What hasn’t been a Pyrrhic victory for the American Right this century?? The Right overturned Roe v Wade and we had more abortions. I guess the hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims Bush slaughtered are still dead…but does it still bring joy to your life??
Harvard and Yale should funnel all donations to the top 10 HBCUs until they get an additional $10 billion in endowment and then these issues won’t be such a big deal. Xavier in New Orleans does a great job of graduating STEM students and getting them into medical schools.
Yes quite so! And I think it has been counter-productive - however tempting - for conservatives to focus in so much on this Harvard blow-up rather than the big picture. Why?....because it fosters the illusion of the feasibility of a quick fix.
The big picture is that academia, as a whole, has been a ROTTEN EMPIRE of Lefty groupthink for 50 years and more. This has done immense damage to the fabric of Western civilisation but few have wanted to notice until recently. Why?..... because mainstream political discourse has been obsessed with the comforting delusion that political power is something that changes hands at election time......meanwhile the future (humanities and social science) elite, sheep-dipped in their university 'education' have quietly assumed the reins of each and every institution of Western society.
I assume you are based in the UK. If so you'll be aware that all our institutions have been colonised by wokeists. Museums management, civil service, charities and other NGOs, all large businesses with significant debt (ie nearly all), the quangos, the judiciary, the military, the NHS. And all facilitated by 'Conservatives'.
Our only hope lies in US conservatism, where there is an ecosystem with a record of effective action, inspiring Conservatives in other realms.
Yes again. The UK led the world into the age of democratic liberalism and is now leading the world into the age of 'woke' barbarism. When I ponder (as I sometimes do) why it is that we - uniquely in the West - have virtually entirely excised conservatism from our politics, the best answer I can come up with is the huge power of that great monster of supposed "impartiality"....the BBC.
Gay, even resigned as president, still remains as a faculty member of Harvard and will still get paid $900,000/yr, same amount as when she was president. After knowing that, I guess you don’t really need to feel sympathetic to her
You need to understand, $900K per year is an astronomical number in terms of salary for any regular faculty member in any academic institution. Doesn’t matter what she was making when she’s the president of Harvard.
I bet she regrets losing the $400k though. And yes $900k is an outrageous sum for a prof and $1.3M is an even more outrageous one for a university president, though Harvard is not in fact the top payer. Or wasn't when people last did the research about 2020
I think you miss the point. Now she’s only a regular tenure professor in Harvard. She doesn’t need to teach or produce any research anymore, but can chip in $900K per year, which is 3 times of the highest pay a professor would likely get in Harvard. So you think that’s normal? Don’t forget, when she’s getting $1.3M, she had to constantly sit in meetings to come up with agendas to fulfill the DEI narrative in Harvard. Plus to watch other professors and make sure they wouldn’t say anything that didn’t align with Harvard’s leftist agenda. In addition, she would have to face the congress and put up with all sort of pressure. But now she’s taking the $900K paycheck for doing NOTHING
Obviously on net, Gay is in a good spot. However it is still true that she had a rough time during this plagiarism investigation.
I can understand that it was hard for Gay, even while recognizing that she brought a lot of it on herself, and that she's still in a pretty good spot overall.
I wouldn’t call Bill Ackman an impeccable guy. Anyone who ever works in finance knows Bill Ackman only works for himself. He pressured Trump to lock down the US and used that information to benefit his own fund. And he’s been a leftist for his whole life. He spoke up just to give the anti-Jew progressives a warning because he can also stop funding them. This is just the left fighting against each other. In the past, the liberal Jews funded the left to be anti-American and anti-white. But the left recently has got too far to become anti-Jews and that’s why they’re sending out warnings
I sincerely hope the Jews are looking for a different class of friends. But I doubt it. Many of these elite Jews have been working with the left for many years. There’re many interests involved and I would rather believe they’re using influential people like Ackman to send the left a warning. We will soon see whether Ackman will really voice support of conservative policies or candidates. I don’t think he will be like Elon Musk
I think he is open to it. Someone asked him on Twitter why he was funneling money to certain organizations. He asked which ones. I think if you went through his donations, and showed how they enabled far leftist, or for sure anti-Semitic, causes he would change
I'm not sure that you have to support all (any?) of those to realize that progressives are screwing things up and need to be opposed. But it would not surprise me if he becomes more pro-life because the pro-choice side has been entirely infected with the same woke dogma he has seen leads to antisemitism
Sometimes my enemy's enemy is just that. But someone having someone who was my enemy's ally become its enemy because they see the corruption in the enemy can become my ally
Pro-lifers are such frauds. Republican activists wanted all abortions banned and now they support candidates like DeSantis and Haley that are fine with killing babies so long as they aren’t over 5 weeks and 6 days old.
This is a governance issue. The board is responsible for material destruction of Harvard brand value. This is not surprising because as I understand it, they are not accountable to anyone. Their incentive is to go along and be part of the club. Very sad.
It is impossible to overstate the commitment of liberals to their world-view. They are the guardians of secular humanism, liberal values, democracy at home, and a "new world order" abroad. They are guarding the gates of civilization against the assaults of primitives - racists, homophobes, self-serving bourgeois. Conservatives and others who don't genuflect to the liberal catechism, especially academics who muster inconvenient facts, are turds in the punchbowl. I recently participated in a Zoom call discussing why CEOs were pulling back from their DEI commitments. Among the explanations were: lack of real commitment to the cause, reactionary response to DEI's rapid growth, racism ("anti-blackness," "whitelash,") "transphobia," fear of being replaced by people of color, mis/disinformation, the effectiveness of some pushback, such as in Florida, and lack of courage to defend DEI against these forces of darkness. No one brought up anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, as intoned by SCOTUS, including me. Why would I want to lose my liberal friends?
Great point that "Like everything else in life, 'diversity' efforts face a budget constraint." It ties back to the Supreme Court decision that questioned what the benefits of "diversity" actually are. And in which sector are they greater? The "diversity is integral to a quality education" argument would seem to imply the benefit is higher to having diversity on campus as opposed to the board room.
After stating that advocating genocide of Jews is OK at Harvard, depending on context, thereafter Gay offered a lot of mush-talk and jibber-jabber about her heroically high standards and virtues, and those of Harvard too. And suggested it was racists etc. who were after her.
Little noted: Moreover, when asked (in the committee hearing) if Israel had the right to survive as a Jewish nation, Gay responded Israel has the right to survive "as a nation." Somehow, the Jewish part dropped out.
One wonders if Gay was asked if Iran had the right to survive as Muslim nation, or any other number of Muslim states, what would be her response.
BTW: In the last 50 years, Jewish Americans have spread out across the political spectrum.
Besides, one only has to be sane, not liberal or conservative, Jewish, Catholic or Buddhist or Hindu, to find Gay's congressional testimony and plagiarism to be beneath contempt.
I wonder what kind of negative comments she gets. I'm serious on that-- I do wonder, and I'm curious if figures on the left get the same kind of vulgar and stupid comments that figures on the right do. I've just posted the negative comments from 2019 that I can find in my old email, etc. https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Negative_Comments I'd be interested in any lists anybody else has.
As I noted in my fisking, I'm sad she received these insults, but I can't help but think that if she'd acted to protect her Jewish students from insults and threats she wouldn't have had any (or at least nothing like as many)
I'm not sure that she would be a "minority super-successful top executive", at least not in a useful way. She seems to be a true believer in DEI and the corporate world has quiet enough DEI true-believers in HR departments, which is almost certainly where she would have ended up. So she's just be another HR drone mandating spending on struggle sessions led by Kendi, D'Angelo or their disciples. If she didn't then probably she'd be in marketing where the chances are she'd help another large corp do a bud-light.
I think the corporate world is doing just fine without her
as a true capitalist...who is FUNDING THIS? Answer?...TAXPAYERS on the hook for multi-Trillions of Student Debt and Federal FUNDING for places like Harvard for FAILED educations and misallocated priorities.
Response DEFUND these Fascists! End Federal Aid going to these obvious America Hating all Democrat institutions! You want an education....then it should be WORTH IT ON Merit....not TAXPAYERS! Democrats use Race and Gender like Fascists Nazis used Jewish Faith...as a WEAPON!
I feel like I live in a Fascist 1930's Germany, Italy or USSR for much of the 1900's.
Great respect for your commentary, except perhaps when you take us deep into the forest of economics, without conclusive commentary.
I object to your earlier comments about the skills of Claudine Gay and the potential loss of those skills to to the business community . Plagiarism is simply a form of kleptomania. Stealing other’s ideas to promote one’s own career. Our businesses need honest people with leadership skills. Dishonesty by management spreads throughout the organization like a prairie fire. It renders them unable to create a high performance culture and cripples the company. They also need leaders. People who can guide the company forward and act decisively when problems arise. There was no obvious leadership demonstrated during Harvard’s Antisemitism protests.
There seem to be few real leadership examples by University Presidents in our country, with perhaps Purdue. And example that would be useful for all of these people to follow is Edward Levi at his time as president of the University of Chicago.
I think the forces behind people like Claudine Gay are not objective. They are true believers in the methods to get to the end they desire. Additionally, many of them have scratched out nice standards of living, status, and income via the policies and methods to implement them they have chosen.
The matter of firing a university president or a university professor should be neither the Congress's business nor the business of the general public/media. The Board of Directors should decide. The university rules and the general law ought to be followed very strictly. Otherwise firing becomes highly subjective and political. For example, should Professor John Mearsheimer be fired by the University of Chicago for his position on the war in Gaza (you can check his substack and the wiki page about him)? I hope John's answer is "no". A harder question: should the far-right members of the Israeli Government be fired for publicly claiming, on the record, that all Palestinians are guilty and that Palestinians are sub-human animals? One needs to be careful with what he/she wishes for.
What hasn’t been a Pyrrhic victory for the American Right this century?? The Right overturned Roe v Wade and we had more abortions. I guess the hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims Bush slaughtered are still dead…but does it still bring joy to your life??
Harvard and Yale should funnel all donations to the top 10 HBCUs until they get an additional $10 billion in endowment and then these issues won’t be such a big deal. Xavier in New Orleans does a great job of graduating STEM students and getting them into medical schools.
Yes quite so! And I think it has been counter-productive - however tempting - for conservatives to focus in so much on this Harvard blow-up rather than the big picture. Why?....because it fosters the illusion of the feasibility of a quick fix.
The big picture is that academia, as a whole, has been a ROTTEN EMPIRE of Lefty groupthink for 50 years and more. This has done immense damage to the fabric of Western civilisation but few have wanted to notice until recently. Why?..... because mainstream political discourse has been obsessed with the comforting delusion that political power is something that changes hands at election time......meanwhile the future (humanities and social science) elite, sheep-dipped in their university 'education' have quietly assumed the reins of each and every institution of Western society.
I couldn't put it better
Thank you.
I assume you are based in the UK. If so you'll be aware that all our institutions have been colonised by wokeists. Museums management, civil service, charities and other NGOs, all large businesses with significant debt (ie nearly all), the quangos, the judiciary, the military, the NHS. And all facilitated by 'Conservatives'.
Our only hope lies in US conservatism, where there is an ecosystem with a record of effective action, inspiring Conservatives in other realms.
Yes again. The UK led the world into the age of democratic liberalism and is now leading the world into the age of 'woke' barbarism. When I ponder (as I sometimes do) why it is that we - uniquely in the West - have virtually entirely excised conservatism from our politics, the best answer I can come up with is the huge power of that great monster of supposed "impartiality"....the BBC.
The BBC has certainly been the nexus of the assault on liberal 'in the old sense' values.
Gay, even resigned as president, still remains as a faculty member of Harvard and will still get paid $900,000/yr, same amount as when she was president. After knowing that, I guess you don’t really need to feel sympathetic to her
Nah as president she should have got at least $1.3M/year, that's what her predecessor trousered in his last year. Plus perks
You need to understand, $900K per year is an astronomical number in terms of salary for any regular faculty member in any academic institution. Doesn’t matter what she was making when she’s the president of Harvard.
I bet she regrets losing the $400k though. And yes $900k is an outrageous sum for a prof and $1.3M is an even more outrageous one for a university president, though Harvard is not in fact the top payer. Or wasn't when people last did the research about 2020
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-highest-paid-us-college-and-university-presidents-2019-5
I think you miss the point. Now she’s only a regular tenure professor in Harvard. She doesn’t need to teach or produce any research anymore, but can chip in $900K per year, which is 3 times of the highest pay a professor would likely get in Harvard. So you think that’s normal? Don’t forget, when she’s getting $1.3M, she had to constantly sit in meetings to come up with agendas to fulfill the DEI narrative in Harvard. Plus to watch other professors and make sure they wouldn’t say anything that didn’t align with Harvard’s leftist agenda. In addition, she would have to face the congress and put up with all sort of pressure. But now she’s taking the $900K paycheck for doing NOTHING
but her book(s) will probably sell better now
Another reason not needing to feel sorry about her
Obviously on net, Gay is in a good spot. However it is still true that she had a rough time during this plagiarism investigation.
I can understand that it was hard for Gay, even while recognizing that she brought a lot of it on herself, and that she's still in a pretty good spot overall.
One thing that became apparent.
The silent majority decided to speak.
Look at the huge number of comments on Twitter.
Americans are tired of the lefty crap.
And the left went after Bill Ackman (and his wife). Two people with impeccable credentials.
To paraphrase Yamamoto: "They have awakened a sleeping tiger."
And millions of Americans (look at the Twitter "likes") are cheering.
And again, thanks to Elon Musk for giving us a forum.
I wouldn’t call Bill Ackman an impeccable guy. Anyone who ever works in finance knows Bill Ackman only works for himself. He pressured Trump to lock down the US and used that information to benefit his own fund. And he’s been a leftist for his whole life. He spoke up just to give the anti-Jew progressives a warning because he can also stop funding them. This is just the left fighting against each other. In the past, the liberal Jews funded the left to be anti-American and anti-white. But the left recently has got too far to become anti-Jews and that’s why they’re sending out warnings
You are right about Ackman, but by Wall Street standards, he isn't bad.
Jews are finding out that their lefty friends don't really like them.
I am using Ackman as an example of smart Jews looking for a better class of friends.
I sincerely hope the Jews are looking for a different class of friends. But I doubt it. Many of these elite Jews have been working with the left for many years. There’re many interests involved and I would rather believe they’re using influential people like Ackman to send the left a warning. We will soon see whether Ackman will really voice support of conservative policies or candidates. I don’t think he will be like Elon Musk
Ackman appears to have been successfully red-pilled. I suspect he's a lot less lefty than he was prior to Oct 7
I think he is open to it. Someone asked him on Twitter why he was funneling money to certain organizations. He asked which ones. I think if you went through his donations, and showed how they enabled far leftist, or for sure anti-Semitic, causes he would change
So you think he is now pro-life and opposes gay marriage and supports invading Iraq??
I'm not sure that you have to support all (any?) of those to realize that progressives are screwing things up and need to be opposed. But it would not surprise me if he becomes more pro-life because the pro-choice side has been entirely infected with the same woke dogma he has seen leads to antisemitism
Sometimes my enemy's enemy is just that. But someone having someone who was my enemy's ally become its enemy because they see the corruption in the enemy can become my ally
Pro-lifers are such frauds. Republican activists wanted all abortions banned and now they support candidates like DeSantis and Haley that are fine with killing babies so long as they aren’t over 5 weeks and 6 days old.
End all federal aid to colleges, including students loan backing
This is a governance issue. The board is responsible for material destruction of Harvard brand value. This is not surprising because as I understand it, they are not accountable to anyone. Their incentive is to go along and be part of the club. Very sad.
It is impossible to overstate the commitment of liberals to their world-view. They are the guardians of secular humanism, liberal values, democracy at home, and a "new world order" abroad. They are guarding the gates of civilization against the assaults of primitives - racists, homophobes, self-serving bourgeois. Conservatives and others who don't genuflect to the liberal catechism, especially academics who muster inconvenient facts, are turds in the punchbowl. I recently participated in a Zoom call discussing why CEOs were pulling back from their DEI commitments. Among the explanations were: lack of real commitment to the cause, reactionary response to DEI's rapid growth, racism ("anti-blackness," "whitelash,") "transphobia," fear of being replaced by people of color, mis/disinformation, the effectiveness of some pushback, such as in Florida, and lack of courage to defend DEI against these forces of darkness. No one brought up anti-discrimination and equal opportunity, as intoned by SCOTUS, including me. Why would I want to lose my liberal friends?
Great point that "Like everything else in life, 'diversity' efforts face a budget constraint." It ties back to the Supreme Court decision that questioned what the benefits of "diversity" actually are. And in which sector are they greater? The "diversity is integral to a quality education" argument would seem to imply the benefit is higher to having diversity on campus as opposed to the board room.
John Cochrane is right.
After stating that advocating genocide of Jews is OK at Harvard, depending on context, thereafter Gay offered a lot of mush-talk and jibber-jabber about her heroically high standards and virtues, and those of Harvard too. And suggested it was racists etc. who were after her.
Little noted: Moreover, when asked (in the committee hearing) if Israel had the right to survive as a Jewish nation, Gay responded Israel has the right to survive "as a nation." Somehow, the Jewish part dropped out.
One wonders if Gay was asked if Iran had the right to survive as Muslim nation, or any other number of Muslim states, what would be her response.
BTW: In the last 50 years, Jewish Americans have spread out across the political spectrum.
Besides, one only has to be sane, not liberal or conservative, Jewish, Catholic or Buddhist or Hindu, to find Gay's congressional testimony and plagiarism to be beneath contempt.
I wonder what kind of negative comments she gets. I'm serious on that-- I do wonder, and I'm curious if figures on the left get the same kind of vulgar and stupid comments that figures on the right do. I've just posted the negative comments from 2019 that I can find in my old email, etc. https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Negative_Comments I'd be interested in any lists anybody else has.
As I noted in my fisking, I'm sad she received these insults, but I can't help but think that if she'd acted to protect her Jewish students from insults and threats she wouldn't have had any (or at least nothing like as many)
I'm not sure that she would be a "minority super-successful top executive", at least not in a useful way. She seems to be a true believer in DEI and the corporate world has quiet enough DEI true-believers in HR departments, which is almost certainly where she would have ended up. So she's just be another HR drone mandating spending on struggle sessions led by Kendi, D'Angelo or their disciples. If she didn't then probably she'd be in marketing where the chances are she'd help another large corp do a bud-light.
I think the corporate world is doing just fine without her
BTW I went through her NY Times piece paragraph by paragraph here - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/a-gay-fisking
as a true capitalist...who is FUNDING THIS? Answer?...TAXPAYERS on the hook for multi-Trillions of Student Debt and Federal FUNDING for places like Harvard for FAILED educations and misallocated priorities.
Response DEFUND these Fascists! End Federal Aid going to these obvious America Hating all Democrat institutions! You want an education....then it should be WORTH IT ON Merit....not TAXPAYERS! Democrats use Race and Gender like Fascists Nazis used Jewish Faith...as a WEAPON!
I feel like I live in a Fascist 1930's Germany, Italy or USSR for much of the 1900's.
Great respect for your commentary, except perhaps when you take us deep into the forest of economics, without conclusive commentary.
I object to your earlier comments about the skills of Claudine Gay and the potential loss of those skills to to the business community . Plagiarism is simply a form of kleptomania. Stealing other’s ideas to promote one’s own career. Our businesses need honest people with leadership skills. Dishonesty by management spreads throughout the organization like a prairie fire. It renders them unable to create a high performance culture and cripples the company. They also need leaders. People who can guide the company forward and act decisively when problems arise. There was no obvious leadership demonstrated during Harvard’s Antisemitism protests.
There seem to be few real leadership examples by University Presidents in our country, with perhaps Purdue. And example that would be useful for all of these people to follow is Edward Levi at his time as president of the University of Chicago.
I think the forces behind people like Claudine Gay are not objective. They are true believers in the methods to get to the end they desire. Additionally, many of them have scratched out nice standards of living, status, and income via the policies and methods to implement them they have chosen.
They are not interested in debate.
The matter of firing a university president or a university professor should be neither the Congress's business nor the business of the general public/media. The Board of Directors should decide. The university rules and the general law ought to be followed very strictly. Otherwise firing becomes highly subjective and political. For example, should Professor John Mearsheimer be fired by the University of Chicago for his position on the war in Gaza (you can check his substack and the wiki page about him)? I hope John's answer is "no". A harder question: should the far-right members of the Israeli Government be fired for publicly claiming, on the record, that all Palestinians are guilty and that Palestinians are sub-human animals? One needs to be careful with what he/she wishes for.
I expect that Beijing will come up with a job offer.