Harvard recently published two reports on antisemitism and Islamophobia that gave more ammunition to the Trump administration, which is looking to crack down on the politics of hate at Harvard.
Two groups of faculty and students interviewed 500 Harvard professors, teaching assistants, and students. They discovered that there has been a “general shift of power from regular faculty and to para-academic administrators” that "has played an outsized role in the politicization and radicalization of academia and its intellectual and reputational decline.”
"Intellectual and reputational decline" is an admission that woke politics is wrecking Harvard.
At Harvard, there is “an ideological effort underway to weaken the post-World War II social consensus that antisemitism is a form of bias." There is also “politicized instruction that mainstreams and normalizes" Jew- and Israel-hate. The report whitewashed antisemitism by referring to “what many Jewish and Israeli students experience as antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias."
In other words, they could be wrong about someone being antisemitic when a Palestinian walks up to them and spits in their face. After all, the victim only "experiences" antisemitism as an abstract. It's a "perception" that others don't share. New York Post:
The report said “cruel and hateful posts” about Israel, Jewish people and the Holocaust have appeared on Harvard’s Sidechat social media platform, and that anti-Israel protesters on campus have chanted antisemitic slogans during demonstrations.
Anti-Israel tent encampment protests at Harvard Yard last spring featured a poster of Garber, who is Jewish, altered to include devil horns and a tail, the report said.
One student told the task force they were sent a disturbing, hate-filled email with the subject line “Burning babies alive,” the outlet writes.
In March, the Trump administration warned it was looking at $256 million in federal contracts for Harvard, as well as $8.7 billion in additional “multi-year grant commitments” over its alleged inaction.
The reports also found that antisemitism and woke politics diminished scholarship at the school.
"The reports trace problems back decades, describing years of compromised scholarship, diminished intellectual standards on campus and biased curriculum that led to the campus devolving into antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias after the Hamas attacks," reported the Wall Street Journal.
These aren't College Republicans or a chapter of the YAF writing these reports. These are academics and upperclassmen telling the world that Harvard is skating by on its reputation.
You cannot have academic rigor without the freedom to disagree. You can't have solid intellectual standards without unbiased acceptance of other points of view. And you can't deliberately offer biased curricula and then purport to be an exceptional place of learning.
Those reports prove that Harvard is a fraud. It is not one of the finest centers of learning in the United States, but rather a concentration of rigid, ugly, hateful professors and administrators more concerned with advancing an ideological agenda than educating the young men and women in their care to face the world.
Turns out when you hand the keys to a school over to a cadre of frothy-lipped ideologues, its quality declines.
And it’s not just Jews who suffer: Everyone loses out on the diversity of thought and free exchange of ideas that should characterize life on campus.
Instead of reading the greats or mastering organic chemistry, they get crammed with gutter propaganda and crackpot theory.
That it took a mini-pogrom and months of public scrutiny to get Harvard to admit this glaring fact is beyond insane.
Yet, for all the report’s circumlocutions and efforts to bend over backward for armchair terrorists and the malleable-minded children of the American elite, Harvard has admitted the truth.
Embracing the blood libels of the left around Israel and the academic theories that undergird them and letting radicals abandon teaching for indoctrinating does foundational harm to any university.
Harvard will have to undergo a radical administrative renovation to return to the level of academic excellence it previously possessed. There are some things that the school will never get back. As long as left-wing radicals are in control, there can be no free thinking.
