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Graduation, 2025
Here is the official Harvard 2025 yearbook, in which 10/7/2023, the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, was labeled “War Breaks Out in Gaza.”
This is like describing 9/11 as “War Breaks Out in Afghanistan.” The above link comes from Shabbos Kestenbaum @ShabbosK, who also says, Please watch these 7 minutes of my graduation ceremony at Harvard. In this X post, he links to an appalling (but sadly, not very surprising) video. For those not on X, the video can also be found on Facebook.
It’s not just Harvard. Here’s graduation at the Hunter Graduate School for Social Work, which is part of the City University of New York. (Video link.)
How about that revered cornerstone of American science and technology, MIT? Guy Ziskind writes at X:
Today should have been a happy day. I finally got my PhD from MIT, with my 5-year-old twins, my 2-year-old and my parents (children of Holocaust survivors) traveling halfway around the world just to be there. Instead, MIT’s student commencement speaker decided it was appropriate to use the moment for hate-filled rhetoric against Israelis and Jews. And it wasn’t just one person; too many in the crowd erupted with cheers and anger. My kids might not have understood every word, but they felt the fear and hostility, and kept asking questions from that point on. It was distressing for them, upsetting for us, and deeply distasteful for everyone else who came to celebrate. How could MIT let this happen and ruin a special day for hundreds of Jewish graduates and thousands of their family members? This is even more heartbreaking considering that just last week, a beautiful Jewish American couple was murdered in DC. Shame on MIT for allowing hate and division to overshadow a day meant for celebration and unity.
Here is the video. If you go all the way to end end, you can see university president Sally Kornbluth’s reaction, best described by the phrase “deer in the headlights.”
In fairness, it should be noted that MIT did later ban the speaker from the full commencement ceremony. But as Gerard Baker notes in the WSJ, [T]his is the face of America’s academic institutions—privileged, extremist little Maoists spouting ahistorical drivel and bigoted cant to people who thought they were attending a celebration and got a Nuremberg rally.
Not all academic institutions, of course, but a high proportion of them. And those institutions that are considered ‘elite’ are clearly the worst ones. At Princeton, graduates handed the president a Palestinian flag during their graduation ceremony, “protesting the university’s complicity with Israel.” Video link.
While there are many factors behind the growth of anti-Semitism in America in recent years, the part played by the universities has been particularly important and malign. America’s ‘elite’ universities have certainly contributed massively to the climate that led to the murder of the Israeli couple in Washington, DC and the burning of Jews in Boulder.
It should also be noted that the “pro-Palestine”, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic fanatics are very often also anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Western Civilization; they subscribe to almost all the leftist memes that have become current in the past decade or so. See, for example, this and this.
America has given our universities vast financial resources and entrusted them with future generations. They have betrayed that trust.
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There could not be an event more lopsidedly ignominious and horrific than Hamas’ October 7th, 2023, attack on Israel. “Free Palestine” is a farce. It is a lie, and all who proclaim are, in truth, saying “Kill the Jews.”
Defund, decertify, deconstruct these incendiary bastions of propaganda and indoctrination.
They have lost everything of value, that they once were revered for.
Every story feels like I’ve been struck. It’s still difficult to digest. How did we come to this??
Some commentators complain that the Trump administration and others are unfairly singling out Harvard for defunding, contract cancellation, revoking tax exempt status, etc.
But since Harvard is America’s oldest university, and holds itself out as the elite of the elite, it is the exemplar to which others aspire. What Harvard does others emulate.
Therefore, it is entirely reasonable to single out Harvard for scrutiny when its policies and procedures undermine basic American values. If Harvard does not want the attention that goes with being an elite institution, possibly America’s most elite university, then it should forcefully relinquish its claim to be such.
As long as Harvard claims to be the elite of the elite, Harvard deserves all the scrutiny, criticism, and consequences for its bad behavior as it gets.
Unfortunately, they are currently one of many. But it is a start.
Headline/url says it all:
https://babylonbee.com/news/harvard-student-leaves-lecture-on-microaggressions-to-attend-kill-the-jews-rally
Harvard is the undisputed top snake of the American academy. It’s not possible to improve the colleges without fixing Harvard. PDT’s people have been working on others too, like Columbia, but those efforts won’t work unless they can break Harvard.
I call for a ceasefire. We abolish the Department of Education, Student loans are henceforth issued by the universities, and the feds will butt out of trying to tell the colleges how to run their businesses. Programs of research grants from other agencies will continue, but this does not preclude reforms.
In response to Larry Summers’ objections to the Trump administration’s actions on Harvard, Michael Gibson (1517 Fund) said: “Dude you abdicated the citadel in 2004 when you resigned the presidency of Harvard for floating a reasonable hypothesis.”
Which reminded me of what Summers said about the Thiel Fund, which grants $100,000 to 17 to 20-year-olds who leave college to start a company…he called it “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.”
This is monopolistic thinking: an attempt to dominate the channel for development of future leaders rather than allowing alternatives to that channel.
Well done.
This country is so screwed up and I think higher education is pretty much the center of it.
Except in some important ways, “higher education” just puts the finishing touches on what started years earlier.
Elaborate.
Really? You think education is just fine, no DEI or woke or trans nonsense etc, right up until college?
No
Is there any societal function left untouched by creeping leftism? Doesn’t seem like it . . .
Harvard is disgusting! It should be dismantled and the ground salted as was done to Carthage. There is nothing of any value there that could not be replaced by a well stocked and used outhouse.
Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor who has been quite critical of that institution in the past, asserts that there is still much of great value in that institution and critiques what he calls Harvard Derangement Syndrome.
And here’s a reply to Pinker from Stanley Kurtz: Harvard is Illegitimate.
Peter Drucker, the great writer on management and society (born in Austria, lived in Germany before coming to the US in 1933, doctorate from Goethe University) said in 1969 that a major advantage America had over Europe was that we did not have a small number of ‘elite’ universities controlling access to the key positions in society:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
We as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above, and there is now a lot of feeling that this has gone too far.
Also see a view of Harvard from an English visitor in 1835. That visitor was Harriet Martineau, who has been called ‘the founding mother of sociology.’
Condolezza Rice was saying this morning that for 80 years we haven’t come up with any alternative for places to do research. If you fix that, that’s how you get them.
Not really a ceasefire.
A bit of an overstatement, but it is true that a lot of very valuable research is indeed conducted in universities, and the Trump administration’s cancellations of such research has certainly done serious harm in some cases..both harm to American health and economic development, and political harm to itself. For example…from yesterday at X:
Harvard researcher Dr Sarah Fortune was only two years away from creating a vaccine that could have saved the 1.25 million people killed each year by tuberculosis. But last month, she received a letter telling her that the $60 million grant funding her research was being halted by President Trump.
Now, maybe the vaccine will be practical and maybe it won’t, that’s the nature of such research. And it seems like that kind of thing that several pharmas and early-stage biotech companies would be interested in picking up. But as a general matter, I do think there’s a proper government role in supporting research…especially basic research, as Ruxandra Teslo has argued.
Yet we cannot allow ourselves to be blackmailed into supporting malevolent activity by universities in order to preserve key research being done under their umbrellas. What is to be done?…maybe an institutional split. If Harvard (for example) continues to feel that their ability to operate a hostile environment for Jews and non-Leftists is more important than their ability to get funding for cancer research, then create a new institution, located nearby, and invite selected researchers to join it.
This has real merit. No blackmail. Create a new institution.
A lot of people have a very Institutional mindset…if something is being done under the auspices of a particular institution, they can’t imagine that it might be done..and maybe done better..in some other way.
“Computers” once meant “IBM”. This wasn’t strictly true, of course, there were also the Dwarves (NCR, GE, Univac, etc.), but IBM was indeed overwhelmingly dominant in the industry. Today, IBM is still around, but it is just one company among many in the industry. Did that change inhibit innovation in the computer field?…or did it actually promote it?
To take another example, General Electric was once a tremendously important part of the US economy. But in 2024, following a string of bad decisions and management problems, the company was split into three separate companies: GE Vernova, GE Aerospace, and GE Healthcare. This transition has not led to the destruction of America’s capability for producing jet engines, power turbines, or medical imaging equipment. It did eliminate the overhang of a finance activities that had turned out to be a lot more risky than planned.
There is already an effective TB vaccine. Maybe the problem is getting it distributed, rather than inventing a new one which would also need to be distributed.
Here’s a description of what her lab is working on. Sounds broader than vaccines, including better diagnosis and treatment.
Certain foreign contributors to Harvard and other high profile Universities must be pleased on the flip side. I can see why there’s been such fanatical push back by Harvard against the Trump administration in attempting some reasonable oversight of these institutions. Harvard is privileged with being flush with a steady stream of US taxpayer money. Multiple reports of Harvard not reporting all of its income or donations either. Harvard wants to write its own rules. Being subject to oversight and restrictions is for the little people. They give orders, they don’t take them. If Trump admin freezes assets or whatever, then maybe just have your ex-grads in Judges robes block the action.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/19/ed-department-records-request/
https://www.thefp.com/p/explosion-in-foreign-funding-for-american-universities
Related post: A Plague of Credentialed Terrorists?
What % of the funding goes directly to her research?