!” or something.
Harvard College’s Office of Undergraduate Education issued a 25- page report sent to faculty and Harvard College students this week. Incredibly, it revealed that more 60% of the grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates are A’s, which, of course, means that the school’s standards of performance are elusive at best. The report concluded that Harvard’s current grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.” Ya think? It is more than that. Such low standards of excellence mean that a Harvard diploma, which the world accepts as powerful evidence of merit and superior intellectual skills, is a fraud.
The report drew on years of data on student grades and course evaluations, as well as surveys of faculty and student leaders. A faculty committee found earlier this year that undergraduates often prioritize other interests over classwork…you know, like protesting in favor of terrorists and against Jews. Still, the report found that the amount of time students say they spend on coursework outside of class each week has remained stable over the past two decades.
The Harvard Alumni Magazine arrived yesterday. Above is the cover and the illustration for its feature section about the University’s “resistance” to President Trump’s completely reasonable, responsible and justifiable demands that the most visible, influential, prestigious and wealthy university in the United States stop dedicating itself to undermining American values, indoctrinating students in anti-American biases, provide intellectual diversity on its faculty, cease discriminating against whites, males and Asians, and stop enabling flagrant Jew hatred on campus.
To Harvard’s credit, the alumni magazine makes a pass at even-handedness, even highlighting an alumnus who writes that “no private institution has a right to demand that taxpayers fund discrimination, exclusion and intolerance.” But most of the issue is devoted to familiar anti-Trump victim-mongering, including an essay extolling the work of a non-binary (or something) professor “whose data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.”
“Authoritarianism” has joined “sexism,” “racism,” “violence,” “insurrection” and other rhetorical weapons of the Left as infinitely flexible accusations steeped in double standards. A President who uses his constitutional powers to pursue policies the Left opposes is an “authoritarian.” A President who weaponizes the legal system to imprison and persecute his political opposition is not—as long as he is a Democrat.
I mean, just to pull a fantastic hypothetical out of the air…
We are learning that in spite of its grandstanding and feigned defiance of the Trump demands that it stop engaging in left-wing indoctrination, allowing an anti-Jewish environment to fester on campus, and engaging in viewpoint discrimination in hiring (along with other unethical conduct), Harvard is quietly (it hopes) negotiating some level of reform along the lines of the Trump Administration’s letter of April 11.
Quietly, because Harvard’s overwhelmingly leftist, totalitarian-tilting, progressive activist faculty wants to have their campus advance only one world view, the “right” one, and because of the sinister influence of that faculty, its student body overwhelmingly believes likewise. In the Trump Deranged world where most academics, scholars, journalists, lawyers and, of course, Democrats dwell, publicly deriding and defying the President of the United States is simply opposing fascism and the forces of darkness, even if the least intellectually crippled of them recognize deep down that President Trump is on the correct side of an issue. He is on the right side of this one.
Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a conservative, which at Harvard is like being a Stegosaurus in the National Zoo, rose to defend his employers and colleagues with an op ed in the Times with the title above as its headline (but without the question mark). The theory is that since he’s not a typical campus leftist, his arguments should carry more weight when he takes the side of the people who issue his paycheck rather than the President who called the school “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”
Actually, the op-ed is pretty funny. (That’s another gift link.) It brought to my mind two quotes: “Hitler did some good things too!” (From “Judgement at Nuremberg”) and “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” (Attributed to comedian Joey Adams.) Pinker lists a lot of the same problems (but far from all) at Harvard that I described and condemned long before Trump went after the school. Tellingly, he somehow neglects to mention the whole Claudine Gay fiasco, when Harvard selected a DEI-obsessed dean who had risen to a tenured place on the Harvard faculty with the help of academic plagiarism, then embarrassed the school testifying before Congress, and was initially defended by the Harvard brass even when it was revealed that her scholarly publications were so tainted that the equivalents would have gotten any student expelled. Funny how all that would slip his mind.
Pinker still makes a damning case against Harvard. He writes,
Of course, they didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.
Francesca Gino is one of Harvard Business School’s best known professors. The behavioral scientist authored “Rebel Talent,” a 2018 book with the subtitle “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life.” Well, the expert on lying, cheating and dishonesty lied and cheated. She took administrative leave from the “B-School” after evidence surfaced that she had falsified her data…on cheating. Ironic, no? And stupid.
Gino, whose work has been widely cited, has been a professor of business administration at Harvard since 2014. She was first accused of fabricating data by the blog Data Colada in July of 2021 when the bloggers approached Harvard Business School with their allegations. The Dean negotiated a secret agreement with Data Colada to delay posting about their allegations until the Business School thoroughly investigated their claims.
An 18-month-long investigation by a three-person committee of former and current professors eventually concluded that the professor had indeed engaged in research misconduct. Gino insists that she is innocent and is suing for $25 million: she might as well, since an ethics professor and author of books about cheating caught cheating doesn’t exactly have a promising future. Of course, the ethical thing for an ethics expert to do in such a dilemma is to confess and apologize. But if she were an ethical ethics expert, she wouldn’t be in this mess.
In an article called “A Weird Research-Misconduct Scandal About Dishonesty Just Got Weirder,” the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that Harvard’s inquiry had found that one of Gino’s studies contained even more fraudulent data than had been alleged. Then Data Colada weighed in with a four-part series examining data in four separate studies co-authored by Gino. The blog authors wrote, “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.”
This week, Harvard University stripped Professor Gino of her tenure at Harvard Business School. Her dismissal seems imminent.
Harvard might have tried to finesse the Gino affair were it not already shaken by the recent Claudine Gay scandal, when the university’s first black president had to resign because of scholarship plagiarism shortly after being appointed. In addition, the school is already on shaky ground in the terrain of public opinion, claiming financial distress as a defense against the Trump Administration’s assault despite Harvard having an endowment some nations would love to have as their their nest egg.
Professor Gino definitely picked the wrong time to embarrass Old Ivy.
The conservative Washington Free Beacon launched a thorough investigation into the ways Harvard University has deliberately sought ways to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling that affirmative action policies at colleges and universities are illegal and unconstitutional. (You didn’t expect the Axis media to do that, did you?) Last week, the project resulted in a damning report of how the Harvard Law Review engaged in—is engaging in—outright racial discrimination in selecting staff, authors and articles:
The law review states on its website that it considers race only in the context of an applicant’s personal statement. But according to dozens of documents obtained by the Free Beacon—including lists of every new policy adopted by the law review since 2021—race plays a far larger role in the selection of both editors and articles than the journal has publicly acknowledged.
Just over half of journal members, for example, are admitted solely based on academic performance. The rest are chosen by a “holistic review committee” that has made the inclusion of “underrepresented groups”—defined to include race, gender identity, and sexual orientation—its “first priority,” according to resolution passed in 2021.
The law review has also incorporated race into nearly every stage of its article selection process, which as a matter of policy considers “both substantive and DEI factors.” Editors routinely kill or advance pieces based in part on the race of the author, according to eight different memos reviewed by the Free Beacon, with one editor even referring to an author’s race as a “negative” when recommending that his article be cut from consideration.
“This author is not from an underrepresented background,” the editor wrote in the “negatives” section of a 2024 memo. The piece, which concerned criminal procedure and police reform, did not make it into the issue.
Such policies have had a major effect on the demographics of published scholars. Since 2018, according to data compiled by the journal, only one white author, Harvard’s Michael Klarman, has been chosen to write the foreword to the law review’s Supreme Court issue, arguably the most prestigious honor in legal academia. The rest—with the exception of Jamal Greene, who is black—have been minority women.
Nice. What does the race of an author have to do with the quality of legal analysis, which is what law review articles are supposed to be? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
My Spring edition of the Harvard alumni magazine just arrived. It was clearly written before Trump’s assault on the school had reached its current zenith, but the magazine’s spinning away of Harvard’s various ethical transgressions was still in evidence, as it always is.
I found one feature more head-exploding than the rest. An alum of recent vintage mocked a previous issue essay warning that Harvard’s “financial foundations” were “at risk” of being “shattered” because of Trump’s barbarians in Washington breaching the metaphorical gates. Pointing to his alma mater’s approximately 53 billion dollar endowment, the contrarian grad wrote, “Given the general Harvard ethos that taxing the rich is a virtue, you would think that taxing the richest—-Harvard—would be embraced, not cause for alarm. What hypocrisy.”
The editor tit-tutted that the writer was mistaken, because Harvard’s endowment per student was less than some other institutions, such as Princeton. Oh. What a neat way to minimize the size of an massive endowment! Amusingly, another letter in the same issue suggested that Harvard use that device, endowment dollars per student, to combat attacks, stating the endowment as “X dollars per student” rather than cumulatively.
Obviously, the staff adopted the suggestion immediately.
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?” …
Wow. CNN senior justice correspondent Evan Perez appeared on last night’s episode of Wolf Blitzer’s “The Situation Room” and attempted to refute President Trump’s assessment of Harvard as a “cesspool of leftist thinking.” (Harvard is, in fact, a cesspool of leftist thinking.) Perez thought he had definitive proof that the representation was false.
“Now, what [the Trump administration] is asking for, Wolf, is for Harvard not only to comply with what they say are anti-Semitic, control of anti-Semitic issues on campus, but they want bigger changes. They want to oversee hiring and admissions standards. They want to make sure that conservative views are being represented on campus.”
Here comes Perez’s brilliant argument: wait for it….
Ethics Alarms 