Harvard

I’m Sick Of Hearing These Arguments That College Admissions Favor The Wealthy And Privileged Because The Problem Is Easy To Fix. So Fix It.

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Nicholas Kristoff, a another New York Times progressive pundit but one who occasionally makes sense, has an intermittently valid op-ed in today’s paper titled, “The Real College Admissions Scandal,” which is, he argues, “affirmative action for the rich and privileged.”

Kristoff immediately knee-caps his own credibility by writing, perhaps to please his Dark Woke Masters, “I wish the Supreme Court had ruled differently on affirmative action for race, but unfortunately it blocked that path for diversity.” It’s a stupid statement. The Constitution blocked that path, and so did the 1964 Civil Rights Act. What his statement literally means is that he applauds “good racial discrimination and prejudice”, but deplores it when it adversely affects groups he cares about.

He also comes close to setting off the hypocrisy alarm, but at least is transparent. While including “legacy admissions” in his list of “affirmative action for the rich and privileged,” Kristoff says, “I was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and my wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is currently a member and previously served on the Princeton and Cornell boards; our three children also attended Harvard.” Hmmm. So, having benefited from the policies he condemns while doing nothing to reform them, the pundit now want to stop others from benefiting from them! Cool. He also is silent about how much money he has given to his alma mater over the years. Donors also get an edge for their kids when they apply to prestige colleges.

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Joy Reid, Harvard, Althouse, And Affirmative Action

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Straining to engage in her trademark “cruel neutrality,” esteemed blogger Ann Althouse stepped up to defend MSNBC’s Joy Reid and stepped in it, as the idiom goes, in the process. Ann defended Reid, claiming that she never said or implied that she was admitted to Harvard because of affirmative action.

“I think Ramaswamy is distorting (or, less likely, not hearing and understanding),” Ann wrote in part. “…She says she got high grades and test scores in high school, but she wouldn’t have thought to try for Harvard if Harvard hadn’t come out to her small, majority-black town and recruited. She was strongly encouraged to apply. The Supreme Court hasn’t changed the power of schools to recruit in places like hers. Reid never says her scores and grades wouldn’t have been enough if she were not black.”

Uncharacteristically, Althouse didn’t do her homework. In the MSNBC segment, Reid was basically regurgitating her blog post saying the same things, and that was headlined, “I got into Harvard because of affirmative action. Some of my classmates got in for their wealth.”

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Ethics Quote Of The Month: John W. Jenkins

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

“The University defends the truth,” says the Harvard logo. ‘The emblem shows respect for science, using only verified facts within the University’s walls and a willingness to defend the truth.’ Yet as it relates to climate change, the University has set aside obvious truths and brought together its five professional schools supporting the new “Save the Planet” religious dogma of the past decade.”

—Harvard M.B.A John W. Jenkins, in a letter to the alumni magazine protesting the University’s complicity in promoting “imprudent policies perpetuated on our populations by Green environmental activists whose view of history is only 20 years deep.”

Jenkins, whom I have thus far not succeeded in contacting, has authored one of the clearest and most persuasive debunking of current climatic change cant, and perfectly chastised our mutual alma mater, Harvard, for its cowardly and irresponsible alliance with an unethical and destructive movement. The author appears to be in his late eighties, and more skilled in communication than graduates half, indeed a quarter his age.

Harvard Magazine published his letter, but I am trying hard to believe it was a coincidence that its second half was difficult to locate due to a pagination error. I hope Mr. Jenkins does not mind Ethics Alarms re-publishing his entire statement. It deserves to be seen by as many people as possible. The whole thing is an Ethics Quote of the Month. Here it is:

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Me: “Berkeley Law School Hiring Chesa Boudin Is Unethical!” Harvard: “Hold My Beer…”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I’m not sure Harvard’s hiring of failed Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot is quite as outrageous and incompetent as Berkeley hiring the pro-criminal ex-DA who helped turn San Francisco into a close approximation of Frank Miller’s “Sin City,” but it’s close enough to make me sick to my stomach.

Lightfoot will teach a course at Harvard later this year on “Health Policy and Leadership,” she announced yesterday, saying, “I learned a lot over the past four years, and this gives me an opportunity to share my experiences and perceptions of governing through one of the most challenging chapters in American history.”

This is an interesting concept: hire teachers to teach what they proved to have no skill at or comprehension of when they had actual responsibility in that area. This is like hiring Mario Mendoza (lifetime batting average: .215) as a hitting coach. It gives Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Bud Light responsible for the Dylan Mulvaney debacle, hope for a new career in academia.

Lightfoot demonstrated as Mayor of Chicago that she knew virtually nothing about leadership, policymaking or public health management, and now she’s teaching it. Perfect. Here’s how her hometown paper sympathetically describes her qualifications:

Early in the pandemic, when Black Chicagoans were dying at six times the rate of whites, Lightfoot and her team led by Dr. Allison Arwady …provided door-to-door outreach with masks and information in vulnerable communities and, when vaccines became available, prioritized them for South and West side residents. But Lightfoot also was slow to take action when the pandemic spurred Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to close schools and businesses across the state, following along only reluctantly. She later clashed with the governor over bar and restaurant rules and battled the Chicago Teachers Union in a push to return to in-person learning, even as she faced blowback over keeping the lakefront closed too long…. Lightfoot also walked away from her campaign promise to reopen public mental health clinics closed by predecessor Rahm Emanuel. Lightfoot argued the city could better serve residents by giving money to vendors…

I wonder if Prof. Lightfoot will teach her students to accuse critics of sexism and racism when their policies crash and burn?

On the same pedagogical theory, she should team teach the course with ex-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who can explain what he learned by killing thousands of elderly nursing home residents by stashing pandemic victims in their midst.

Oh, all right, Berkeley hiring Boudin to head a new criminal justice center is more unethical than Harvard letting Lightfoot pollute student minds with her concept of leadership…after all, it’s just a single course, and the smart students can just skip it.

Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #4: Imagine…If John Lennon Had Graduated From Harvard

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

If John Lennon had graduated from Harvard (and not been assassinated, of course) he might have written the ridiculous insufferable screed I just read in my anniversary report. I knew the author as a freshman, and did not enjoy the experience: the fact that he appears to be just as big a jerk today as he was when he was 18 confirms my long-held conclusion that maturity is a myth and most people don’t change as much as we would like to think.

Of course this guy is obsessed with climate change. He is downcast about the “prospects for the future of human civilization,” seeing “pending catastrophe” due to our “abuse of Mother Nature,” and there’s “very little time” to turn things around. No, Al Gore was not in my class.

Millions are going to die, “water wars” will rage, nuclear wars are inevitable, and hoards of climate-displaced refugees in the millions will roam the earth. Everyone must reduce their carbon footprint to zero–ZERO!—immediately, “not next year, not in five years, but now” or we are doomed. That means, this expert says (I can’t figure out what his real area of expertise is, but I don’t care, either), going cold turkey on fossil fuels and buying electric cars or, presumably, using bicycles and roller skates. Airplanes are right out, I guess.

He goes on to lecture on the need to abandon “tribalism,” self-interest, nations, success (“tribal dominance”) basic human aspirations and ambitions, all of it, because it is these maladies that have brought us to this perilous state. I’ll give him credit for one thing: at least he realizes that the kind of ascetic existence that he demands of humanity can’t possibly occur under the current governmental and societal structures, though he never has the guts to come right out and say what he’s advocating: world dictatorship by some body or individual who is wise and beneficent. For that would be the only way his formula for survival could ever be carried out, and that formula is exactly as absurd as Lennon’s lyrics in “Imagine.” It can’t happen, won’t happen, and most important of all, shouldn’t happen. Two and a half pages and 2,000 words of environmental, utopian virtue-signaling, all culminating in an urgent, indeed hysterical exhortation to not only do the impossible and impractical, but also do it without any reasonable assurance that such radical measures will work.

Good plan!

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Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #3

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

I have just a few general observations this time.

  • I know I have mentioned this before, but I can’t get past it: it is remarkable to me, but maybe it shouldn’t be, how many of my classmates regard climate change as their greatest concern for the future.These are (mostly) smart, analytical people, yet climate change conventional wisdom has been successfully implanted in their brains by relentless media hammering and by cognitive dissonance (that is, what the “good” people believe must be good and true) so deeply that they are incapable of perceiving obvious logical fallacies. The people society trusts to devise substantive and practical solutions to our problems are stuck in the “Do something!” mode. Scary.
  • Trump Derangement rages.
  • So does wilful historical revisionism. One Democrat wrote that his wife was an “Eisenhower Republican” but had abandoned the current Republican Party because it had become too radically conservative. Eisenhower Republicans would make today’s GOP seem like the Antifa. Kennedy Democrats were more conservative than today’s Republican Party.
  • By far my favorite ethical weirdness, though, is the widespread obsession with exaggerating the significance of the January 6 Capitol rioting while referring to it as both an “insurrection” and a bleak portent of the decline of democracy. This opinion is coming from the class that overwhelmingly supported the student take-over of the Harvard administration building and cheered the students who battled riot police who tried to clear out the mob! That invasion of Harvard offices was just a microcosm of the Capitol riot, a foolish and doomed tantrum, except that the students were angry that their school was supporting a war over which they had no authority or control, while the Capitol rioters were protesting what they believed was a perversion of a Presidential election that had rendered their votes and rights effectively null and void. While the students were never held accountable for their civil disobedience, the Capitol rioters have been severely punished. After decades that should have made them wiser, the former students who never held any fantasies that their brief take-over of university offices would allow them to overthrow the Harvard administration now solemnly claim that a few hundred jacked-up idiots with bear spray and sticks thought they could take over the United States government.

Thoughts While Reading Classmate Entries In My Alma Mater’s Anniversary Report, #1

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

As I have noted, I deliberately missed my class’s big reunion intentionally, disgusted with what the school has become and the unethical values it now imposes on its students, alumni, applicants and other sho rely upon it to be a force for enlightenment in the nation. Interestingly, several classmates (none of whom I ever met) sent me their approval of my protest and the stated reasons for it in my class report, but none emailed. All arrived in handwritten letters. Either they think my views are so out-of-date that I communicate in quill and parchment only, or they do.

Anyway, I am slowly working my way through the hardbound tome, which is over a thousand pages long and in small print. Its statements by members of the class provide a fascinating and useful set of clues about the current state of mind the more pampered, “privileged” Boomers are in—for one thing, those who did write (a lot of them didn’t) are even more verbose than I am. Also notable is how many of the survivors of the original campus protests are just as vulnerable to facile conventional wisdom among their peer groups now as they were when they were praising Ho Chi Minh, promiscuous sex and the habit of being stoned much of the day.

I have always thought that maturity is a myth.

With this post, I’m launching what might be a continuing series, but who knows what horrors lie in those 1000 pages? I have already been horrified by the number of my classmates who feel that the Earth is endangered by global warming, which they view as the Most Important Thing Ever, though none of the people writing that appear to be in the scientific community.

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Autumn Afternoon Ethics Leaves, 10/25/2022: Hope, Harvard, Fakes, And Weenies.

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

So far, at least, Biden’s spectacularly incompetent and unethical Cabinet hasn’t seen anyone indicted, though there are good arguments that at least two of them should be impeached. This date in history, October 25, marks the day in 1929 when Albert B. Fall, Secretary of the Interior in President Warren G. Harding’s cabinet, was found guilty of accepting a bribe while in office. Fall was the first Presidential cabinet member to be so humiliated. There would be others.

Fall accepted a $100,000 interest-free “loan” from Edward Doheny of the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company in exchange for Interior granting him a valuable oil lease in the Elk Hills naval oil reserve, which together with the Teapot Dome naval oil reserve in Wyoming, had been transferred to the Department of the Interior as part of Fall’s scheme to profit by receiving bribes. The Senate Public Lands Committee launched an investigation that revealed not only the $100,000 bribe that Fall received from Doheny, but also a $300,000 bribe that Harry Sinclair, president of Mammoth Oil, had given to Fall for use of the Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming.

Yet Fall was only sentenced to a year in prison. It’s comforting to know that laws were only for the “little people” 100 years ago too, don’t you think?

A Cabinet member who betrays the public trust like that belongs in prison for decades, if not life.

1. There is hope! At least one committed progressive activist of note has the integrity to be revolted at what her party of choice is doing. Susan Sarandon, a charter member of the Hollywood Left, posted this on Twitter:

Good for her.

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From The “Res Ipsa Loquitur” Files: Harvard’s Press Release Announcing The Proud Addition Of Brian Stelter

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Well, I don’t know what else I can do to express my shame and revulsion at having a Harvard diploma. I’ve turned it to the wall, and lowered it to the floor. I boycotted my class reunion this year, and wrote why in my class notes. This latest despicable breach of ethics and academic integrity is still baffling to me. Stelter proved himself over and over again to be an unethical journalist, a fake expert on journalism ethics, a transparently biased hack and a liar incapable of admitting either his misconduct or that of his employer, CNN. Even the title of his weekly show, “Reliable Sources,” was a lie: Stelter’s reports were reliably unreliable. He did not, as his show promised, cover and critique news media conduct, misdeeds and controversies. Increasingly, he focused his criticism only on Fox News, while his own network was lapping the field in scandals.

What does it tell us, then, about Harvard, its Kennedy School (which Bill O’Reilly constantly boasted about attending for a few months) and its Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy that they would issue this press release? I hope the answer is obvious to all:

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Well Waddya Know! Harvard Undercuts A Core Progressive Big Lie!

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I can’t let this pass. I’ve been bashing my embarrassing alma mater here for years, and it finally is responsible for something that almost makes me want to hang the ol framed diploma up again, with the back of it to the wall again.

Almost.

The Harvard Crimson reports:

In the most comprehensive study to date of what motivated the Trump supporters to attack the Capitol, Shorenstein Center researchers found that 20.6 percent of the rioters, a plurality, were motivated to take part in the riot because they supported Trump. Another 20.6 percent of the rioters cited Trump’s fraudulent claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged as their primary reason for participating in the Jan. 6 riot.

The authors of the study — Joan Donovan, Kaylee Fagan, and Frances E. Lee — wrote that their analysis found that the largest proportion of defendants “were motivated, in part, to invade the US Capitol Building by Donald Trump.”

The third most common reason for attacking the Capitol: a desire to start a civil war or an armed revolution, according to the study. Almost 8 percent of defendants indicated it was their main motivation.

In an interview, Fagan said she was surprised by how frequently support for Trump and concerns about the election were cited as primary motivations for joining the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“I don’t think I expected the result to be this stark,” Fagan said. “I also certainly didn’t expect those two motivations to come up nearly exactly as often as they both did.”

Though more than 800 have been federally prosecuted for their participation in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the study focused on 417 defendants charged with federal crimes in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

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