Kenny Xu, An Inconvenient Minority

At Amazon, Kenny Xu, An Inconvenient Minority: The Ivy League Admissions Cases and the Attack on Asian American Excellence. 

For Harvard Crimson's Editorial Board, Facts Are for Losers

It's Dara Horn, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "It turns out that nobody’s SAT scores can provide immunity to propaganda":

Twenty-five years later, I still remember the theatrics involved with becoming an editor at the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper produced by Harvard undergraduates every day for the past century and a half. The newspaper’s office had a room upstairs called the Sanctum, so named because only those who had jumped through the paper’s prescribed journalistic hoops were allowed to enter—and then only for Sunday night editorial meetings, at which the coming week’s worth of unsigned editorials were debated and approved under strict secrecy. Newly minted editors were welcomed into the room with the question, “What are your politics?” One’s answer determined the side of the room where one would sit for these debates.

Many participants cared deeply about these discussions—though this being the 1990s, many more didn’t, and attended mainly for the fun of it. My peers were largely the children of baby-boomer parents who had morphed from flag-burning hippies to mall-hopping yuppies; Gen Xers like us took people’s self-important opinions with a very large grain of salt. In the Sanctum, I sat on the left by vague default, but didn’t attach much meaning to it. I was far from alone: A good number of editors didn’t even bother to remain on their side of the Sanctum, instead simply choosing the comfiest chairs.

When I later became one of the editors responsible for drafting each week’s worth of unsigned opinions about subjects like university workers’ strikes, affirmative action, and the Clinton impeachment, I learned that the only real sign of success was to say something interesting enough to generate a dissent. The only way to do that, of course, was to marshal the facts and explain why they mattered. When an editorial prompted other editors to write a dissent objecting to it—about, for instance, a campus visit by China’s then-premier—it was the ultimate compliment. You’d actually had something to say.

I hadn’t thought about any of this for ages. My work as a writer for the past 20 years has been almost entirely solitary; none of my books involved convincing a roomful of people of my point of view. But I was reminded of this ancient student ritual last week when my phone blew up with messages from dozens of irate former Crimson editors, including many actual journalists, a group of alumni going back several decades.

The current Crimson editorial board, in a somewhat modified version of the procedures I remembered, had just published an unsigned editorial fully endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, reversing its position from two years earlier. There was no official editorial dissent. Afterward, copies of this editorial were posted publicly in undergraduate dining halls, just in case anyone missed it.

The BDS movement, as it’s known, is old news on college campuses and elsewhere; it’s been around long enough that it no longer bothers to hide its goal of eliminating the world’s only Jewish state. But I had to hand it to The Crimson for timing, given that the editorial followed several weeks of terror attacks in Israel during which 15 people were stabbed, shot and car-rammed to death while engaging in such provocative behaviors as drinking at a bar or walking down the street...

Keep reading. 

The Crimson editorial is outrageous, though not surprising. 

Read it here: "In Support of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions and a Free Palestine."

And see, "The Crimson Faces Backlash Over Editorial Endorsing BDS Movement," and "To the Editor: From Six Crimson Alumni In Regard to BDS."

Harvard's Slave Photos Raise Many Questions

Following-up, "Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)."

At the New York Times, "The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing."

This is Renty below, in a very famous photograph you may have seen before.

From the article:

For a century, they languished in a museum attic. Fifteen wooden cases, palm-size and lined with velvet. Cocooned within are some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images — the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings.

Alfred, Fassena and Jem. Renty and his daughter Delia. Jack and his daughter Drana. They face us directly in one image and stand in profile in the next, bodies held fixed by an iron brace. The Zealy daguerreotypes, as the pictures are known, were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. A proponent of polygenesis — the idea that the races descended from different origins, a notion challenged in its own time and refuted by Darwin — he had the pictures taken to furnish proof of this theory.

Agassiz wanted images of barbarity, and he got them — implicating only himself. He had hand-selected his subjects in South Carolina, seeking types — “specimens,” as he put it — but each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal. The photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, who specialized in society portraits, did not alter his method for the shoot; he carried on as usual, using the same light, the same angles, giving the images their unsettling, formal perfection.

Agassiz showed the pictures only once. They were then tucked away at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Rediscovered in 1976, they have been at the center of urgent debates about photography ever since...

 

Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)

Ooo!

Well one would think. They're sitting on a $53.2 billion endowment. I'm sure they can afford a chintzy $100 million to throw a sop for reparations. *Eye Roll.*

At the New York Times, "Harvard Details Its Entanglements With Slavery and Its Plans for Redress."

Plus, "The Major Findings of Harvard’s Report on Its Ties to Slavery":

Harvard University issued a 134-page report investigating its ties to slavery, and its legacy. Here are the key findings.

In 2019, Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, appointed a committee of faculty members to investigate the university’s ties to slavery, as well as its legacy. Discussions about race were intensifying across the country. Students were demanding that the names of people involved in the slave trade be removed from buildings. Other universities, notably Brown, had already conducted similar excavations of their past.

The resulting 134-page report plus two appendices was released Tuesday, along with a promise of $100 million, to create an endowed fund to “redress” past wrongs, one of the biggest funds of its kind.

Here are some of its key findings and excerpts.

Slavery Was Part of Daily Life at the University

The report found that enslaved people lived on the Cambridge, Mass., campus, in the president’s residence, and were part of the fabric, albeit almost invisible, of daily life.

“Over nearly 150 years, from the university’s founding in 1636 until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found slavery unlawful in 1783, Harvard presidents and other leaders, as well as its faculty and staff, enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom labored on campus,” the report said. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.”

Four Harvard Presidents Enslaved People

The committee found at least 41 prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people. They included four Harvard presidents, such as Increase Mather, president of the university from 1692 to 1701, and Benjamin Wadsworth, president from 1725 to 1737; three governors, John Winthrop, Joseph Dudley and John Leverett; William Brattle, minister of First Church, Cambridge; Edward Wigglesworth, professor of divinity; John Winthrop, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy; Edward Hopkins, founder of the Hopkins Foundation; and Isaac Royall Jr., who funded the first professorship of law at Harvard.

The University Benefited From Plantation Owners

While New England’s image has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, the report said, wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were mutually dependent for their wealth.

“Throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These profitable financial relationships included, most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and in the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage. The university also profited from its own financial investments, which included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers along with investments in cotton manufacturing.”

Integration Was Accepted Slowly

Early attempts at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders who prized being a school for a white upper crust, including wealthy white sons of the South.

“In the years before the Civil War, the color line held at Harvard despite a false start toward Black access,” the report said. “In 1850, Harvard’s medical school admitted three Black students but, after a group of white students and alumni objected, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them.”

Faculty Members Spread Bogus Science Harvard faculty members played a role in disseminating bogus theories of racial differences that were used to justify racial segregation and to underpin Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations.

“In the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, that would, in the hands of the university’s prominent scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of so-called race science at Harvard and other American institutions,” the report said.

The bitter fruit of those race scientists remains part of Harvard’s living legacy today...

The Legacy of Slavery Lived On

Until as recently as the 1960s, the legacy of slavery lived on in the paucity of Black students admitted to Harvard...

 

Brother Cornel Threatens to Leave Harvard — Again

I met Cornel West when he spoke at my college a few years ago, and while at that time I was no big fan, I gotta admit the guy's a powerful speaker with an uncanny attractiveness: Signing my book (that came with the event program, etc.), he wrote, "Brother Donald! Stay Strong!" (Photo below.)

So, while I don't agree with all his writings (nor his public statements, on Israel, in particular), he's definitely an interesting character, and it looks like he's taking a principled stand against Harvard University, since the powers-that-be there are denying him tenure. (And I guess Harvard, in fact, has not had a good record of late in granting tenure to scholars of color, so that's also interesting to me, because, I mean, c'mon, Harvard?!!)

In any case, RTWT, at the Boston Globe, "Cornel West threatens to leave Harvard again."

Getting Into Harvard

At NYT, "Getting Into Harvard Is Hard. Here Are 4 Ways Applicants Get an Edge":

A federal case against Harvard has brought to light many of its closely guarded admissions secrets https://t.co/CGdXLwd8x9

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) November 8, 2018

For three weeks in October, Harvard’s admissions system was on trial before an often standing-room-only crowd in a federal courtroom in Boston. Harvard was accused of discriminating against Asian-American applicants, but the university firmly denied this throughout the trial, which ended last week.

Through testimony and internal documents, the case provided an eye-opening look into the often guarded and opaque admissions process at Harvard. With some 40,000 applicants and about 1,600 available seats, Harvard argued, some students would inevitably be left out.

How admissions officers went about that sifting process seemed to some in the gallery like an exercise in cynicism, which perpetuated the established ruling class, and to others like a noble pursuit, which lifted “diamonds in the rough,” of all backgrounds, into the future elite. Here’s what we learned about who gets an admissions edge:

‘A.L.D.C.’s

Harvard gives advantages to recruited athletes (A’s); legacies (L’s), or the children of Harvard graduates; applicants on the dean’s or director’s interest list (D’s), which often include the children of very wealthy donors and prominent people, mostly white; and the children (C’s) of faculty and staff. ALDCs make up only about 5 percent of applicants but 30 percent of admitted students.

While being an A.L.D.C. helps — their acceptance rate is about 45 percent, compared with 4.5 to 5 percent for the rest of the pool — it is no guarantee. (One of those rejected despite being a legacy was the judge in the federal case, Allison D. Burroughs. She went to Middlebury College instead.)

Harvard’s witnesses said it was important to preserve the legacy advantage because it encourages alumni to give their time, expertise and money to the university.

Students from ‘sparse country’

Every year, Harvard sends out thousands of recruitment letters inviting high school juniors to apply, based in part on their P.S.A.T. scores. Students who take Harvard up on the invitation are about twice as likely as other applicants to be admitted.

In “sparse country” — 20 largely rural states where relatively few apply to Harvard — the university drops the P.S.A.T. score cutoff for white students to qualify for an invitation. In 2013, white applicants with P.S.A.T. scores of 1310 were invited to apply from sparse country, compared with 1350 for white and Asian-American women and 1380 for white and Asian-American men outside of sparse country. Black, Hispanic, Native American or other minority students needed an 1100 or better to be invited to apply, regardless of location.

Effervescent (or reflective) applicants

Admissions officers are urged to look for applicants with “unusually appealing personal qualities,” which could include “effervescence, charity, maturity and strength of character.”

Outgoing students seemed to benefit most, according to court documents and testimony.

But new guidelines issued days before the trial began last month caution officers that character traits “not always synonymous with extroversion” should be valued, and that applicants who seem to be “particularly reflective, insightful and/or dedicated” should receive high personal ratings as well.

At trial, Harvard did not dispute that Asian-American applicants received, on average, lower personal ratings than applicants of any other race or ethnicity. The plaintiffs said this was evidence of Harvard’s stereotyping of Asian-Americans as industrious but dull. Harvard said it was not the result of discrimination; rather, it was partly because of weaker support from high school teachers and guidance counselors.

“We do not endorse, we abhor stereotypical comments,” the dean of the Harvard admissions office, William Fitzsimmons, testified.

Those with a compelling life story, who have overcome obstacles

Court documents, including guidelines issued to admissions officers, repeatedly showed clear advantages given to poor students and those from disadvantaged circumstances. But stories of besting challenges of other kinds also gave applicants an edge.

In his application, Thang Diep, a Harvard senior who came from Vietnam as a child, talked about being bullied for his accented English, and how affirming it was when a Harvard professor was the first teacher to pronounce his name correctly.

Sarah Cole appeared in court to testify that as a black student from Kansas City, Mo., she had worked hard to get a scholarship to a prestigious private college-prep school, but suffered socially for it. She said white teachers told her she was not smart enough to excel, and customers at her job laughed at her for wearing a Stanford T-shirt...

Still more.

Harvard's going to lose this case, especially on the effervescent" criteria, which systematically limits Asian acceptance rates. 

Think Twice

About communism.

From Laura M. Nicolae, at the Harvard Crimson, "100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice":

"My father left behind his parents, friends, and neighbors in the hope of finding freedom. I know his story because it is my heritage; you now know his story because I have a voice. One hundred million other people were silenced." https://t.co/qgSm47yOMZ @lauramnic pic.twitter.com/AhAhPEvgQf

— Victims of Communism (@VoCommunism) November 21, 2017

In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him again.

My father ran from a government that beat, tortured, and brainwashed its citizens. His childhood friend disappeared after scrawling an insult about the dictator on the school bathroom wall. His neighbors starved to death from food rations designed to combat “obesity.” As the population dwindled, women were sent to the hospital every month to make sure they were getting pregnant.

My father’s escape journey eventually led him to the United States. He moved to the Midwest and married a Romanian woman who had left for America the minute the regime collapsed. Today, my parents are doctors in quiet, suburban Kansas. Both of their daughters go to Harvard. They are the lucky ones.

Roughly 100 million people died at the hands of the ideology my parents escaped. They cannot tell their story. We owe it to them to recognize that this ideology is not a fad, and their deaths are not a joke.

Last month marked 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution, though college culture would give you precisely the opposite impression. Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence. Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.

Walk around campus, and you’re likely to spot Ché Guevara on a few shirts and button pins. A sophomore jokes that he’s declared a secondary in “communist ideology and implementation.” The new Leftist Club on campus seeks “a modern perspective” on Marx and Lenin to “alleviate the stigma around the concept of Leftism.” An author laments in these pages that it’s too difficult to meet communists here. For many students, casually endorsing communism is a cool, edgy way to gripe about the world.

After spending four years on a campus saturated with Marxist memes and jokes about communist revolutions, my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.

Statistics show that young Americans are indeed oblivious to communism’s harrowing past. According to a YouGov poll, only half of millennials believe that communism was a problem, and about a third believe that President George W. Bush killed more people than Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who killed 20 million. If you ask millennials how many people communism killed, 75 percent will undershoot.

Perhaps before joking about communist revolutions, we should remember that Stalin’s secret police tortured “traitors” in secret prisons by sticking needles under their fingernails or beating them until their bones were broken. Lenin seized food from the poor, causing a famine in the Soviet Union that induced desperate mothers to eat their own children and peasants to dig up corpses for food. In every country that communism was tried, it resulted in massacres, starvation, and terror.

Communism cannot be separated from oppression; in fact, it depends upon it. In the communist society, the collective is supreme. Personal autonomy is nonexistent. Human beings are simply cogs in a machine tasked with producing utopia; they have no value of their own.

Many in my generation have blurred the reality of communism with the illusion of utopia. I never had that luxury...

Keep reading.

'It’s Okay to Be White'

Well, it should be. It should be okay to be whatever natural color or ethnicity you are.

But not on the left. The left hates whiteness. And it hates anyone who doesn't toe the hateful race-bating white supremacy line.

At Instapundit, "SO I GUESS IT’S NOT OKAY. GOOD TO KNOW. ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ Signs Posted At Harvard Law School, Denounced by Dean."

Harvard Feminist Nian Hu: Men 'Will Always Be Oppressors'

Radical feminists should be institutionalized in mass.

Through in the transgender rights lobby and we'll be half way toward restoring sanity in this country. Sheesh.

At the Other McCain, "Harvard Feminist @Nian_Hu Hates Men, Who ‘Will Always Be Oppressors’."

The woman wrote a piece at the Harvard Crimson called "Beware the Male Feminist," but click through at the link for all the details.

Harvard Looks to Boot 'Puritans' from School Song

Leftists will erase our entire history before their done.

The problem, of course, is just because you change the lyrics doesn't change the facts of our country's founding, or of Harvard's. This is pretty despicable, frankly.

At NYT, "Harvard Seeks to Write ‘Puritans’ Out of Its Alma Mater":

Harvard is writing "the Puritans" out of its alma mater, seeking to make it more inclusive https://t.co/DnjVcJN6aV

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 8, 2017

For decades, Harvard students and alumni have sung an alma mater that calls on them to be heralds of light and bearers of love “till the stock of the Puritans die.”

University officials teach the refrain to freshmen on arrival and sing it again when the students graduate years later.

But this week, a university steeped in tradition said the time had come for a change.

To affirm Harvard’s commitment to inclusion in a time when college campuses are routinely finding themselves at the center of national debates on race and identity, university officials said they are seeking suggested rewrites of that disquieting final line. The contest is open only to members of the Harvard community.

The line about Puritans concludes a sentence that is “an exhortation to pursue the truth until a certain endpoint,” said Danielle S. Allen, a professor and political philosopher on the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which launched the competition.

Harvard’s motto is “Veritas,” Latin for “truth,” she noted, adding, “there shouldn’t be any endpoint to the pursuit of truth, nor should we imply that the pursuit of truth is for any particular ethnic group.”

More.

Danielle Allen's an idiot.

A task force on "Inclusion and Belonging," pfft. These people belong in an asylum.

Also at Never Yet Melted, "The Stock of the Puritans Has Apparently Died":

Today, minority admittees and presiding administrations eagerly lobby for fundamentally changing the composition, constituency, and even the complexion of those schools. Matters have reached a point at which the non-traditional groups feel entitled to rename buildings and to purge references and memorials to illustrious alumni and benefactors on the basis of their own amour propre. Now, at Harvard, they are sending the founders and original constituency of the college into exile from the school’s alma mater. All this causes me to wonder: had the people who initiated the effort at diversity admissions been able to foresee this occurring, would they ever have admitted any of these minorities at all in the first place?

RTWT.

Harvard's Kennedy School Adds 'Checking Your Privilege 101' to New Student Orientation

So stupid, at Big Government.

And ICYMI, from Kurt Schlichter, at Town Hall, "I Checked My Privilege, And It’s Doing Just Fine":

So how do we deal with this idiocy?

The proper response to the privilege gambit is laughter. The super-serious zealots of progressivism hate being laughed at, but there’s really no other appropriate response outside of a stream of obscenities. The privilege game is designed to circumvent arguments based on reason and facts and evidence, so the way to win it is to defeat it on its own terms.

Call: “Check your privilege!”

Response: “What you call ‘privilege’ is just me being better than you.”

They won’t like it. It will make them angry. Good. Because tactics like “Check your privilege” are designed to make us angry, to put us off-balance, to baffle us and suck us down into a rabbit hole of leftist jargon and progressive stupidity.

Don’t follow them. Mock them. Accuse them of adhering to a transphobic cisnormative paradigm and start shrieking “Hate crime!”

Don’t worry about not making sense. They’re college students. They are used to not understanding what people smarter than they are tell them.

Respectful argument should be reserved for those who respect the concept of argument. The sulky sophomores who babble about privilege do not. They only understand power. And we give them power when we give their nonsense the respect we would give a coherent argument.

They deserve only laughter. And to laugh at them, we simply need to refuse to be intimidated...

Classic.

William Jacobson on the Mark Levin Show

Awesome!

At Legal Insurrection, "On The Mark Levin Show talking Israel and the boycotters."

Harvard's Sandra Korn and the Leftist Crusade for 'Academic Justice'

When I first read about Harvard radical-feminist activist Sandra Y.L. Korn and her crusade for "academic justice," I was reminded of the classic piece from Zombie a few years back, "Justice Justice."

As Zombie notes, for the radical left, any and all political issues devolve to some form of "justice." Because who really can oppose justice? Americans are if anything a people committed to justice, especially in the late-20th century, when the United States made more legislative and political efforts to ensure civil rights and justice than any other nation in history. When you confront a decent, law-abiding citizen with the accusation that they are denying others justice you are wielding a powerful club of guilt over an otherwise innocent member of the polity. Leftists will hammer you with demands for justice, and you'll will submit:

The trend started with the two justice titans: “economic justice,” and “racial justice.” And someone must have thought: Why stop there? Soon we started seeing demands for “environmental justice” and “reproductive justice.” And then the floodgates were opened. The global warming scare brought us “climate justice“; the drive for socialized medicine became “health care justice“; amnesty for illegals transmogrified into “immigrant justice“; and on and on it went. By now we have

food justice
housing justice
gender justice
workplace justice
farmworker justice
urban justice
media justice
disability justice
transformative justice
birthing justice
prison justice

…to name just a few. Go to any protest or visit a left-wing Web site and you’ll find dozens more “justices” that need immediate resolution.

Want to give your hobby the veneer of righteousness? Just think of a noun, affix the word “justice” after it, and voilà: You’re part of the solution! Yes, it’s that easy.

So, hey! It's just another skip and a jump to "academic justice."

In any case, be sure to read Korn's piece at the Harvard Crimson, "The Doctrine of Academic Freedom: Let’s Give Up on Academic Freedom in Favor of Justice."

And as always, I tweeted the piece over to Robert Stacy McCain, who's been doing a seminar on radical feminism of late, and he came up with this, "‘The Second Time as Farce’: @sandraylk’s Recycled Marcusean Marxism":

Most of us who lived through the 1960s and ’70s have no desire for a repetition of that carnival of radical errors. Unfortunately, many of those who do remember that era fondly are leftist academics who have turned American university campuses into cauldrons of radicalism, where they inculcate in their young protégés a misplaced nostalgia for an idealized make-believe version of the Sixties. Brainy youth at elite institutions are therefore filled with an obsolete revolutionary zeal to “smash the system,” as if the Establishment today were as oppressive as the administration of Clark Kerr, the hapless liberal whose misfortune it was to be president of the University of California when the Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” erupted.

Because today’s radical youth do not know the actual history of the Sixties, but only what they have been taught about the Sixties by leftist academics, the students are ill-equipped to avoid the typical errors of radicalism, and seem not to realize how stale and predictable their supposedly “innovative” ideas actually are.

And so we come to Harvard senior Sandra Korn’s celebration of the hippie student mau-maus who protested psychology professor Richard Herrnstein’s research about heredity influence on IQ...

Keep reading.

And then see Bruce Bawer, "Harvard’s Rebel Without a Clue":

Ms. Korn, I further discovered, is not only a prolific columnist – writing regularly for both the Crimson and the Harvard Political Review – but an active member of Occupy Harvard, the Progressive Jewish Allliance, the Student Labor Action Movement, and BAGELS, “Harvard’s group for bisexual, gay, lesbian, and transgendered Jews.” In her columns, she’s paid tribute to the Black Panthers, celebrated the Occupy movement, and chided those who cheered Kim Jong-Il’s death. She’s opposed allowing ROTC back onto the Harvard campus, one reason being that “[i]nternational students…from countries not allied with the United States” might object to their presence. She’s criticized Harvard’s plans to distribute lecture courses on the Internet as the latest development in “a long history of imperialism in which U.S. elites have told an increasingly globalized world that what they thought was best.” She’s written that “[w]hile violent resistance through Hamas is not right,” it’s “not incomprehensible,” given that “non-violent resistance cannot make the international community pay attention to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.” And she’s dismissed as “Islamophobia” any statement of the objective fact that anti-Semitism is a core element of contemporary Palestinian identity.

Speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, summer before last Ms. Korn went on a free ten-day trip to Israel courtesy of Taglit-Birthright Israel, then wrote a column savaging the “right-wing rhetoric” she was fed – by which she meant that, for example, her tour guides displayed an unapologetic pride in Israel and were honest about the systematic inculcation of anti-Semitism in Palestinian schools. While in Israel, she wrote an article lamenting that the country – which some of her family members admired half a century or so ago as “a workers’ nation, a socialist utopia” – has now “adopted capitalism with fervor,” an action which she plainly deplores. She is, indeed, no fan of capitalism. More than once, she’s ranted about the fact that many Harvard graduates get jobs in finance. In one column (reprinted by The Nation, where she was an intern) she savaged Harvard’s Office of Career Services for steering students toward Wall Street, and wondered aloud whether they do so in order “to guarantee wealthy alumni donors.” She concluded her piece by underscoring the need to “destroy…the well-paved road between the Ivy League schools and Wall Street.” When she went to England last summer to do “research” at Trinity Colllege, Cambridge, she found stuff to complain about there, too: “Why do the fellows here dine in the same hall as undergraduates but on a raised platform apart from them?”

In the wake of the 2011 Mumbai bombings, Ms. Korn was outraged – not at the terrorists, but at Subramanian Swamy, an Indian politician and Harvard economics lecturer who responded to the atrocities with an article about how “Muslims of India are being programmed by a slow reactive process to become radical and thus slide into suicide against Hindus.” Ms. Korn and some of her confederates jumped into action, agitating for Harvard to – as she put it – “discontinue its association with an offensive figure.” The action succeeded; Swamy was banished....

Who, then, is this fierce critic of American empire, this enemy of capitalism, this scourge of Wall Street? Well, as it turns out, she’s from the affluent suburb of Basking Ridge, New Jersey, where she grew up in a house at 61 Darren Drive that was purchased in 1998 for $800,000. (If you check it out on Google Maps, it looks like the very image of the American dream: a peaceful paradise of large, pretty houses separated from the quiet street by broad, manicured lawns dotted with shade trees.) Her parents are Elizabeth A. Korn, a pediatric endocrinologist, and William D. Korn, whose own Harvard degrees are in economics and business administration and whose website describes him – the father of this proud 99-percenter – as follows:

Bill Korn is a veteran technology executive with more than 30 years of experience managing fast growth businesses. As Chief Financial Officer for seven companies he has raised over $250 million of capital, including debt and equity financing. Bill has completed seven acquisitions, including negotiating terms, arranging financing, performing due diligence and integrating teams. He has successfully created many successful partnerships and joint ventures.

The bio goes on for several more paragraphs, providing details of his years at IBM and other corporations and his involvement in the National Association of Corporate Directors and the New Jersey Economic Growth Council.

Sandra Korn is, then, the child of two parents who, taken together – to judge by their CVs – personify pretty much everything she’s rebelling against. She’s a product of precisely the kind of upper-class American suburban life for which she has professed an ardent class contempt. And she’s about to collect an immensely valuable diploma after utterly squandering a magnificent, world-class opportunity to actually learn something. Instead of grasping this opportunity, she’s spent the last four years marinating in her own ideology by writing articles, participating in activism, and taking “courses” that are about nothing more than Being Ideologues Together.

There's still more at the link, but it's hard to disagree with a key part of Bawer's conclusion: "To the extent that this young woman represents the next generation of the American elite, America is doomed – period."

What to do? Well, push back against these idiots, since their programs have a long lineage in regressive leftist "hate speech" codes on America's campuses. For example, see FIRE's piece on Korn's leftist intolerance, "‘Harvard Crimson’ Column: Time to Get Rid of Academic Freedom":

Korn’s case for “academic justice” is quite similar to the cases put forth for establishing “hate speech” laws that curb free expression, as well as many of the defenses of campus speech codes. The argument posits that there are opinions and ideas out there that, if spoken or publicized, harm listeners. Why shouldn’t we be able to censor such expression and punish those responsible for it? Just like the case for hate speech laws, the case for academic justice falls into the same trap.

For one, a regime of academic justice would surely demand fealty to a legion of nebulous concepts over which people disagree wildly—not the least of which is the notion of “justice,” which has been intensely debated for thousands of years, frequently at the cost of tremendous loss of human life. Just as the Supreme Court famously declared in Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15, 25 (1972) that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric,” one man’s idea of “justice” may vary significantly from another’s. This does not mean that one is right and one is wrong. Yet it seems safe to say that there is one acceptable concept of justice in Sandra Korn’s framework, and that is Sandra Korn’s. FIRE has seen where this leads before. Columbia University’s Teachers College, for instance, has litmus-tested students in part on how they conformed to Columbia’s concept of “Respect for Diversity and Commitment to Social Justice.” The University of Delaware forced students in its residence halls through a coercive, invasive “treatment” program where they were forced to adopt highly politicized positions on sensitive topics.

Another major obstacle to this kind of value-based system is that such systems nearly always establish hazily-realized ideals as rules and trust their enforcement to those in positions of power. Proponents of such measures tend not to see much problem with this, because it is hard for them to imagine anyone having values different from their own....

Hence the danger of Korn’s position that “[o]nly those who care about justice can take the moral upper hand,” when dismissing bipartisan criticisms of the American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israeli institutions. Korn’s argument presumes we have all the answers and can therefore stop asking the questions. It takes the position that “bad” speech should be silenced, rather than challenged with more speech. In that respect, Korn’s “social justice” framework is no different from any other form of censorship.

More at the Jewish Press, "Sandra Korn’s Academic Totalitarianism."

So, fight back against these totalitarian freaks and privileged hypocrites. Sandra Korn is a perfect representation of today's radical left. Intolerant, hateful, and hypocritical. Don't let the f-kers get away with it.

Larry Summers Drops Bid for Fed Chair

He never had a chance.

At LAT, "Larry Summers pulls out of running to be Federal Reserve chairman."

And at the Wall Street Journal, "Victory on Summers Emboldens Liberals as New Fights Loom":

WASHINGTON – Chest-thumping by liberals after Lawrence Summers‘s decision to withdraw from consideration as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve could have broad implications, not just on the central bank but also for how Democrats maneuver during looming budget fights.

A number of Democrats and liberals quickly called Mr. Summers’s move a victory for their cause, and they tried to leverage the decision to pressure President Barack Obama to nominate Fed vice chairman Janet Yellen to the post.

“I applaud Larry Summers for withdrawing his name from consideration,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) said late Sunday. Mr. Sanders is one of Congress’s most liberal members. “The truth is that it was unlikely he would have been confirmed by the Senate.”

Some Democrats could also interpret Mr. Summers’s decision, particularly his prediction that if he were nominated it would be “acrimonious,” as a possible thawing of their recently dormant influence with the White House on economic decisions. Instead of polite reaction to Mr. Summers’s move, liberal critics piled on immediately.

“Summers’ decisions to deregulate Wall Street & do the bidding of corporate America has made the lives of millions of Americans acrimonious,” tweeted Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a group that pushes for liberal causes and candidates.

Mr. Green’s characterization of Mr. Summers is popular among liberals, but one that Mr. Summers’s allies say is distorted and unfair.

The White House clearly didn’t appreciate the rebellion against Mr. Summers. Rather, senior members were annoyed at public attacks on someone who hadn’t even been nominated. But the result illustrated how quickly – and effectively – progressive groups can mobilize on particular issues even when they had appeared to lose clout on Capitol Hill.

The larger question is where things go from here...

Where do we go from here? Farther left, of course. These aren't "liberals" who quashed Summers' nomination. They're socialists. Bernie Sanders is a socialist who caucuses with the Democrats, and these so-called progressive organizations --- like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee --- are basically front-groups for far-left movements influenced by Marxist and "social justice" ideologies. They're not "liberals."

Control the language and control the culture. Call these assholes out for what they are: far-left radicals pushing Marxist gender politics and aggressive economic redistributionism.

More at the Washington Times, "Under pressure from some Democrats and feminists, Lawrence Summers withdraws name for Federal Reserve." And at Memeorandum.

FLASHBACK: At VDare, "The Larry Summers Show Trial."

Harvard Hacked Staff Emails

Gawd, this is lame.

At NYT, "Harvard Hacked E-Mails in Search of Media Leaks."

And last month at Instapundit, "HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Harvard Cheating Scandal Ends In Dozens of Forced Withdrawals. (And at the search, "Harvard cheating.")