Thursday, December 14, 2023

Cheer on Academia Burning Itself Down


Never interrupt your enemy when he/she/they/xe/zorp is making a mistake, and the Ivy Leagues are making a huge one. Talk about getting high on your own supply – for the last few decades, our allegedly prestigious universities have been dealing out highly addictive nonsense to their students, and it looks like they huffed a big rail of it. How else could you explain having three university poohbahs sit there on camera in front of Congress and be unable – or, more likely, unwilling – to say that cheering on Jewish genocide is bad?

Is it bad? Yes. Period. Nothing follows. 

They did not say that because they actually do not believe it. To them, Jews are settlers and colonists, and decolonization is, well, messy. The mess being, of course, the blood and guts of the men, women, and children that their semi-human Hamas heroes splattered all over their victims’ homes. Understand that to these bureaucrats and to those in their academic cesspool, this butchery is A-OK. Oh, they will pretend to decry it. They will mutter some qualifications, but what matters to them is context. And they accept the possibility that there is a context that allows mass rape, mutilation, and murder – as long as a designated oppressor is raped, mutilated, or murdered.

What they failed to understand is that normal people do not accept this morally bankrupt paradigm. Oh, they soon found out. When a bunch of alumni who had fond memories of their alma maters suddenly saw what their schools had degenerated into, they stopped writing their zillion-dollar checks. Then the backpedaling began. The head of Penn was canned, but – as of this writing – the head of Harvard seems unlikely to follow. According to CNN – unlike the Harvard head, I believe citation is important – “The Executive Committee of Harvard University’s Alumni Association on Monday announced their unreserved support for President Claudine Gay.” I could not be happier that these tools have tossed another can of gasoline onto the fire burning down their garbage institution.

Let’s examine Harvard, the alleged pinnacle of academic achievement and scholarship. It has a multi-billion dollar endowment, which a real Republican Party would tax, but its true power is its reputation. The name “Harvard” is such that any hiring partner at a law firm or brokerage house or wherever has a ready-made excuse if the recruit blows it: “Well, he/she/whatever was from Harvard.”

Or had an excuse. Harvard is not Harvard anymore. The majority of grades given at Harvard are A’s. At one time, “A” stood for “outstanding.” Now, it stands for “average.” The admissions process is no longer merit-based. It is diversity-based, as SCOTUS recently noted when it slapped the college for its racism. Asian and white students need stratospheric grades and more to get in; those whose grandparents hailed from the right continent do not. Diversity is an explicit rejection of merit, though you are not supposed to say it. Well, everyone is seeing it and saying it.

Harvard’s current president is a shining example of diversity in action. She was not hired because she was talented. She is demonstrably untalented. She was hired because she is diverse, meaning she checked boxes that should be meaningless but, in academia, mean everything. She – I am assuming her pronouns – is no brilliant scholar. She published just 11 academic articles in her career. That’s a joke. And her topics were a joke too, the typical race/gender/jargon nonsense that these untalented hacks generate. But the punchline is not that her work is crap. It was that she plagiarized it. It’s not even her crap. Hell, if you are going to steal, steal stuff that’s not garbage. Oh, and be able to speak in public without embarrassing yourself.

But she was not hired for competence and integrity. She was hired both for block-checking and for her promise to put DEI front and center at the university. And she sure has. It’s so front and center that they cannot hide the rot anymore. Her sordid and shameful career demonstrates the problem with prioritizing diversity over merit. You get diversity (of a sort), but you don’t get merit. And merit was the Harvard brand. That was the value of the Harvard diploma. It was shorthand for “This kid is probably pretty smart and will do a good job for you.” But we are seeing that this is no longer true. We are seeing the opposite – these kids are entitled pinko morons strutting around in their keffiyehs being mad that Jews are alive. They are not bright. They are not articulate. They are arrogant and stupid. 

That’s the new Harvard brand, and we are all seeing it. But the school cannot change course. Insanely, 600 faculty members signed a letter of support for their plagiarizing prezzy. The alumni committee high-fived her. It hardly matters, though. It’s not a matter of terminating the reign of one thieving mediocrity. The woke cancer has metastasized throughout the school and through all these schools. It infects every corner of them – you now have med schools that talk about prioritizing equity over, you know, curing people. 

But people notice. These idiots – no one is as dumb as a university professor or bureaucrat – are undermining their value proposition. When the schools suck, they put out sucky products. People notice. And they are noticing. The fact is that those talented folks who lost a place at Harvard over their pigment and parentage are going to school somewhere, and they are available to employers. People do not have to hire from Harvard. In the law field, many people refuse to hire useless Ivy League junior lawyers – they have been burned too often. This will spread.

Good. The era of these petri dishes of commie indoctrination is ending. They are trashing their reps just as an alternative arises. The internet and AI can provide the world’s best teachers to students anywhere in the world, not just in the Ivies’ hallowed lecture halls. Who needs Harvard? And don’t say, “You do if you want to network.” As they squander their prestige, their network value shrinks. Plus, the GOP is getting sick of them, and soon it will be forced by the voters to turn off the cash spigot and ramp up the investigations over the colleges’ rampant racism.

It is a glorious time to be alive, to watch creative destruction at work. And you could not find a more deserving victim.