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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David Kaiser is pathetic. An absolute monument to the self-absorbed, unthinking, unassailable academic class in the United States. The man is perfect example of spending a lifetime coming up with ideas in the sterility of a classroom and then looking aghast when those ideas meet the hard concrete of the real world. The less of these people we have around pretending to educate others the better off we are. Universities are useless outside of the hard sciences and even that is becoming less true by the day.
Kaiser's and others like him attitude toward the public is especially comical as this is the world they built after all.
Glenn,
I think the language you are looking for is the difference between elite, elitism, and elitist.
Harvard and other elite schools have become elitist, rather than elite. Not the same thing. Elitists make assumptions about facts and standing without the need for study. Without an acceptance of other ways of thinking.
Elitists support the foundations of their elitism, while the elite challenge such foundations. Constantly.