In case you missed it, recently a number of Ivy League Presidents testified before congress (L-R) Dr. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, Liz Magill, president of University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Sally Kornbluth, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on December 5, 2023 in Washington, DC.
This included the recently trending questioning by congresswoman Elise Steffniak of NY to inquire about the recent Hamas attacks on Israel and giving a pass to students who were openly practicing racist rhetoric on campus. The responses to some of the questions was quite astonishing. Not for the mere reasons that I just articulated but for what this article is so aptly to point out and that is such presidents of presitgious schools are no longer being hired for their academic and professional achievements but based on what diversity boxes that they check.
For example, Dr. Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, hasn’t published much work throughout her entire career, and her given testimony and responses to question before the committee indicates that she was a diversity hire rather than one who can be considered and respected for her intellectual and academic prowess. Larry Summers, who was formally Harvard’s head, published more in a years time than Gay has in her entire life as this article points out.
The main point and why I decided to share this is because its more about the problem, the symptom heading into America’s future as most people who graduate from these prestigious colleges are in some way going to be leading in various positions that will undoubtedly will spell trouble for the country’s future and the decisions that it will be confronted with, especially in Government ones. This article makes some very sober and salient points that simply can not be ignore. These Ivy league professors and what they displayed before congress was by an large a micro-cosim look into a world that is out of touch with its predecessors.
Highlights from the article:
The presidents—Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, and Penn’s Liz Magill—beclowned themselves with their inability to straightforwardly condemn anti-Jewish hatred on campus in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 atrocities in Israel. They hemmed, they hawed, they tried to ‘contextualize’ the outbursts from left-wing students, so that they could stay on the right side of the woke narrative.
“Does calling for the genocide of ■■■■ violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” a Congresswoman asked Magill.
“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied.
So: according to the president of the University of Pennsylvania, it’s only against her university’s rules to call publicly for the genocide of the Jewish people if you try to kill ■■■■—and even then, it “can be” harassment. It all depends, you see.
A couple of days later, facing pressure from university donors, one of whom withdrew a $100 million gift in protest, Magill resigned. \
What we saw on Capitol Hill last week is a condensed symbol of American decay. Walter Russell Mead, himself an elite academic of the center-right, tweeted in response to the Congressional testimony scandal:
He’s right about that. Who can believe in these people anymore? As horrible and as pervasive as it is, it’s not just the wokeness, which destroys both justice and competence, and opens the door to racial strife. It’s the failure of elites, both in the U.S. and in Europe, to execute the fundamental duties of leadership: protect the country’s borders. It’s their dishonest handling of the Covid crisis, including the fraudulent testimony of many scientists, and their deployment of their authority to manipulate the public.This didn’t start yesterday. It’s also the baseless Iraq War, which the U.S. dragged its European allies into, and which ultimately opened the floodgates of migration into Europe. It’s the economic mismanagement that caused the 2008 global crash. It’s the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya that toppled the dictator Qaddafi, but also turned that country into a failed state and exporter of migrants to Europe.
And it’s the Washington-led NATO proxy war on Russia, which has now dead-ended in what looks like Russian victory. It now appears that the war could have ended shortly after it started, as both Russia and Ukraine had reached a settlement—only to have it torpedoed by Washington and London, which wanted to fight Vladimir Putin down to the last Ukrainian. Result: an estimated 200,000 Ukrainians dead and countless maimed, plus around 300,000 Russians. The leadership class in both the U.S. and Europe—including the media—refused to discuss facts and logic that did not serve the belligerent narrative. When Western leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán brought up inconvenient facts about the unlikeliness that NATO-backed Ukraine would prevail, they all denounced him as a Russian stooge—just like they denounced Americans who, in 2002, questioned the wisdom of the coming Iraq War as ‘unpatriotic.’
Now, with much of its ammunition stockpile depleted on the battlefront of eastern Ukraine, the United States faces rising aggression from China, and a profound lack of manufacturing capacity to replace what we have lost in Ukraine. What’s more, confidence in the U.S. military among Americans is at a twenty-year low, and the all-volunteer armed forces faces a chronic recruitment shortage. Anecdotal accounts of military families discouraging their service-age children from joining the armed forces because of wokeness and other forms of politicization are common. As one now-retired officer told me, the senior leadership class in the U.S. military is well attuned to the fact that if you want to advance your military career, you had better salute woke ideology, even if you believe it hurts America’s ability to wage war.
To repeat: what we saw with the elite university presidents’ testimony in Washington is but a single manifestation of the rot throughout the establishment of what was once the mightiest nation on earth, and a beacon to the world. The termites have been feasting for a long time.
Take a little bit of time to read this article, its quite stirring and illuminating as to what we have been dealing with.
