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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Tell the student if they continue to disrupt, they will be expelled. If they continue to disrupt, expel them and then call the police to have them removed.

There are thousands (if not tens of thousands) of qualified students ready to take the rabble rousers place.

And this is completely reasonable, but it’s not what Harvard is about.

Harvard is about granting membership in the elites to people the elites think should be there, but aren’t. And little aristocrats don’t get dragged out for minor civil disobedience, unless they want to be. Yes, if they try this at northwest Iowa tech podunk campus, they should get beaten and dragged out by the police because northwest Iowa tech podunk campus exists to give the degrees we have arbitrarily decided are necessary to have a good job with a minimum of disruption. That they aren’t is a reasonable criticism of the northwest Iowa tech system. But Harvard is a different kind of institution.