Harvard

Oh, Great. It’s Bad Enough That Harvard Is Woke and Incompetent, But Its “Ten Minute Rule” Proves That The University Is Now Stupid As Well

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

I at least expected my thoroughly disgrace alma mater to always maintain some vestige of intelligence, as misapplied as it frequently has been lately.

Guess not.

Before student group-sponsored speakers at the college are allowed to begin, the following official statement from the administration must now be read to the audience:

“A quick note before we begin—Harvard University is committed to maintaining a climate in which reason and speech provide the correct response to a disagreeable idea. Speech is privileged in the University community. There are obligations of civility and respect for others that underlie rational discourse. If any disruption occurs that prohibits speech the disrupters will be allowed for up to 10 minutes. A warning will be issued to all disturbers at the 5-minute mark explaining that the protesters are disrupting the event and ask them to stop. Any further disruption that prevents the audience from adequately hearing or seeing the speakers will lead to the removal of the disrupters from the venue.”

Brilliant.

How smart do you have to be to figure out what’s wrong with this? Let’s see:

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FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings Are Out: Can You Guess Who’s Dead Last Again?

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Of course it’s Harvard. My other alma mater, for which I worked as an administrator for several years, Georgetown, was ranked at #240 out of 251 schools. Harvard lapped the field however, with a perfect 0.00 score. Do read the report, rankings and details here, as depressing as they are regarding the ethics rot in higher education generally. At least I wasn’t disappointed or disillusioned about my two universities’ rankings and performance, since Ethics Alarms has covered the deterioration of both, not as extensively as FIRE, but enough to make it obvious to readers here (and me) that Harvard and Georgetown have busted ethics alarms.

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Yet Another Candidate For My Proposed New Standard For Disbarment…

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has joined the large cadre of fools who seem to seriously believe former President Donald Trump has a strong similarity to Adolf Hitler. After the assassination attempt on July 13, Caraballo posted on Twitter/”X”: “Trump is going to use this as his Reichstag moment to crack down when he’s elected.” See?

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And Now For Something Completely Different: An Ethics Challenge on Slavery Reparations

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Except for one brief moment of frustration and madness, Ethics Alarms has been consistent in its derision of the concept of reparations for slavery. Illogical, legally unhinged, divisive, anti-democratic and most of all, impossible, this really bad idea, a favorite of get-rich-quick racial grievance hucksters and reality-resistant progressives, still hangs around like old unwashed socks, and no amount of argument or reasoning seems to be able to send them to the rag pile. Recently both California, where terrible leftist ideas go to thrive and ruin things, and New York, which really should be moved to the West Coast, have both at least pretended to endorse reparations for slavery. California’s ridiculous reparations task force has proposed giving $223,200 each to all descendants of slaves in California, on the theory that it will be a just remedy for housing discrimination against blacks between 1933 and 1977. The cost to California taxpayers would be about $559 billion, more than California’s entire annual budget (that the state already can’t afford), and that doesn’t include the massive cost of administrating the hand-outs and dealing with all the law suits it is bound to generate.

Brilliant. But that’s reparations for you! Logic, common sense and reality have nothing to do with it.

Now comes two wokey professors from—you guessed it, Harvard, to issue a scholarly paper published in “The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences,” titled “Normalizing Reparations: U.S. Precedent, Norms, and Models for Compensating Harms and Implications for Reparations to Black Americans.” The thesis of this thing is essentially that reparations for slavery should be paid because “Everybody Does It,” offering variations of the #1 rationalization on the list that don’t properly apply to slavery at all. (What? The descendants of slaves are not like fishermen facing depleted fish stocks?) The paper is being called a “study”: it is not a study, but rather an activist advocacy piece. (I would have bet that both scholars are black; nope, just one is, although I would not be surprised to learn that Linda J. Bilmes signed on just to help Cornell William Brooks avoid the obvious accusation of bias and conflict of interest. And, naturally, at Harvard taking on such a mission, certifiably bats though it is, can only enhance her popularity on campus.)

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Is “The Great Stupid” Finally Receding? There Is Hope: From Harvard!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.

It’s also discriminatory.

And stupid.

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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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