Harvard Betrayed Its Mission
with David Kaiser
As my guest this week, historian David Kaiser, says, the Claudine Gay fiasco is a symptom, not a cause, of Harvard’s institutional rot, and that of many elite universities. Maintaining high academic standards was once one of the most important parts of a college president’s job. A candidate with Gay’s demonstrable scholarly flaws, he implies, should never have been put in charge of overseeing undergraduate education. The fact that she was tells us much more about the failings of the institution than it does about the failings of Claudine Gay.
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Harvard assigned as co-chair its "antisemitism commission" a personage who has asserted in public that Israel is "an apartheid state". Simultaneously, Harvard assigned as co-chair of its "Islamophobia commission" a personage who has publicly asserted that its an Islamophobic myth Islamist "madrassas" produce jihadists. Get the picture?
From my YouTube comments...
Years ago, I was in a conversation with the president of an elite university, a university I had attended, and for which I was a member of the Board of Trustees. During our wide-ranging discussions, I recall her saying, "Our job is not to teach them (our students) WHAT to think. Our job is to teach them HOW to think." That is perfect. Too many cases now, particularly at the ostensible "elite universities" has devolved into some version of teaching them what to think, what to feel, how to look at history, in service to, in honor of, some prepackaged notions of right and wrong. That's a shame and should (obviously) be the exact wrong way to go. #Shrugs