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On the bird site (or is it the letter site now?) I'm seeing increasing calls to oust Harvard President Claudine Gay. Famously, during her recent Congressional testimony she was asked this question:
"Dr. Gay, at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?"
Her memeworthy reply was: "It can be, depending on the context".
This of course, is pretty weak sauce considering that Harvard is ranked dead last out of 245 institutions for Freedom of Expression according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. It would appear to an outside observer that Harvard's standards of what is acceptable speech vary greatly depending on who is doing the speaking.
Bill Ackman, billionaire and Harvard alum, didn't pull any punches tweeting "Resign in Disgrace".
Predictably the scandal has caused people to dig into Ms. Gay's academic work, and accusations were made that she plagiarized parts of her thesis. Nevertheless, many have come to her defense with more than 650 Harvard faculty signing a letter of support for Dr. Gay, who became the institution's first black President earlier this year.
It would appear that Harvard is in a no-win situation.
If they fire Dr. Gay, they will have fired a black, female President and will enrage the social justice left who constitute the vast majority of Harvard's students and staff.
If they don't fire her, they will have proven that Harvard has no consistent free speech principles and, furthermore, that calls for genocide are acceptable as long as they are against the appropriate targets.
There is perhaps a third option, in which Dr. Gay cracks down hard on anti-Semitic speech and makes an example of a few students or staff who crossed the line, thus blaming it on a few bad apples and going back to the status quo.
Whatever happens, I think that Harvard's reputation has been damaged by this incident. There is an opportunity for another school in the elite ranks to set itself apart as the "sane" alternative and perhaps capture Harvard's crown at the top of the academic food chain.
As always, I believe that donations to elite institutions are harmful and the donors should be laughed at, taxed, and shamed.
Ackman seems like the mob leader. He says they haven’t fired her because he’s making too much noise.
The obvious issue with her and her plagiarizing is affirmative action. Like that’s the best you can find for Harvard? She appears well below the average Motte posters ability. And atleast a few of us probably wouldn’t mind the position.
The second thing I’ve been thinking about is whether anyone is going to NOT attend Harvard. Where would you even going? MIT seems in the same boat here which at one point would have just been the pragmatic engineering school. All the Ivy’s are the same. Perhaps University of Chicago, Notre Dame, and Cal-Tech, after that whats out there flagship state schools? Yeshiva?
The degradation of Harvard won't begin on the side of the applicants, but with elite employers and the families who run them. Whether or not this week's scandal has any permanent effect, the headlines have absolutely put a microscopic chip in the edifice of Harvard's reputation. The failing is ultimately not the president herself nor the answers she gave, but instead the amount of criticism that has been able to exist without loud pushback from the Left. The fact that Progressive mouthpieces haven't gone full Propaganda Mode to defend the integrity of the Ivy League at all costs indicates something has already started to crumble in the Ivies-as-Progressive-Temples mindset. If any of this has long-term implications, it's likely toward the end of the current top post in this CWRoundup: to shave the wildest edges off of Wokeism in the interest of waterproofing Progressive positions (both professional and ideological) for the long haul.
And don't forget that the Chinese (at the very least) are actively looking for ways to degrade Harvard's (and other Western universities) reputation. English, Japanese, Chinese, French, Swiss, South Korean, etc. universities aren't going to cry if Harvard gets knocked off its perch. There's a whole world out there waiting for a chance to step into the prestige circle.
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