Harvard

It Comes Too Late, But At Least Harvard Is Learning (or Pretending To)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Opinions? We don’t need no stinkin’ opinions!

Harvard announced that it will henceforth avoid issuing statements about matters that don’t directly affect the core academic mission of the university. That core mission, surprisingly enough, is education, not politics, not social justice, not sucking up to student activists and not virtue-signaling to progressives. “There will be close cases where reasonable people disagree about whether a given issue is or is not directly related to the core function of the university,” the announcement stated. “The university’s policy in those situations should be to err on the side of avoiding official statements.”

The policy will apply to all University administrators and governing board members, as well as deans, department chairs, and faculty councils.

“Individuals within the university, exercising their academic freedom, sometimes make statements that occasion strong disagreement,” the report stated. “When this happens, the university should clarify that they do not speak for the university and that no one is authorized to speak on behalf of the university except the university’s leadership….Because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others,” the statement says.

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The Latest From Harvard Is So Irresponsible and Incompetent That It Shocks Even Me

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And I have absolutely no faith or trust in this arrogant and rotting (a bad combination) institution. But I still didn’t think its leadership could be this stupid. Hence my brains and skull fragments being all over the ceiling…

Harvard’s 2024 commencement speaker will be Maria Ressa, the CEO of the Philippines-based news site Rappler and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Sounds Harvard-y eneough, doesn’t she? Except that in January, Ressa signed a letter accusing Israel of “unabated killing of journalists in Israeli airstrikes since the start of the Israel-Gaza war”while calling for “immediate end to the bombardment of journalists and apparent targeting in some cases of our colleagues in Gaza and the region.” (This a dubious accusation at best.)

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“Bias Makes Harvard Incredibly Stupid,” the Series! Today’s Episode: “The Law of Holes”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

One of the downsides of denouncing my alma mater is that I only hear about its latest unethical conduct when the story imposes itself on my consciousness or when the alumni magazine arrives, usually containing news that it a month old or more. I was going to write about the last two, post-Claudine Gay presidency issues, which were fascinating as exercises in denial, spin, and self-delusion: the framing of Harvard’s most recent debacle was essentially that “something happened” to Old Ivy, you know, like an earthquake or a plague of frogs. These are supposed to be smart people. Instead, America is auditing a Harvard course on just how stupid bias can make us. Well, that’s a lot more useful than a lot of Harvard courses now.

But even I didn’t see this coming: I didn’t think Harvard could be this stupid. I really didn’t; when I saw this headline in the Washington Free Beacon, my first thought was that I had hit the Babylon Bee on an unfunny day. No, not only was it true, the story was two weeks old.

As the Harvard Crimson had announced on April 16, Vivian Hunt (seen here in a student production of “The Handmaiden’s Tale” or something—I don’t know what the hell she’s wearing or why, but it’s weird)…

… is the newly appointed head of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Hunt is a Harvard College alum, female, black, a likely affirmative action success, and a vocal DEI activist, even more of one, arguably, than disgraced ex-prez Claudine Gay.

Hunt is nearly “patient zero” for the DEI plague. In 2015 she co-authored the McKinsey consulting firm’s influential and dishonest paper, “Why diversity matters,”based on data that has recently been shown to be junk as many (like me) long suspected. She has vigorously argued that meritocracy “isn’t good enough” and urged the private sector to hire based on color and gender rather than that old-fashioned, busted, racist, “talent, ability, and demonstrated success” formula.

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Ethics Quiz: Harvard’s Human Skin-Bound Book

/ Jack Marshall / 23 Comments

As if it doesn’t have enough to worry about, Harvard University announced yesterday that its copy of Arsène Houssaye’s “Des Destinées de L’Ame,” or “The Destiny of Souls” had been stripped of the very feature that made it unusual enough to be worth collecting. The book (above) had been bound in human skin, just like the book in “The Evil Dead” movies. Its first owner, Dr. Ludovic Bouland, a French doctor, had inserted in the volume a handwritten note saying that “a book about the human soul deserved to have a human covering.” The alumnus who gave the book to Harvard in 1934, the American diplomat (and the famous hat family heir) John B. Stetson, had informed the Houghton Library (Harvard’s rare book collection), that Bouland had taken the skin from an unknown woman who died in a French psychiatric hospital.

Harvard removed the binding and said it would be exploring options for “a final respectful disposition of these human remains.” “After careful study, stakeholder engagement, and consideration, Harvard Library and the Harvard Museum Collections Returns Committee concluded that the human remains used in the book’s binding no longer belong in the Harvard Library collections, due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history,” the university’s statement read.

Incidentally, the word for binding books in human skin is anthropodermic bibliopegy.

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…

Was this really ethically necessary?

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FIRE’s Annual Censorship Awards

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

FIRE released its annual “Top Ten Worst Censors” list. They are…

As you see by the EA links, I batted just .500 in covering this topic, and some of the incidents described in FIRE’s report are clearly major ethics breaches that should have been discussed here. Personally, I blame Donald Trump for being a catalyst for so much unethical conduct by the Axis of Unethical Conduct (AUC)—the “resistance,” Democrats and the mainstream media—as well as his own usual forays into the Ethics Twilight Zone that I missed other important matters. Or, as Joni Mitchell might have croaked, “So many things I might have done, but Trump got in my way….”

OK, I’m kidding. Sort of.

The most horrible story that I missed is a tie between the Mayo Clinic outrage and the Marion County Police Dept.’s gestapo act. In that one, FIRE explains,

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KABOOM! Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Is a Worse Plagiarist Than Even Claudine Gay!

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

And there goes my head. I just painted the ceiling of my office, too.

Unbelievable! The Washington Free Beacon, in an exclusive (hey, you wouldn’t expect the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Boston Globe of “Spotlight” fame to do any investigative journalism that might embarrass a black, female DEI officer at Harvard, would you?), revealed that Harvard University’s Sherri Ann Charleston appears to have “plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks” and even taking credit for a study done by her own husband according to a complaint filed with the university yesterday. Charleston was the chief affirmative action officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, then joined Harvard in August 2020 as its first chief diversity officer—you know, because the negligent death of an overdosing career crook in Minnesota meant that Harvard had to launch a new bureaucracy. And what to you know? Charleston contributed to the fateful selection of former Harvard president Claudine Gay!

Charleston’s Harvard bio describes her as “one of the nation’s leading experts in diversity,” whatever that means. Oh wait…it means that she’s aces at “translating diversity and inclusion research into practice for students, staff, researchers, postdoctoral fellows and faculty of color.”

The allegations against Charleston look irrefutable and damning. From the Free Beacon report:

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Stop Making Me Defend Harvard!

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Maybe there is some hope for the tarnished Ivy League progenitor after all. Maybe.

I cite as the evidence for this the near unanimous beat-down a Harvard Crimson editor received from the presumably Harvard community commenters on an arrogant screed called “I’m Trans, and I’m Not up for Debate.” If there ever was smoking gun evidence of the political Left’s attitude toward opposing views, unwelcome speech and “offensive” ideas, this is it.

The essay, posted in the venerable Harvard student-run daily newspaper, begins, “For a community that represents such a small percentage of the population – less than one percent – trans people have occupied a strikingly large portion of public and political discourse.” Why yes, and whose fault is that? Who decided that public school teachers had any business delving into the problems of that tiny percentage of the population, or that the sliver would decide to assert imaginary rights, like being able to crush women in athletic competitions?

“As a transgender person, it has been exhausting to watch my community’s basic rights put into jeopardy and framed as subjects for debate,” undergrad E. Matteo Diaz ’27 writes. “Should trans people be allowed in public bathrooms? Should we be allowed to play sports? Should we be included in school curricula? Should we have access to healthcare? We are treated like a question to be answered, a problem to be solved,” he (She? Readers are never ordered to use specific pronouns) continues. “To cast trans rights as a “debate” suggests that the opinions of all parties — however ignorant of the reality of trans existence — are equally deserving of merit and consideration,” we are told.

Well all righty, then! No debate! What trans activists say must be accepted as revealed truth! How typical of the 21st century Left: challenging the cant is blasphemy. More:

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Ethics Dunce (Still!): Harvard University

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

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It’s quite possible, I think, that Harvard’s ethics rot is so entrenched and endemic that it can never be fixed, even by Barack Obama.

Here’s the latest revolting development. Harvard’s Interim President Alan Garber announced in an email that Professor of Jewish History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Derek Penslar will co-chair its new anti-Semitism task force, established to deal with the concerns of students, faculty, donors, elected officials and the public at large over demonstrations on the Harvard campus calling for the elimination of Israel and the murder of Jews.

Penslar is, shall we say, not the ideal candidate to encourage trust in the task force’s dedication to its task. He signed a letter in August accusing Israel of running a “regime of apartheid,” stating in part, “Without equal rights for all, whether in one state, two states, or in some other political framework, there is always a danger of dictatorship. There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.” He has also said on more than pone occasion that the problem of anti-Semitism at Harvard is being exaggerated, while quickly pairing it with Islamophobia. “Yes, we have a problem with antisemitism at Harvard, just like we have a problem with Islamophobia and how students converse with each other,” Penslar said this month. “The problems are real. But outsiders took a very real problem and proceeded to exaggerate its scope.” Jewish Insider reported that Penslar told the Harvard Crimson in late December that the amount of media focus on anti-Semitism at Harvard has “obscured the vulnerability of pro-Palestinian students, who have faced harassment by actors outside of the University and verbal abuse on and near campus.”

Being “Pro-Palestinian” is the exact equivalent of advocating the killing of Jews, and will be until the official mission of Hamas and other Palestinian groups is altered to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

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NOW Will You Sign My Petition?

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

I got a lot of eye-rolling, real and metaphorical, after I announced my petition aimed at persuading the Harvard Corporation to address the university’s credibility problem in the wake of the Claudine Gay scandal by offering the Harvard presidency to Barack Obama. As far as I can tell, I was among first to make the suggestion in print.

Today the New York Post reports, “Last week the Harvard presidency job was offered to Obama. He deferred the suggestion. Didn’t outright reject. Deferred.”

My Change.org petition pretty much died on the vine last week. Maybe a surge of support could tilt O toward Cambridge and give him something to do besides operating a shadow third term in the White House.

See? I’m smart! Not like everybody says, dumb! ….

Unethical Quote of the Month and Ethics Dunce: Ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

I was prepared to write a sympathetic and generous post in response to the resignation of Claudine Gay from the presidency of Harvard University. It must be a crushing blow for her, both personally and professionally. At this moment, I can’t think of a fair analogy from the past in any field: the closest I can come is Richard Nixon’s forced resignation from the American Presidency. She was celebrated as a great trailblazer as the first black and first black female president of the world’s most famous university only a few months ago. Her fall was rapid and ugly.

I an not sympathetic any more, however. Her Unethical Quote of the Month is her resignation letter, which you can read here. It is disgraceful. She never alludes to her failure to adequately address the anti-Semitic and pro-terrorism demonstrations on the Harvard campus. She never mentions her plagiarism in multiple scholarly papers, without which she probably could have survived the criticism arising from her inept testimony in Congress. What she says, in the midst of empty rhetoric about her aspirations and how much she cares about Harvard, is this:

“[I]t has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

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