Harvard has long been accused of fostering an anti-free speech environment and quelching viewpoint diversity. That was the subject of my recent debate with Law Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard. A new report confirms many of the objections raised in that debate, including a chilling environment where only a third of Harvard’s most recent graduating class expressed comfort in discussing controversial subjects.
Some 89 percent of the graduating class responded to the survey. The study of the Classroom Social Compact Committee, co-chaired by Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 and History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96, found that, with an overwhelmingly liberal faculty and student body, even liberal Harvard students still found a chilling environment for free expression at the school. And it is getting worse. The results show a 13 percent decrease from the Class of 2023.
This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges.
What is most striking is the fact that Harvard has created this hostile environment while maintaining an overwhelmingly liberal student body and faculty. Only 9 percent of the class identified as conservative or very conservative. Yet even liberals feel stifled at Harvard. Only 41 percent of liberal students reported being comfortable discussing controversial topics, and only 25 percent of moderates and 17 percent of conservatives felt comfortable in doing so.
During the Harvard debate, I raised the gradual reduction of conservatives and libertarians in the student body and the faculty. The Harvard Crimson has documented how the school’s departments have virtually eliminated Republicans. In one study of multiple departments last year, they found that more than 75 percent of the faculty self-identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.” Only 5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
According to Gallup, the U.S. population is roughly equally divided among conservatives (36%), moderates (35%), and liberals (26%). So Harvard has three times the number of liberals as the nation at large, and less than three percent identify as “conservative” rather than 35 percent nationally.
Among law school faculty who donated more than $200 to a political party, 91 percent of the Harvard faculty gave to Democrats. While Professor Kennedy dismissed the notion that Harvard should look more like America, the problem is that it does not even look like Massachusetts. Even as one of the most liberal states in the country, roughly one-third of the voters still identify as Republican. The student body shows the same bias of selection. Harvard Crimson previously found that only 7 percent of incoming students identified as conservative. The latest survey shows that level at 9 percent.
Some faculty members are wringing their hands over this continued hostile environment. However, the faculty as a whole is unwilling to restore free speech and intellectual diversity by adding conservative and libertarian faculty members and sponsoring events that reflect a broad array of viewpoints.
Given my respect for Professor Kennedy, I was surprised that he dismissed the sharp rise in students saying that they did not feel comfortable speaking in classes. Referring to them as “conservative snowflakes,” he insisted that they had to have the courage of their convictions.
This ignores the fact that they depend upon professors for recommendations, and challenging the school’s orthodoxy can threaten their standing. Moreover, a recent survey shows that even liberal students feel chilled in the environment created by Harvard faculty and administrators.
There was a hopeful aspect, however, to the debate. Before the debate, the large audience voted heavily in favor of Harvard’s position. However, after the debate, they overwhelmingly voted against Harvard’s position on free speech. It is an example of how exposure to opposing views can change the bias or assumptions in higher education.
There is little likelihood that Harvard or higher education will change. It is like the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer is just one but the bulb really has to want to change.
At the end of the day, there is no real indication that Harvard faculty want any of this to change. They will continue to report the results of surveys and express deep angst and confusion over the results. What they will not do is meaningfully change their course in the hiring of faculty, admission of students, and sponsoring of debates.
For the second year in a row, Harvard University is ranked dead last among universities and colleges on the annual survey of free speech on campuses by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Harvard shares a score of 0.00 with Columbia University. They are followed by New York University, University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College.
In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss free speech on campuses and note that public universities could prove the last line of defense for this right. It is not that faculty members are necessarily any more protective of free speech or intellectual diversity at these schools. However, they are directly subject to the First Amendment as state schools and thus can be taken to court more readily for denials of the right.
Conversely, at schools like Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and NYU, the faculty appears unconcerned about their dismal records on free speech. There is still a growing anti-free speech movement on our campuses. It is notable that these schools also have largely purged conservative and Republican faculty from their ranks. A past survey found that over 75 percent of faculty identify as liberal or very liberal. Another survey found that many departments do not have a single Republican.
I was disappointed that my alma mater University of Chicago has fallen from number 1 to 44, though it still gets a shout out from FIRE as being a consistently strong free speech environment. The concerning fall has occurred under with the presidency of Armand Paul Alivisatos. He replaced one of the greatest advocates of free speech in academia, the late Robert Zimmer.
In the letter, the university declared that “our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
It was a moment of clarity that is missing in today’s environment of speech codes, microaggressions, and cancel campaigns. When Zimmer stepped down in 2021, there was a virtual panic in the free speech community. He was our champion and placed one of the premier academic institutions in the world on the side of free speech.
Notably, Barnard College (unlike the other schools at the bottom) has joined other schools in adopting the Chicago Principles. It released a statement committing itself to a new course. We will have to wait to see if faculty will honor such a commitment.
George Washington University, where I teach, is 161st out of 251 schools with a below average ranking. What was surprising this year were the schools receiving a “warning” about anti-free speech policies. They include Pepperdine University, Hillsdale College, and Brigham Young University. FIRE found that all “have policies that clearly and consistently state” that they prioritize “other values over a commitment to freedom of speech.”The President of Hillsdale responded in this column.
If there will be substantial improvements in the anti-free speech environment in higher education in private colleges, they will only come from donors refusing to support these schools until they change their policies and culture. Administrators and faculty feel little pressure to reverse these trends. However, they will respond if their intolerance begins to threaten their own budgets and departments.
Higher education has already plunged in trust among citizens under the current administrators and faculty at our colleges and universities. They are destroying the very institutions that sustain them. In the meantime, public universities can be a strong line of defense for free speech, offering students not just free speech environments but the direct protection of the First Amendment. What is missing is greater diversity of viewpoints on faculties. I have written about how taxpayers and legislators can exercise their own power to demand more diversified and tolerant environments at these schools.
While some professors have argued that free speech and intellectual diversity are not essential to higher education, most of the public disagrees and has a right to expect a diverse and tolerant environment at state-supported schools.
In my book and past congressional testimony, I have also encouraged Congress to adopt ten basic prerequisites for federal funding for colleges and universities on free speech. If these schools want to continue to deny free speech to students and faculty, they should do so with their own funds and contributions from donors who share their anti-free speech agendas. Taxpayers should not be supporting schools which deny a right considered “indispensable” to our constitution and culture.
In my book out this week, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, I write about the anti-free speech movement that has swept over higher education and how administrators and faculty hold a view of free speech as harmful. Now Harvard is again at the heart of a free speech fight after Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science, rejected views of free speech as a “blank check” and said that criticizing university leaders like himself or school policies are now viewed as “outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct.”
Bobo warns that public criticism of the school could “cross a line into sanctionable violations.”
“A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.”
The column adopts every jingoistic rationale used by anti-free speech critics today, including the invocation of the Holmes “crowded theater” analogy:
“But many faculty at Harvard enjoy an external stature that also opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy. Figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker have well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy.
Would it simply be an ordinary act of free speech for those faculty to repeatedly denounce the University, its students, fellow faculty, or leadership? The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.”
First and foremost, the ability of faculty to speak out on public disputes should not depend on whether you are more popular or visible. However, it is the theater analogy that is most galling.
I have an entire chapter in The Indispensable Right that addresses the fallacies surrounding this line out of the Holmes opinion. It is arguably the most damaging single line ever written by a Supreme Court justice in the area of free speech.
I have previously written about the irony of liberals adopting the analogy, which was used to crack down on socialists and dissenters on the left.
One of the most telling moments came in a congressional hearing when I warned of the dangers of repeating the abuses of prior periods like the Red Scare, when censorship and blacklisting were the norm. In response, Rep. Dan Goldman, D-New York, invoked Oliver Wendell Holmes’ view that free speech does not give a person the right to yell fire in a crowded theater. In other words, citizens had to be silenced because their views are dangerous to others.
When I attempted to point out that the line came from a case justifying the imprisonment of socialists for their political viewpoints, Goldman cut me off and “reclaimed his time.”
Other Democrats have used the line as a mantra, despite its origins in one of our most abusive anti-free speech periods during which the government targeted political dissidents on the left.
Dean Bobo is now the latest academic to embrace the theater rationale to justify the silencing of dissent. At Harvard, he is suggesting that the entire university is now a crowded theater and criticizing the university leadership is a cry of “Fire.” It is that easy.
By punishing criticism of the school’s leadership and policies, Bobo believes that they can look “forward to calmer times” on campus. It is precisely the type of artificial silence that academics have been enforcing against conservatives, libertarians, and dissenters for years. It is the approach that reduced our schools to an academic echo chamber.
The reference to Professor Steven Pinker is particularly ironic. As we have previously discussed, Pinker was targeted for exercising free speech. In past controversies, most Harvard faculty members have been conspicuously silent as colleagues were targeted by cancel campaigns. It was the same at other universities.
As faculties effectively purged their ranks of conservative or Republican members, the silence was deafening. Others either supported such campaigns or justified them. Notably, over 75 percent of the Harvard faculty identify as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Then the Gaza protests began and some of these same faculty found themselves the targets of mobs. Suddenly, free speech became an urgent matter to address. Fortunately for these liberal professors, the free speech community is used to opportunistic allies. Where “fair weather friends” are often ridiculed, free speech relies on “foul-weather friends,” those who suddenly see the need to protect a diversity of opinions when they feel threatened.
Bobo’s arguments are consistent with years of rationales for silencing or investigating dissenting faculty for years. It violates the very foundation for academia in free speech and academic freedom. The university is free to punish students or faculty for unlawful conduct. However, when it comes to their viewpoints, there should be a bright line of protection.
Of course, this criticism is likely to trigger another common fallacy used to rationalize speech controls: as a private university Harvard is not subject to the First Amendment and thus this is not a true free speech issue.
As discussed previously, free speech values go beyond the First Amendment whether it is a controversy on social media or campuses. For years, anti-free-speech figures have dismissed free speech objections to social media or academic censorship by stressing that the First Amendment applies only to the government, not private companies or institutions. The distinction was always a dishonest effort to evade the implications of speech controls, whether implemented by the government or corporations.
The First Amendment was never the exclusive definition of free speech. Free speech is viewed by many of us as a human right; the First Amendment only deals with one source for limiting it. Free speech can be undermined by private corporations as well as government agencies. This threat is even greater when politicians openly use corporations and universities to achieve indirectly what they cannot achieve directly.
Dean Bobo’s desire for “calmer times” would come at too high a price for free speech as well as Harvard.
Students at the University of Washington postponed an anti-Israel demonstration planned for Thursday because too many of the students who signed up are white.
According to MyNorthwest, a Washington-based radio station, the University of Washington’s Progressive Student Union (UWPSU) opted to delay an encampment in solidarity with Palestinian terrorists “to make sure this encampment is a better reflection of the UW community, and having even greater unity with Muslim, Palestinian and Arab students.”
“We want to be part of a much larger coalition of groups and make no mistake, WE WILL HAVE A UW ENCAMPMENT! We want to make sure everyone’s voice is included and this action is as safe, secure, and strong as possible,” read a statement from the far-left student union published by MyNorthwest.
BREAKING: Activists with the UW Progressive Student Union said they're postponing the “UW Palestine encampment” because there were too many white students involved. The group received criticism for not including Muslim and Arab students in the organizing.https://t.co/Do5KBLbFM2
— Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) April 25, 2024
The protest at the University of Washington would have placed the school on the map of more than 40 college campuses where pro-Palestine demonstrations have brought havoc to institutions from coast to coast. These anti-Israel encampments have been reported from Harvard and Yale to Stanford and the University of Southern California (USC), driving a nationwide rise in anti-Jewish hate. According to the Associated Press, students taking over college campuses are broadly demanding schools halt business with Israel or any other groups supporting the Israeli effort to eliminate Iranian-backed terrorists in the Middle East.
Demonstrations spread from Columbia University, where students began to protest last week as school leaders testified about antisemitism on Capitol Hill. The Ivy League school canceled in-person classes Monday and notified students that classes would be hybrid for the rest of the semester due to ongoing demonstrations. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson visited the university this week to shift attention away from his embarrassing failure to secure any new border fortification amid negotiations that ended with sending more money to Ukraine.
At USC, officials announced the university will cancel the school’s primary graduation ceremony after dozens were arrested in protests Thursday. Other universities may follow suit while some, such as the University of Michigan, are tightening restrictions on prohibited items, including flags and banners.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sent a letter to college and university presidents earlier this month to “urge you to take clear, decisive action now to ensure that graduation ceremonies, events, and functions run smoothly, and that all students and their families feel safe, welcomed and celebrated.”
“As leaders in the Jewish community, we ask that you take your role seriously in making sure that Jewish students — and all students — are not robbed of a positive, memorable lifecycle event,” said the ADL.
Meanwhile, schools where demonstrations are taking place are facing financial consequences for their failure to crack down on the encampment protests. Billionaire Columbia University alum Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, said he would stop contributing to his alma mater, and Leon Cooperman, another alum, also pledged to continue a halt in donations shortly after the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. According to The New York Post, other billionaire donors are considering a similar pause on university contributions. With high-dollar contributors pulling back from schools, having too few white students involved in pro-terrorist protests should be the least of their worries.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
“Academic freedom” in American universities is nonexistent. There is zero freedom to be anything other than a leftist, which is why nonleftists are an endangered species in academia. Universities only use “academic freedom” to defend their left-wing fellow travelers from criticism and accountability.
There is zero desire for critical independent thought in modern American academia, because modern American academia is little more than a Marxist madrassa used to train and indoctrinate the next generation of left-wing shock troops. Academia uses “academic freedom” in the same way it uses “diversity” — as a way to exclude anyone who rejects left-wing identity ideology. Universities want ideological diversity in the same way bacteria crave bleach. They want actual academic freedom in the same way cockroaches want sunlight.
Never forget that to leftists, words have no fixed meaning. Words are weapons. Nothing more, and nothing less. “Diversity” means they get to hire left-wing, dead-eyed, purple-haired, barely literate white freaks who hate Jews, and black conservatives will just have to suck it. “Academic freedom” means they get to hire low-IQ, left-wing plagiarists whose entire livelihoods depend on the success of the left-wing machine, not brilliant analysts whose research rejects global warming or Covid alarmism nonsense.
Every single left-wing institution has the same rules and the same hiring practices.
At the Pentagon, delusional and drug-addled male perverts who think putting on a skirt and ladyface is the pinnacle of valor get promoted, while decorated combat veterans who reject heart attack juice in the guise of a fake vaccine get fired. On Wall Street, throwing other people’s money at failed global warming plays that will never be economically sustainable will get you promoted much faster than successfully investing in technologies viewed to be a threat by the regime. In Hollywood, a script trashing America as racist and evil will get greenlit faster than Alec Baldwin drawing down on a camera crew. But if you want to make a film praising the American founding? Good luck with that.
And in government, there’s no surer guarantee of lifelong employment for midwit morons than pledging allegiance to whatever delusion the regime is peddling on any given day, because the left-wing machine will defend anyone from anything, no matter how horrific, as long as that person marches to the beat of the regime’s drum.
This is the modern state of America, and it is true across every industry and major institution of power. One election will not fix it. One resignation will not fix it. Removing the rot that’s compromising the entire foundation of this country will require ruthlessly tearing down, fumigating, and rebuilding every single institution that has been infiltrated by the left.
This won’t be accomplished by politicians, or journalists, or celebrities, or hedge fund managers. It can only be accomplished by you demanding it and refusing to give in until the rot has been eliminated. Are you up for it? I hope so. Because if you’re not, this country doesn’t stand a chance.
Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.
Harvard President Claudine Gay said she would resign from her position on Tuesday, after her first months in the role were rocked by her congressional testimony about antisemitism on campus and allegations of plagiarism.
Gay had faced pressure to resign from Harvard’s Jewish community and some members of Congress over her comments at the Dec. 5 congressional hearing, and she has also faced several allegations of plagiarism for her academic work in recent months.
In a letter to the Harvard community, Gay said her decision to step down had been “difficult beyond words.”
“After consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
The Harvard Corporation, the university’s 11-member governing body, said in an email to the community that its members had accepted Gay’s resignation “with sorrow.”
Gay, former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Sally Kornbluth testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee on Dec. 5 about a rise in antisemitism on college campuses following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The trio declined to give a definitive “yes” or “no” answer to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik’s question as to whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their schools’ codes of conduct regarding bullying and harassment, saying they had to balance it against free speech protections.
More than 70 U.S. lawmakers signed a letter demanding that the governing boards of the three universities remove the presidents, citing dissatisfaction with their testimony.
Magill resigned after receiving backlash for her comments.
“Harvard knows that this long overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history,” Representative Stefanik said in a statement on Tuesday.
‘RACIST VITRIOL’
Despite the controversy ensnaring Gay, the Harvard Corporation last month reaffirmed its confidence that she could lead the school through a period of high tension over the war in the Middle East. It also said an independent review of Gay’s academic work found she had not committed research misconduct. She has submitted several corrections for citation errors in recent weeks.
Gay, who became the university’s first Black president six months ago, and the members of the Harvard Corporation said in their letters to the community on Tuesday that she had been subject to racist attacks.
Some of Gay’s critics, including billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, have argued that she was chosen for the role as part of the school’s effort to promote diversity rather than for her qualifications.
Ackman could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday. He reposted the Harvard Crimson’s story about Gay’s resignation on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay said in her statement.
The Harvard Corporation wrote that she had been subjected to “deeply personal and sustained attacks” that included “racist vitriol directed at her through disgraceful emails and phone calls.”
College students attending universities with restrictive speech codes are used to walking on eggshells and keeping their heads down on campus out of fear of committing social suicide or experiencing violence. In the disordered world of contemporary higher education, Jewish students receive limited, if any, support from school administrators amid explicit calls for violence against them, while other students face punishment for banal infractions like rolling a “free speech ball” around campus.
But if you are shocked at how students are subject to hypocritical double standards and draconian speech codes, what goes on behind the closed doors of faculty lounges and administrative offices will surely horrify you. Militant students can restrict the speech of other students, but often, faculty find themselves subjected to even stricter rules that embolden this militancy in the first place.
This has proven true at Bates College, my alma mater, ranked 213 out of 250 schools nationwide for free speech. Emails obtained from several former Bates College professors show just how limited faculty freedoms are. In the past, faculty were reported to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) for questioning students’ assertions in class or asking students to think more critically. The environment created by this policy has left some professors fearful that a student will use a simple classroom lecture or assignment to terminate their jobs.
In the wake of Bates’ latest round of antisemitic controversy — where a swastika was drawn in a dormitory bathroom amid a bevy of pro-Hamas activity at Bates — I reached out to several former and current professors at Bates to see if this DEI reporting system was still in place. After communicating with members of Bates faculty, staff, and former students, it’s clear that not only is the DEI reporting system still in operation, but it has been used to intimidate faculty into maintaining leftist orthodoxy in their classrooms.
This policy bared its teeth in the firing of Keith Taylor, a lecturer in Bates’ geology department. Taylor was fired earlier this year for asking a student to provide examples defending their assertion that Bates College was a bastion of white supremacy. Taylor was browbeaten by Dean of Faculty Malcolm Hill and ordered to apologize to his class for his supposed racial insensitivity, but instead, he denounced the school. One student recorded the exchange and shared it with me at the time.
Taylor provided several emails from a fellow professor, Loring Danforth, who feared for his termination. Danforth expressed fear at Taylor’s firing, saying he felt “trapped in an alternate reality” due to his fear of being targeted by students for speaking on race, a topic he studied, wrote, and lectured on for several decades at Bates and other institutions.
This nightmarish “alternate reality” soon became real for Danforth. A classroom discussion quickly became a struggle session after a student asserted Bates College was on stolen Penobscot land. Danforth, being a seasoned teacher, asked the student to explain what she meant. “Do you mean legally? Technically? Morally? Historically? Traditionally?” Danforth asked. In an attempt to further discussion, he followed up with the question: “Do Native Americans own the land your parents’ house in Connecticut is on, or do your parents own it?”
But instead of engaging in the discussion or thinking critically about her assertion, the student reported Danforth to the DEI office for opposing Native American land claims. That led to another reprimand by the DEI office and the dean of faculty. Ironically, Danforth is a proud supporter of Native Americans, as was shown in his email with Keith Taylor; “I’d argue it’s my right to oppose them [Native American land claims]. But in fact I support them.” Professor Danforth refused to provide comment.
That same email between Taylor and Danforth described an incident over text where Dean of Faculty Malcolm Hill reprimanded Danforth for supposedly perpetuating racism on campus. That was after Danforth was again reported to the DEI office for stating that “race was a social construction” to the offense of a black staff member. As a result, Danforth, who correctly pointed out that the social construction of race is “a fundamental concept and expression” in anthropology, was again reprimanded by Hill. Only after Bates President Clayton Spencer stepped in did Hill back down and apologize to Danforth.
Over a series of emails and text messages, several professors discussed potential punishments for DEI infractions, including being forced to “absorb literature about racism” or even be subjected to mandatory sensitivity training, which, if refused, could lead to further punishment.
Bates’s DEI reporting system has significantly cowed professors in the liberal arts. Several students I interviewed believe free speech at Bates was already nonexistent but think professors are largely responsible for allowing this toxic culture to take its current form.
One such student, a 2018 Bates graduate, James Erwin, recalled portions of emails that appeared scripted when professors corresponded with students about “sensitive” topics. “After Trump was elected in 2016, there were demonstrations around campus,” Erwin explained. “All the faculty emails for my classes and campus resources contained the same ‘I understand and support you,’ directed towards students who wanted to skip class to protest the election.”
Erwin also suggested professors had only themselves to blame for the campus climate, saying, “Many Bates professors can’t speak up because this is the bed they made … they teach this performative emotional fragility in class, so, of course, they can’t object to it now that the outrage is directed at them.”
An email I have had since my own time at Bates proves James correct. One economics professor expressed doubts that teachers at Bates could adequately instruct students, only to refuse to elaborate on his comments. Economics professor Paul Shea said, “Things like this make me fear for the future of Bates. More and more departments seem comfortable infusing their curricula with specific forms of activism and ideology and those that do not are met with hostility or, in some cases, a loss of resources. It is hard for me to see how this fits with the mission of the college.”
Shea refused to comment when asked to elaborate on the “hostility” or “loss of resources” and departures from the economics department.
Taylor’s emails and the various professors with whom I spoke expressed the same feeling: Bates no longer resembles an academic institution committed to free speech. T. Glen Lawson, who taught in the Bates Chemistry Department for over 30 years and is now retired, said, “It is true that the [Bates] environment is toxic and freedom of expression and academic freedom have both been suppressed in the past few years, so I was happy to leave. I don’t really care about what goes on there now.” Jenna Berens, a 2023 graduate of Bates, agreed. “The culture is definitely toxic in the context of the classroom. I can imagine that culture extends to the faculty, too.”
Bates’s DEI system has successfully made almost every professor at the college terrified of his or her own students. With fees to attend Bates set at over $81,000 for the 2023-2024 academic year, parents and students are footing the bill for DEI enforcers alongside the collaborating programs within the college that act as speech police and reporting systems.
It is obvious that antisemitic students control Harvard University’s campus, and they have the freedom to spew their poison with no accountability from the administration. It took a congressional hearing, alums withdrawing millions of dollars, and leading companies pledging not to hire Harvard graduates for the school even to notice its antisemitism problem. Legacy institutions with larger budgets often overshadow Bates. However, the toxic, illiberal behavior that has consumed Bates is a glimpse of higher education’s future. Across the country, there are thousands of smaller colleges like Bates, where free speech has been destroyed and its defenders driven underground.
Bates and its faculty preach the college’s commitment to academic excellence, egalitarianism, and freedom. Those words ring hollow when the academics tasked with passing those values on cannot defend them.
Roy Mathews is a writer for Young Voices. He is a graduate of Bates College and a 2023 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Law & Liberty, and the Boston Herald.
Christmas is supposed to be a season for love, comfort, and joy, but the arrival of the holidays means the grinches, scrooges, and corrupt politicians of the world are lurking. This year, unfortunately, yielded an abundance of bureaucrats, brands, and buffoons who blew their shot to make the nice list when they sacrificed common sense and dignity for partisanship and radicalism.
Merry Christmas to everyone except these naughty no-gooders!
1. Jack Smith
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s association with the corrupt Department of Justice alone was enough to land him in Santa’s bad graces. Smith further solidified his place on the naughty list when he brought two “legally flawed and politically shady” cases against former President Donald Trump over classified documents and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
Smith also demanded the court gag Trump from criticizing him, President Joe Biden, and other deep-state bureaucrats for their hyperpartisan prosecution of his First Amendment right to claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, which D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan eagerly agreed to do.
2. Letitia James
James is on the naughty list for following through on her campaign promise to sue Trump, his children, and the Trump Organization for allegedly “grossly” inflating their assets in financial statements by billions of dollars.
Despite bringing a case with “no merit” and “no evidence,” James continues to work with Arthur Engoron, a judge of the Supreme Court 1st Judicial District in New York, to silence Trump and keep him from conducting business in the state of New York.
3. David Weiss
Every time a bell rings, a corrupt Department of Justice official like Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss gets named special counsel.
Weiss and the DOJ deliberately choked the IRS’s tax crime investigation and charging recommendations for Hunter Biden because they didn’t want to damage the elder Biden’s presidential chances.
After a federal judge denied Hunter’s initial sweetheart plea deal, the Biden son was eventually charged with several tax-related felonies and misdemeanors, but Weiss failed to indict him for any foreign influence-peddling or registered foreign agent violations.
House investigators warned the tax charges would never have happened without the testimonies of IRS whistleblowers the DOJ tried to silence.
4. Joe Biden
Biden may not technically have a stocking since his family was publicly shamed into ditching the tradition after leaving their seventh grandchild out of last year’s display, but he’s for sure getting coal for Christmas (for the second year in a row!) for repeatedly denying his role in the Biden family influence-peddling scheme.
Senate Republicans certainly don’t deserve presents this year. They may not even deserve your votes.
Their gravest 2023 mistake by far was working to take down one of their own, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, for daring to hold the Department of Defense accountable for its embrace of Biden’s radical abortion agenda. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer later thanked the GOP senators forcurbing Tuberville’s protest of the Pentagon’s baby-killing activism.
The upper chamber GOP didn’t stop there. They were also indefensibly silent on Biden family corruption and impeachment, ignored their constituents’ feelings about taxpayer-funded abortion, and spent a majority of the year simping for Ukraine. It was only when it was no longer politically beneficial to put a foreign country over their own — a move many Americans have long opposed — that they started to pivot.
6. Elite Universities
Presidents from three of the nation’s top universities refused to admit that student calls for Jewish genocide following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel violate their schools’ codes of conduct. Backlash ensued, prompting both University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill, who faces a forced resignation, and Harvard President Claudine Gay to issue apologies days after the hearing.
In an interview with the student newspaper The Crimson, Gay blamed her delayed condemnation of antisemitism on a failure to “return to my guiding truth.” As one clever X user noted, Harvard’s slogan is “veritas,” not “veritas mae.”
7. Los Angeles Dodgers
Who doesn’t love a good baseball game? There are rowdy fans, Cracker Jacks, and — drag queens? Well, at least at Los Angeles Dodgers’ games there are.
Instead of focusing solely on the sport — which is what any real fan cares about — the Dodgers decided to honor an anti-Christian drag group during this year’s “pride night” game. Known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, this group’s members mock Christians by dressing up as so-called “queer and trans nuns” and performing highly offensive acts on biblical symbols, including the cross.
While initially disinviting the group after public backlash, the Dodgers caved to the leftist mob by apologizing to the Sisters and begging them to attend the “pride” event.
If that’s not worthy of coal this Christmas, I don’t know what is.
8. Bud Light
What better way to make the Yuletide gay than by chugging down a cold can of Bud Light?
After partnering with woman-pretender and TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney this year, the Anheuser-Busch brand’s sales tanked, with drinkers abandoning the beer quicker than Hunter Biden left town when he found out the stripper he had sex with was pregnant.
Sales got so bad that retailers could hardly even give Bud Light away for free. But that didn’t stop the beer giant from doubling down on its LGBT obsession by sponsoring various “pride” events throughout the country.
9. Target
Target and the naughty list go way back, but the company’s partnership with a Satan supporter who called for the eradication of critics of transgenderism, and its “pride month” displays featuring “light binding effect” tops and “tuck-friendly” bottoms, angered millions of Americans.
Miss Americana Taylor Swift may have won Time’s Person of the Year, but that doesn’t mean she won over everyone’s hearts. The pop star’s presence at boyfriend Mr. Pfizer’s — er, Travis Kelce’s — NFL games stole the TV cameras, sports announcers, and fantasy football apps away from America’s favorite Sunday evening pastime.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx. Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
“Canceling” people who disagree with you over ordinary political issues is bad for civil society. Ruining someone’s life because he wore a MAGA cap or tweeted something stupid or supported the wrong initiative creates an oppressive environment for open discourse.
“Canceling” people who sign petitions and hold up signs that openly celebrate or justify the targeted, brutal murders of women and babies, on the other hand, is good for civil society. Stopping malevolent ideas from being normalized is good. Exercising your First Amendment right to free speech and free association to shun and call out people who spread odious ideas in public life is a moral imperative.
Because people who walk around ripping down posters of kidnapped children and women aren’t pondering the future of a “two-state solution” or the Gazan refugee situation, they are moral degenerates. In the same way you wouldn’t hire the guy who stands in front of Disney World waving around a swastika flag, you shouldn’t hire someone who marches with a sign that reads “from the river to the sea.” Both convey the same sentiment. The ethical line is bright and obvious. If you don’t see it, something is broken in you.
Yet, a bunch of Hamasapologists are calling out conservatives for their alleged hypocrisy on “cancel culture” when it comes to “pro-Palestinian” advocates.
Though I’m not a fan of mobs, I’ve never been a big critic of cancel culture, either. Looking back, I could find only one piece I’ve written on the topic — and it concerned itself with double standards. It’s a slippery term. And there is facet to the debate that’s often overlooked. Americans have no obligation to associate with those who attack their deep-seated values. To hire someone who signs a pro-Hamas petition can be an endorsement of that outlook. Your company is not an open social media platform which exists as a forum for debate, it has a reputation and customers. (Not that I believe the state should be able to compel social media companies to host opinions, either.)
And it’s not as if you asked these people to give you their opinion on genocide. They did so by their own volition. The Harvard petitions blaming Jews for their own murders were signed and released for public consumption. They were released before Israel had even counted the dead, much less invaded Gaza. If law students were celebrating 9/11 on 9/12, would New York firms have a responsibility to provide them with gainful employment? No, they would be rejected in the real world and compelled to get jobs in academia, where such views are welcome.
Of course, the contention that “pro-Palestinian” advocates, or even those who talk about Israel as if it was some authoritarian proto-Nazi state, are being mass canceled is a myth, anyway. They fill the op-ed pages of major newspapers and cable news. They dominate campuses. They aren’t canceled. They are rewarded. When someone like “porn star” Mia Khalifa was “canceled,” it is because she was quite literally rejoicing in the murder of innocent people in real time.
Ibrahim Bharmal, who one suspects is dumber than the average internet prostitute, is the editor of the Harvard Law Review, not some rando trying to wind people up on the internet. He is out there physically and verbally abusing a Jewish student during a pro-Hamas rally on campus like some kind of Brownshirt. Does Harvard have a responsibility to have him on campus? Why should a firm with Jewish partners — or any decent people — hire him?
Harvard, by the way, has assembled a special task force to help students who signed pro-Hamas statements deal with the blowback. Apparently, some people are under the impression they’re the only ones allowed to speak.
The notion that anti-Israel pundits are concerned about double standards, by the way, is risible. You might recall that Harvard rescinded its offer to pro-Second Amendment Parkland kid Kyle Kashuv, ostensibly over things he tweeted as a 16-year-old. No one cared. Today, Georgetown thinks it’s fine to cancel Ilya Shapiro for a single inarticulate tweet, but it will not cancel a professor who complains online about “Zio bitches.” The New York Times cancels an editor for running a column from a sitting senator but hires a writer who praises Hitler (true story).
When I say I’m a free-speech absolutist, I mean it. The state should do absolutely nothing to inhibit or censor pro-Hamas Americans from expressing their opinions. Free speech isn’t contingent on your position. Hate speech is free speech. The government has no business prodding or even suggesting limitations on our rhetorical interactions. Even outside state intervention, we should be upholding the values that promote free expression. We can peacefully coexist with colleagues, neighbors and friends who hold contradictory opinions within the normal parameters of political debate.
Likewise, Americans have a right to use their freedom to call out and disassociate themselves from people who take the side with nihilistic murder cults.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Monday morning, I swept through the marbled halls of the Supreme Court of the United States, off First Street NE here in the nation’s capital, to enter the highest room of jurisprudence in the land. The sound of my footsteps muffled atop thick carpeting, the blinds on the massive windows mostly drawn and the room packed with rows upon rows of chairs, slowly filling.
A daughter of India who grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia, little could I know that over the next four-and-a-half-hours I would ride an emotional rollercoaster as three so-called “liberal” justices and four attorneys overlooked, erased, and tried to gaslight the truth of Asian Americans who face discrimination — or as the ideologues call it, “systemic racism” — in admissions to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
If not for fierce questioning from the court’s six conservative justices and the arguments of two attorneys for the plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, Asian Americans would have been erased in the courtroom that day — much as they have been nationwide by “equity warriors” for whom we are an inconvenient minority. Instead, this is my prediction for the rulings, expected next year: a 6-2 victory by Asian American families and students over Harvard and a 6-3 win over the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Born in India, I was on an emotional roller coaster today in the Supreme Court, listening to 3 justices + 4 lawyers try to gaslight America on the reality of anti-Asian racism. Fortunately, 4 justices argued fiercely. My bet: 6-2, Harvard loses. 6-3 UNC loses. America wins 💯 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/IsQ1yK8Ny1
In 332 pages of court transcripts, “diversity” was referenced 202 times, most of the time by the universities’ lawyers and the three justices that supported them, with “Asian” mentioned only 81 times. The universities’ lawyers, the sympathetic U.S. solicitor general, and the three like-minded justices spoke many times about supporting “students of color,” “minorities” and “diversity” but most often excluded Asian Americans. Ironically, the three liberal justices waxed eloquently about “diversity” without once noting the obvious: There wasn’t an Asian American justice beside them.
In the most defining moment of the day, Harvard’s attorney, Seth Waxman, tried to downplay “race” as a “determinative factor” in admissions to Harvard, noting that it was just like, “you know,” being “an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Ratcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.”
Chief Justice John Roberts shot that comparison down immediately.
“Yeah. We did not fight a civil war about oboe players,” he said firmly.
“I—,” Waxman tried to interrupt.
Roberts continued, undeterred. “We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination, and that’s why it’s a matter of — of considerable concern.”
Across the country, parents listening to the proceedings laughed and cheered. The day before, many of those parents, with names like Jack Ouyang, Wai Wah Chin, Eva Guo, Suparna Dutta, Yuyan Zhou, and Harry Jackson, stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at an “Equal Education Rights for All” rally with signs promoting simple ideas. “Stop Anti-Asian Discrimination.” “Diversity ≠ Skin Color.” Together, over the past years, we had become accidental activists in the war on merit and Asian American students.
Since late August, parents had been meeting at 9 p.m. on Thursday nights over Zoom to ready for the rally, trading messages through the week on WeChat, Telegram, and Signal. CNN and Fox News featured their voices in their coverage of the case. Chinese-language newspapers put news of the rally on their front pages. But inside the Supreme Court, to the lawyers for the universities and the three justices who supported them, it felt as if we were invisible.
‘Gas lighters’
I’d first visited the nation’s capital decades ago as an 18-year-old intern in the summer of 1983, but this was my first time in the Supreme Court hearing room. It is about the size of a soccer field. At 57, I had to be a witness for the approximately 22 million Asian Americans living in the United States, about one of every 15 people, most hailing from 19 countries and the fastest-growing racial group in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
In response to a K-12 education system that has largely failed black and Hispanic students, officials at Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill have allegedly rigged their admissions processes with “race-conscious” standards that discriminate against Asian American students to boost the number of black, Hispanic, and other “underrepresented minorities,” known today as “URMs.”
I brought two books into the Supreme Court with me: the big red book, “Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,” and the yearbook for the class of 2021 from my son’s alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia, a magnet school known as “TJ,” where about 70 percent of the students are Asian American.
The yearbook theme was simple, “We know exactly how you feel.” Unfortunately, activists for the tenets of critical race theory don’t even pretend to want to know how we feel, and I witnessed this tone-deaf callousness from the three activist justices: Associate Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In my notebook, I penned their three names under “Gas Lighters.”
These three justices infused their questions, comments, and analysis with the politics and worldview of critical race theory, the ideology that teaches that society’s injustices must be corrected through the lens of race. Kagan wondered whether “people who have been kicked in the teeth by our society for centuries” can get a “thumb on the scale” instead of “white men.” She spoke about “our color blindness, whatever that means, because our society is not color blind in its effects.” Sotomayor punctuated many a question with “correct?” For example, she said schools are working to examine the “whole” student as “equals” — “correct?”
Quickly, Kagan found a kindred spirit in the country’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, who spoke so sing-song it took a careful ear to recognize the disturbing worldview of critical race theory in her words. To the plaintiff’s argument on the “color-blind interpretation of the Constitution,” she said, “There’s nothing in history to support that.”
Under “Fierce Against Racism,” I wrote four names: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Under “Sympathetic” to the plaintiffs, I penned two names: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
Photo/Asra Nomani
Prophets of critical race theory, such as author Ibram X. Kendi, have spread a toxic, unbelievable, and illiberal idea: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Asian American students have been their sacrificial lambs in their racial experiment, with K-12 schools like TJ in the crosshairs of their war on merit.
In December 2020, after the killing of George Floyd turned educrats into activists, the 12-0 Democratic school board in Fairfax County, Virginia, eliminated the merit-based admissions tests to the school and replaced them with a “holistic” process that would increase the number of black, Hispanic, and other “URM” students, assigning “bonus points” to racially engineer the student body. A group we started, Coalition for TJ, filed a lawsuit with attorneys from a public-interest nonprofit, Pacific Legal Foundation.
In early 2022, a federal judge ruled that the new admissions process is “blatantly unconstitutional,” but the “UnFairfax” school board, as we like to call it, is appealing the case, and it will likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court as early as fall 2023.
‘Asian’ Does Not Appear
On Monday, to hear the three “Gas Lighters” and the university’s lawyers, you wouldn’t have even known they were weighing the effect of systemic racism against Asian Americans. In fact, at one point, Alito turned to David Hinojosa, an attorney representing current and former students at UNC-Chapel Hill supporting race in admissions and said: “I was struck by the fact that the word ‘Asian’ does not appear one time in your brief. Yet Asians have been subject to de jure segregation. They have been subjected to many forms of mistreatment and discrimination, including internment.”
Like a magician, Hinojosa said there was no mention of “Asian” in his brief because, voila, a “record” of discrimination against Asian Americans “actually doesn’t exist.” He instructed the court to take it up with Harvard.
When Alito pressed the Harvard attorney, Waxman, on why Asian American students received a lower “personal score” than other students on character traits, including “integrity, courage, kindness, and empathy,” the Harvard lawyer did a tap-dance, saying the “syllogism” of the question was “wrong,” then asserted that the personal score difference is a “slight numerical disparity” that doesn’t reveal any “evidence of discrimination in admissions outcomes against Asian Americans,” because it’s “simply a number” that “fades into the background.”
Simply a number.
“They think we’re that stupid.”
Alito pounced with the obvious question: “If it doesn’t matter, why do you do it?” Waxman dismissed the “personal score” as a “matter of triage” for overwhelmed admissions officers.
What about “affinity groups,” the controversial new tool for separating and segregating students in housing, discussion groups, and elsewhere in schools by race and other identity markers, asked Justice Amy Coney Barrett? Oh, they have “incredible benefits,” gushed Hinojosa.
Photo/Asra Nomani
In the 1920s, Harvard President Lawrence Lowell discriminated in admissions against another group: Jewish students, because he believed there was a “Jew problem” with the overrepresentation of Jewish students at the school. In gaslighting back then, Harvard officials said they weren’t discriminating against Jewish students but just putting in place a “holistic” admissions process.
Now, in his closing remarks, Cameron Norris, an attorney for Students for Fair Admissions, said, “Harvard thankfully does say it is ashamed of its history of Jewish discrimination. I hope someday it says the same about how it’s treating Asians.”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, Nomani writes a regular newsletter, Asra InvestigatesAsra Investigates, with breaking news and analysis on the frontlines of culture and politics. She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at the Independent Women’s Network and a cofounder of the Coalition for TJ, a grassroots parent group, and of the Pearl Project, an investigative reporting initiative. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com and @AsraNomani.
If you’re looking for a shortcut to get your kid into a prestigious college, but your little one doesn’t have high enough cheekbones to claim to be an Indian, consider the petal-strewn path of the newly elected San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin.
Chesa’s sparkling credentials are: He is the son of celebrated cop-killers Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert! That was enough to win him admission to Yale, Oxford and Yale Law School.
His mother consciously parlayed her way to success by becoming a violent revolutionary after realizing that she wasn’t going to set the world on fire with her SAT and LSAT scores.
By contrast, Kathy’s brother, Michael — the Republican — had nearly perfect board scores, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, went on to Harvard Law School, worked for a white-shoe law firm, then took a top position in the Reagan administration. Today, he is a federal appeals court judge, appointed by the first President Bush.
The only thing Kathy could do to impress her father — and our nation’s elite institutions — was to become a domestic terrorist.
It worked. Her parents showily displayed Kathy’s motorcycle helmet from her participation in the “Days of Rage” in Chicago. Jean Boudin’s “pride in her aristocratic position on the left,” Braudy writes, made her “the match of any Palm Beach hostess.”
In addition to the “Days of Rage,” which left a Democratic politician paralyzed, Kathy was part of the Weather Underground brain trust that blew up a Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970, killing three of the radicals. The bomb they were building was intended to kill servicemen and their dates at a Fort Dix dance. With body parts flying and walls collapsing around her, Kathy made it out of the house one step ahead of the police.
Again, Kathy’s parents were delighted with the townhouse bombing. Her mother had always envied the owners for their wealth, anyway. Her father thought seeing his daughter on FBI “wanted” posters was “good for his legend.”
As luck would have it, going underground after the townhouse explosion finally gave Kathy an excuse to get a nose job. She also dyed her hair bright red, mimicking Bernadine Dohrn, born Bernadine Ohrnstein. (These revolutionaries would engage in sex orgies to “smash monogamy,” but one convention the gritty radicals adhered to was the WASP ideal of beauty and gentrified names.)
The only thing that terrified Kathy, Braudy says, was that “if stripped of her glamorous and dramatic revolutionary attachments and subterfuges, she would be the dullest person in Leonard’s circle of admirers. … She would be a woman, no longer young, whose work was waiting tables and cleaning houses.”
In fact, that’s exactly what she was. While Kathy and David play-acted being on the run, the FBI wasn’t even looking for them anymore. A newspaper in Wisconsin published David Gilbert’s whereabouts and — OH MY GOSH … nothing happened. “No one arrested him,” Braudy writes; the “authorities weren’t interested in him.”
It was time for drastic action. Those LSAT scores weren’t going to bury themselves. So in 1981, Kathy conspired with violent drug-addicted members of the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brinks armored truck in Rockland County, New York. They wanted drug money and she wanted fame.
At the Nanuet Mall, her BLA co-conspirators murdered Brinks guard Peter Paige and wounded two others, then hopped in the getaway truck being driven by Kathy and David.
The truck was stopped by the police minutes later, but 38-year-old Kathy emerged from the truck’s cab, playing an innocent housewife, frightened by all the guns. She begged the perplexed police to lower their weapons. No sooner were their firearms holstered than six BLA members leapt out, guns blazing. They instantly killed the force’s only black officer, Waverly Brown. Sergeant Edward O’Grady died a few hours later on the operating table.
She’d done it. Kathy was a bona fide success! In jail, she received a string of celebrity visitors and fawning journalists. There would be documentaries, glorious write-ups, Oscar nominations and poetry awards.
After decades of recounting her sufferings since the robbery that left Brown dead, Kathy was told that Brown’s son still attended the memorial service held for his father and Sgt. O’Grady at 4 p.m. every Oct. 20.
“Really?” Kathy said. “I never knew the guy had a son.”
According to our betters, that’s an “idealist.”
She was granted parole in 2003 — supported by none other than William F. Buckley. (The elites circle the wagons!) Soon she was a professor at Columbia University and director of the school’s Center for Justice.
These status-obsessed Yale rejects became “radicals” in order to win a lifetime of good press and cushy academic positions unavailable to them any other way.
Look at David Hogg, rejected from a half-dozen non-elite schools, only to be accepted by Harvard — all for raising his scrawny little arm in a preposterous one-arm salute after a speech denouncing the National Rifle Association. True, Hogg’s SAT score (1270) was far below that of the average Harvard student (1484). It was even below that of recruited athletes at Harvard (1297). But he had turned himself into a left-wing activist just in the nick of time. Harvard here I come!
The two “idealists” who raised Chesa Boudin were William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. On account of putting a bomb in the Pentagon, Ayers became a distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For praising the Manson family and leading a group of protesters in a little ditty that mocked the government official paralyzed during the “Days of Rage” rampage, Dohrn was made a professor at Northwestern University School of Law.
Another leftist celebrity, Susan Rosenberg, had conspired to kill cops, blow up buildings and rob a Brinks truck; she was sentenced to 58 years in prison for felony murder and possession of more than 700 pounds of explosives. She was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office.
A couple years later, Rosenberg was offered a teaching position at Hamilton College. Apart from her fondness for bombs and cop-killing, Rosenberg’s credentials consisted of: a master’s degree in writing from a correspondence course in prison.
Oh, by the way, when Kathy Boudin was finally arrested after the Brinks robbery, the police searching her Morningside Drive apartment found, amid the food stamps and welfare forms, Kathy’s application to New York University Law School.
It’s one thing to say a person shouldn’t be punished for the sins of his parents. But America’s elite institutions treat cop-killing — even merely being the child of cop-killers — as the equivalent of being a star athlete or getting double-800s on your SATs.
Say, instead of forcing taxpayers to take on the burden of student debt, how about letting the colleges eat their own student loans?
Ah, the halls of academia where the world is turned upside-down on a regular basis.
The new plan to deal with racial tensions?
SEGREGATION.
Seriously.
In 2017.
The plan is to now have a separate Graduation Ceremony for Black students.
What kind of backwater college would do that?
Harvard.
WTF?
Because college life for black students is hard.
In the name of progress, Harvard University will segregate graduation ceremonies based on race.
For real.
“Aside from studying and taking grueling tests, if you’re a minority, the outer pressures of society make the already challenging coursework even more difficult. Knowing this, Black members of the class of 2017 decided to form an individual ceremony. It’s the first of its kind at the school in recent memory and took nearly a year to plan,”reports BET. “The separate graduation is an effort to highlight the aforementioned struggles and resilience it takes to get through those.”
Because of ‘overt racism’, ‘microaggressions’, ‘passive racist comments’ and ‘marginalization for minority experiences in assignments’.
The Root similarly lamented how difficult college life can be for minorities: “The ceremony comes at a time when the experiences of Black students on college campuses in America have been marked by incidents of overt racism, microaggressions, passive racist comments, and the marginalization of minority experiences in both reading assignments and learning materials.”
The segregation will include only graduate students this year, but there are plans to expand such racial separation next year to all university students, including undergrads.
But it’s not Segregation segregation — it’s just separating the graduates based on their race.
‘It’s not about segregation,’ says Micheal Huggins, a Graduate Student at Harvard. He spoke to The Root:
“This is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s Black excellence and Black brilliance,” said Huggins. “It’s an event where we can see each other and our parents and family can see us as a collective, whole group. A community.
“This is not about segregation,” he continued. “It’s about fellowship and building a community. This is a chance to reaffirm for each other that we enter the work world with a network of supporters standing with us. We are all partners.”
Read more: Daily Wire
It looks like this book will need to be updated:
Oh, what progress!
This is why we send our young men and women to these establishments of higher learning. For the opportunity to be exposed to various ideas and have their assumptions challenged. Outside of the ‘safe spaces’, of course.
That is — when the Starbucks aren’t being looted and private property isn’t being set aflame by Antifa protesters complaining about a non-Leftist speaker. So that when they’re finished being coddled with hot chocolate, coloring, Play-Doh, and their therapy animals, they can be segregated by race to celebrate their accomplishments!
Is this an annual rollout? Are the Hispanics next year and Asians the year after? What about the mixed kids? Do they identify as one or the other, go to both, or is their separate Graduation Ceremony planned for 2020?
Will the Polynesians get their own ceremony? Or are they too much of a minority to justify it?
Wouldn’t Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. be so very proud of this?
For all the talk about ‘racism’ and ‘winding the clock back’ — which side of the aisle is doing this crap?
It ain’t the folks on the Right.
An apology by the Media (D) to Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his alleged ‘racism’ is certainly in order.
The absurdity of the climate change hoaxers has taken a full step further into the bizarre as scientists from Harvard are planning a ridiculous stunt.
That the climate change hoax has persisted for this long, in the face of hard scientific evidence debunking the entire agenda, is a testament to the stubborn ignorance of the left. By perpetuating the fallacy that we are on an unstoppable path to global destruction based on our own habits is the only way that some of these cockamamy liberals can legislate anything. It’s their doom and gloom fear mongering that has helped to prolong the inevitable demise of their hoax.
Now, spurred on by these asinine ideas that have been allowed to fester, scientists from Harvard are moving forward with their insane plan to spray the sky with geo-engineered materialsaimed at blocking the sun, all in the hopes of preventing the mythical global warming.
“Sometime next year, Harvard professors David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to launch a high-altitude balloon, tethered to a gondola equipped with propellers and sensors, from a site in Tucson, Arizona. After initial engineering tests, the “Strato Cruiser” would spray a fine mist of materials such as sulfur dioxide, alumina, or calcium carbonate into the stratosphere. The sensors would then measure the reflectivity of the particles, the degree to which they disperse or coalesce, and the way they interact with other compounds in the atmosphere.
“The researchers first proposed these balloon experiments in a 2014 paper. But at a geoengineering conference in Washington, D.C., on Friday, Keith said they have begun engineering design work with Arizona test balloon company World View Enterprises. They’ve also started discussions about the appropriate governance structure for such an experiment, and they plan to set up an independent body to review their proposals.
“’We would like to have the first flights next year,’ he said at the Forum on U.S. Solar Geoengineering Research, held at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”
The idea of spraying our atmosphere with heavy chemicals such as these is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in terms of the safety of all Americans. While global warming has yet to cause a single fatality, the possibility of these experiments affecting a large swatch of humanity is very real.
E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency.
In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage. Across the media, the authors were innocuously described as simply university-affiliated “researchers.” After all, the researchers had declared they had “no competing financial interests” in their study. Both universities had issued media releases heralding the study as the “first independent, peer-reviewed paper of its kind.”
Study co-author Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University told the Buffalo News, “I’m an academic, not a politician. I don’t have a dog in this fight.”The claim of independence was also emphatically asserted by study co-author Jonathan Buonocore of Harvard University. “The EPA, which did not participate in the study or interact with its authors, Buonocore says, roundly welcomed its findings.” [Emphasis added].
But a closer look at these claims of independence raises serious doubts.
An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that;
Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA.
Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million.
Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants.
Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA.
Are we to believe that a group of researchers who had previously received some $45 million in grants from EPA, no doubt hoping for more in the future, could possibly not have any dog in this fight? It’s probably not necessary to ask how this slipped past the incurious mainstream media.
Intrigued by Bounocore’s odd assertion of absolutely no involvement with EPA, I submitted a request to EPA under the Freedom of Information Act for email between the study authors and EPA staff. Although subsequent wrangling with agency staff gave me doubt that I would ever get anything, I received, much to my surprise, 99 pages of emails after mere weeks. The emails reveal that study co-authors Driscoll, Buonocore, Schwartz and Harvard’s Kathy Lambert were definitely in contact with key EPA staff regarding this research.
A July 8, 2014 email shows Lambert arranging a conference call with EPA staff to get EPA’s input on the study. One of the EPA staff involved was the contact person for agency’s Clean Power Plan cost-benefit analysis. A subsequent e-mail shows that the top EPA staffer on the Clean Power Plan cost-benefit analysis was added to the call.
A July 15, 2014 email from Driscoll to an EPA staffer boasts of “considerable interest” in their analysis from unnamed outside “groups.” One sentence after buttering up the EPA staffer, Driscoll asks her if they could have a phone call to discuss fundraising for a conference Driscoll is organizing. No appearance of attempted financial conflict there?
A November 7, 2014 e-mail from Lambert to EPA about the study reads,“We would like to follow back up with you by phone to discuss possible next steps in this analysis and what role you might be able to play.”
This issue goes deeper than mere truth-telling. The EPA’s controversial Clean Power Plan hinges on the notion that shuttering coal plants will save lives. The EPA’s proposed global warming plan ostensibly focuses on reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants. But the bulk of the alleged benefits of the plan actually arise from collateral projections of lives supposedly saved by reducing coal plant emissions related to particulate matter and ozone.
As EPA values each life “saved” at about $10 million, the claim that the rules will save 6,600 lives per year puts the rules’ alleged benefits on the order of $66 billion per year, far in excess of industry projections of the rules’ costs. These EPA claims, however, are controversial to say the least. A compelling alternate view is that no lives will be saved because, for one reason, EPA’s own extensive clinical research shows that particulate matter and ozone in outdoor air do not kill anyone. The only casualty in this case is our confidence in the independence of EPA-funded researchers.
New students at Harvard Universitywill soon be treated to a mandatory special orientation programdesigned to teach them all about societal “privilege and power” structures. The group responsible for overseeing the program explains (kind of) what the “class” is:
A mandatory power and privilege training that examines components of race, gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, ability, religion, international status, and power differentials . . .
And why it’s important for Harvard students:
The exercise of public leadership … requires an honest assessment of structural power dynamics, of in-group and out-group dynamics, and of privilege.
Maybe you’re not up on the vagaries(1) of Newspeak. So I’ll explain the class rather bluntly: it’s a class designed to make white, Christian, heterosexual males feel guilty about the fact that all the good things in their lives have been handed to them on a silver platter, and they don’t deserve any of them. And it’s also a class to empower feminists, homosexuals, atheists, and racial minorities in their quest to gain the privilege and power they currently covet, and do not possess (apparently).
I think that about sums it up. Just why such an orientation would be necessary is beyond me. Harvard will already do a fine job teaching these poor unsuspecting students to use catchalls like “Heteronormativity(2),” “white privilege,” “structural sexism/racism,” and the like. Even without the special mandatory brainwashing session.
“Sounds to me like communist countries “Brainwashing” re-education prison camps.” JB
Harvard, interestingly enough, was started by white, Christian, heterosexual males as a seminary. So if there is a group at Harvard that has inherited an undeserved legacy from their forefathers, its liberal Harvard students. A tragic irony if ever there was one.
Do they really think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest would have come about in any other environment than Christian America? No. Atheists, homosexuals, feminists, and racists don’t build schools like Harvard. They just destroy them.
vagaries:an erratic, unpredictable, or extravagant manifestation, action, or notion
Heteronormativity: Heteronormativityis the body of lifestyle norms that holds that people fall into distinct and complementary genders (man and woman) with natural roles in life.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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