The unbearable mediocrity of the Ivy League
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
―G.K. Chesterton
There is a YouTube video (begin at 56 sec.) making the rounds that brings together six people from various walks of life and education. They range from a young high school graduate who is a Marine to a Ph.D. They are interviewed briefly and asked to guess the I.Q. of the others and to guess where they themselves would fall on the I.Q. spectrum. The woman with the Ph.D., of course, assumes she is the brightest. They all assume that the Marine has the lowest I.Q.
This is not how it turns out. The Ph.D. actually scores the lowest on the I.Q. test.
The point is that people with advanced degrees and prestigious positions in academia are not necessarily the smartest people in the room. This was proven with some needed satisfaction on Tuesday, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT testified at a hearing to address the massive pro-Hamas/anti-Israel protests on each of those campuses. The protesters called for the extermination of Israel and the genocide of Jews.
Each of those three women has a very high opinion of herself; they assume that by virtue of their academic achievements, they are superior, thus smarter, than the rest of us. Oh, and then there are the billions of dollars these schools receive from foreign entities of the Middle East variety.
“Highly educated = Highly indoctrinated”
―Mishelle Boniface
But, as their carefully uttered talking points revealed, not one of them is very smart. So confident in the rightness of their own opinions and perspectives on all things, they all shamefully but casually declared their own antisemitism. Each of them proclaimed that free speech must take precedence over the “abhorrent” behavior of the protesters who called for the genocide of the Jewish people and the elimination of the state of Israel. (Elise Stefanik pointed out that Harvard scores the lowest for freedom of speech on campus.)
Harvard president Claudine Gay refused to say that calling for the extinction of Israel and its population violates Harvard’s code of conduct! When Stefanik, herself a Harvard grad, asked Gay, if campus thugs demanded the genocide of African-Americans, would that be equally acceptable, she refused to answer.
We all know that if any group that called for the extermination of blacks, gays, or Muslims, its members would immediately be expelled and probably arrested for hate crimes. But calling for the death of Jews was just fine with each of these women.
Not one of them seemed to grasp the horror of their almost offhand comments, their refusal to answer to the question posed: “Will any action be taken against those students?” I think we can guess the answer. Like the BLM rioters who did billions of dollars of damage in 2020, they will not be charged with any crime. They will suffer no consequences for their blatant support of what is essentially Nazism.
The presidents of these three universities, and probably Columbia, Brown, and NYU as well, do not think they did anything wrong. As Andrea Widburg wrote here on Tuesday, their “obvious [personal] antisemitism” exposed the rot at the heart of academia. “The three women are very clear that merely calling for Jews to be exterminated really isn’t harassment unless they’re actually getting killed in real time.” Yeah, that’ll work!
In the campus culture that prevails at nearly all colleges in the U.S., where skin color, sexual orientation, and minority status — identity politics — rule the day, it is almost easy to see why these women saw absolutely nothing wrong in their answers to the questions asked of them. Bill Ackman, a Harvard grad who reacted first to the outrageous testimonies of the three women, noted that “the answers they gave reflect the profound moral bankruptcy of presidents Gay, Magil and Kornbluth.” Indeed, they did. Even Kornbluth, Jewish herself, was equally willing to excuse the protesters’ vicious hatred of Israel and Jewish people on the grounds of “context.”
An article in the Daily Mail addresses Gay’s feeble attempt to walk back, to clarify, her statements and refusal to answer certain questions:
There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. [They have.] Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard [but they do], and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.
Far too little, too late. Not one of the three did anything to protect their Jewish students who were being harassed and physically threatened. A few of them testified as well. Not only do they not feel safe; they are not safe.
Who could have predicted that this kind of monstrous behavior would be sullying the most elite campuses in the country in response to the worst and most barbaric attack on Jews since the Holocaust? Something is very, very rotten in academia. Is it perhaps that, like little Palestinian children, who are taught practically from birth that their mission in life will be to kill Jews, our current crop of university presidents have likewise been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the prevailing notion that there are only two kinds of people, the oppressed (victims) and their oppressors? This perverted and catastrophic ideology has destroyed education in the U.S. Any and all persons deemed oppressors are legitimate targets of discrimination, hate, and even murder.
We have all been reduced to one or the other of those two categories. Misgender a trans person? You’re an oppressor. Black conservative? They are coming for you. Anti-transgenderism for all the obvious reasons? You are a target. The left’s social credit score is the order of the day on college campuses and in the media.
As in the YouTube video linked above, professional academics are very often not the smartest people in the room. For those three women to expose the binary reductionism of their own dumbed down thinking so arrogantly, with no apparent clue that their words were a shock to most Americans, has been yet another wake-up call for us all. The Democrat party as currently constituted is Marxist, the Biden administration verging on tyrannical. It has caved to all the most basic Marxist tenets, bent slightly from purely socio-economic classes to include racial and sexual groups.
The individual is a non-entity to the left. Only oppressed groups matter. Those university presidents, not a critical thinker among them, are proof that calculated indoctrination works, and it is seriously dangerous, for it ends with the worst regimes in history.
“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.”
—Thomas Sowell
Image: Joseph Williams via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
How Harvard’s President Gay has failed
In testimony before Congress, Harvard president Claudine Gay said, “I’ve sought to confront hate while preserving free expression.” She added “This is difficult work. I know I have not always gotten it right.”
I do not see any indication that Gay has “confronted” hate, which I would like to see her define, and I wonder if she would preserve the free expression of a Ku Klux Klan protest in Harvard Yard.
President Gay does not seem to understand her role. It’s not her job to preserve free expression. The Constitution of the United States does that (well, okay, under normal administrations that enforce the laws of America faithfully).
Gay’s job is to: 1) educate Harvard students with, among other things, historical facts, enabling them to reach informed, wise conclusions on their own; and 2) support and preserve the values of her institution. Clearly, she is incompetent on both counts.
Harvard students have expressed support for eighth-century Islamic savagery and for killing Jews. Since this unqualifiedly offends the institution’s values, Harvard has no right to mentor our children and no reason to exist.
Supporting core Judeo-Christian American values should be a sine qua non. Some companies have reportedly done that, withdrawing job offers from Harvard students supporting Hamas and Jew killing. Gay and Harvard can do it too, by expelling students, faculty, and staff who support or supported Hamas and the murder of Jews. Failing to do that, Harvard proves it has no right to exist.
Image: C-Span screen shot
College Students Revel in Blissful Ignorance at Pro-Gaza Rallies
There is an obvious explanation as to why college students engage in “atrocity denialism” at pro-Palestinian marches.
They are (well) clueless, and devoid of all rational thinking. The students aren’t shy about expressing their blissfully ignorant critique of Hamas as “liberators,” and their creepy foray into painting the dark side of evil -- the slaughter and torture of innocent civilians in Israel -- as “necessary.”
Parents don’t have to wonder what’s happening with their kids’ expensive education, they can watch the academic dumpster fire on social media. There isn’t a shortage of embarrassing outtakes of the privileged millennials who are passionate about their pro-Palestine cause and at the same time prove themselves to be passionate know-nothings.
If you’ve missed the most absurd outtakes, I regard you as lucky. Still, a brief overview may be in order to gain perspective on how unhinged our morally challenged youth have become as they allow themselves to become part of the herd.
Let us start with the more amiable students, and work our way down to the unabashed Israelophobes and Jew haters.
Wearing a bright smile, a male student was asked to explain the catchy phrase on his placard that reads: “From the river to the sea -- Palestine will be free.” This slogan was and continues to be widely recycled among thousands of protestors, and hardly serves as a new propaganda tool.
“What river are you talking about?” asked an unidentified interviewer. The question hangs in the air for several seconds. Could the student really be so mind-numbingly ignorant as to not know the incendiary message behind the phrase? “I know the name of the sea,” he offered. “It’s the Mediterranean.”
Perhaps the student should receive partial credit. He turns to his buddy, hoping for a bailout. Such bailouts are a sign of the times in the form of big-fat-government packages, but one is not forthcoming here.
There is more ground to cover and the interviewer moves on.
“What do you think of Hamas’ slaughtering and raping innocent Israeli citizens?” asked the interviewer of another student. She doesn’t flinch at the thought of supporting Hamas’ modern-day pogrom campaign. The assault on Oct. 7, she claims, “wasn’t properly investigated, and it’s hard to know what’s true.”
“Isn’t she concerned about supporting a terrorist regime?” asked the interviewer. “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter,” she adds
Sounding like a cheerleader for Hamas terrorists, she has taken the first step into the propaganda wars of normalizing savagery. The internet is fertile hunting ground for any student who wishes to build up an arsenal of denial and support the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels could not have been more convincing than Hamas’s mouthpieces in the West -- which relieves the Islamic organization of taking any responsibility for the atrocities committed on Oct. 7.
“I’m shown video clips, and them I’m also told that they’re beheading babies,” claimed Farhan Siddiqui, imam of the Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque in Washington, D.C. “I’m also told that they’re raping women… And when I go and I investigate these specific reports I found out that they’re all lies.” Plenty of artful denials can be found and traced to such “reliable sources” as imams, brain-addled professors and DEI squads funded by your tax dollars.
This denialist narrative is gaining traction among the impressionable college students nationwide: They don’t appear to have difficulty distinguishing reality for a simulation of reality because they have no wish to venture beyond their political safe space.
Elliot Tebele, the founder of the viral Instagram account “f-ckjerry,” gathered extremely candid comments by going undercover at a pro-Palestinian rally to interview protestors. “How would you describe a Jew?’ Tebele asked a demonstrator in London.
“They’re devils,” he answered. “So if they (terrorists) do take Palestine, where do the 12 million Jews go?” Treble asked another protestor. They can “go to hell” responded the protestor.
American students are more squeamish about the endgame proposed by Hamas, with more than one suggesting the Jews could be resettled where they came from. Quite a few came from Judea and Samaria area, now the West Bank, and would have difficulty “resettling” in that hostile region. Although it has their name on it. The actual identity of one large swath of Israel’s multicultural population and where they came from would come as a real shocker to the historically illiterate students. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were expelled from Arab lands and would naturally wish to avoid the Islamic-fascist regions infiltrated by terrorist group (i.e. Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and even Iran, which considers itself non-Arab).
Life can be so simple for students who don’t need to worry about being the next target on Hamas’s list of infidels. Or do they? Many of the students -- who become unhinged if they are “misgendered” -- would be horrified to learn that Hamas’s Caliphate goal is to destroy the infidel worldwide, which would include those pink-haired, tattooed, and gender fluid class of know nothings.
Image: Montecruz Foto
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