We’ve seen it before: you can be fired as a professor or have your admission revoked as a student if you misgender a transgender person or question DEI philosophy. But seeing crowds of their own students and faculty calling for the genocide of the Jewish people, the presidents of several major universities reacted with a… meh. Harvard University President Claudine Gay, former University of Pennsylvania head Liz Magill (she resigned under heavy pressure Saturday), and MIT chief Sally Kornbluth all thoroughly embarrassed themselves and our country this week during hearings by the House Committee on Education and Workforce when they failed to condemn the virulent antisemitism on their campuses and the chants for “Intifada Revolution” and Jewish genocide by their students and faculty. Both UPenn and Harvard are part of the eight-school Ivy League, but MIT is not, even though it is considered top-tier and is often mistakenly considered to be a member of that club. Their testimony was shameful. So far, only Magill has paid the price for her ridiculous equivocations, but it’s only Sunday, and we’ll see what transpires this week. Senior Hoover Institution Fellow Victor Davis Hanson eviscerated the decline of our once legendary educational institutions in a blistering X thread Saturday, labeling the three school presidents “our three blind mice.” Three blind mice. Three blind mice.See how they run. See how they run… It's a long thread, but I'll try to hit the highlights. First, he says academic elitists like Kornbluth, Gay, and Magill have done more harm to higher ed than anything else in recent times:
RedState has reported numerous antisemitic incidents at our nation’s institutions of “higher education”: Harvard Student Surrounded by Pro-Palestinian Mob in Latest Campus Madness Hanson laid into the three blind mice for their blatant double standards on free speech, what he calls “systemic prejudice”:
The professor, farmer, and prolific author went on to point out that the three are supposed to be the smartest people out there, yet they were “utterly eviscerated by Republican congressional representatives with no such academic credentials.”
His final point was that they only issued groveling apologies in the wake of their disastrous congressional testimonies because they saw a threat to their universities' pocketbooks—in the form of withdrawn donations, of which there have been many. But Hanson has a plan:
I like his ideas, but I don’t have much confidence that they will be deployed anytime soon, given that higher education in America has become an over-priced wokefest where actual learning has been placed on the back burner, and there are too many entrenched interests to easily unseat. Nevertheless, I find VDH to be an interesting thinker who is willing to say things that other academics are not. He's spot on here. |
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