A fish rots from the head down. The Harvard Board of Trustees is chaired by billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, Obama’s secretary of commerce and Jay Pritzker's sister. Seize the endowments. Use them to pay off student loans and settle the tsunami of lawsuits they richly deserve. Name and shame the Obamassars: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-gay-bobo-corporation
"All of the Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless.
But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Warning To The West
Land Acknowledgments, stating pronouns and dutiful submission of DEI compliance are filters for stochastic entryism.
Inclusion is only for compliance/ proof of predatory/parasite collaboration
This is how ideological infection/intoxication rates among faculty are nearly100% and administrators have bloated to almost a one-to-one ratio with students, themselves victims of K – 12 indoctrination/abuse.
And the irony is they deeply believe they are the righteous ones who are practicing noblesse oblige in a virtuous way, to make up for sins of the past. The world according to intersectionality and critical social justice. My wife graduated from Harvard’s arts education program, and she said it was full of critical consciousness, but took her a while to unpack it all after it was done. We still get their Ed. magazine, which is anything but politically diverse. They are all in.
I am going to take a different position on this. My feeling is that the federal government should let elite private universities (not public universities) do as they wish; let them follow this path of extreme DEI hiring and do nothing. (Maybe tax their enormous endowment, but that is a separate and valid issue). It is a free country. Don't stop them and don't punish them. If they double-down on hiring people on the basis of race and not talent, then in a matter of a few years, the school will suffer the very real consequences of having done so. People of color who were hired for their skin color and "lived experiences," rather than requisite talent will perform poorly compared to historical expectations at Harvard and other Itop vies. Further, these people will be given tenure which means they will have lifetime appointments and their lackluster performances will be uncorrectable. Lower individual performance will become the norm, thus diminishing the school's overall performance. Those people with high talent, whether white or of-color, will be expected to perform at even higher levels to compensate for low performers. This will create anger, resentment and division in the faculty and staff ranks. (This is already happening, but fear of reprisal keeps it under wraps.) Overall there will be a steady downward spiral of quality and outcomes in education, research and scholarship. The metrics (if any) and rhetoric of values will shift to match the new reality and with that will come a further diminution in quality, actual prestige and the value of the degree. My feeling is that this "process" or phenomena is already well underway at Harvard, Princeton and Yale, and may be also happening at Penn too. It is a shame and the tendency is to want to fix it, but the government should do nothing. Let it happen naturally, but at the same time enforce merit-based hiring and viewpoint diversity at state schools. Also cut the federal funding of research that is based in DEI and CRT. If this plan were to be followed, then within a decade the results of such folly will be evident to all and the outcomes will be clear, and new leaders will return to merit and color blindness in hiring and promotion. But trying to force change from the outside of these institutions and from the top down with big government is the wrong way to approach this problem. Sometimes, sadly in human affairs, one must let failure happen before positive change can be made.
if it's world class, they should have no problem replacing much of the taxpayer funding with private money and the rest can be obtained from their $50+Billion endowment.
For all intent and purposes the medical enterprises at Harvard, Penn and Yale have very little to do with the workings of the colleges that they are attached to...you never hear from the truly excellent medical researchers, scientists and physicians...you hear from a radical group of students who have been ginned up by even more radical faculty in quite unimportant niches of study...Trust me, if you are a student in the hard sciences or engineering as these schools, you are spending hours and hours just trying to keep up with the immense workload...Honestly, it is true at almost all universities, but no one dares to say it.
I agree with you. The value in these schools historically was as much the networking opportunities as the education. The education is of questionable value and if they do away with legacy admissions (as they've discussed) and only admit DEI applicants then you have neither of the very things that attracted prior students. Poor education and instead of rubbing elbows with the high and mighty you end up in an encampment with the low and needy! Fuck that.
I think your point is valid. Same with other businesses that insist on DEI hiring practices. Let them be overcome with incompetence and have their businesses fail. End of problem.
Institutional ESG investing subverts natural market forces (as well as basic fiduciary responsibility) to help buoy and sustain the incompetence of these policies.
The biggest problem being Vanguard, Blackrock, Fidelity et al handling corporate retirement vehicles … there’s no telling how many Johnny and Jane Public are investing in ESG without even realizing.
The problem is the "they" who are angering you and many more is a small minority of ultravocal students, faculty and administrators who have taken highly visible positions. The rest of the faculty, staff and students are among the hardest working people you will find anywhere, highly accomplished and driven to make discoveries.
In other words, you'd say, like an alcoholic, they have to hit bottom first. That might take a long time, and during that long time, many students and faculty will be indoctrinated, or at least prevented from reaching their full intellectual potential. Trump as usual overreaches, but I do hope federal intervention will speed up the evolutionary process. For instance, by getting rid of some administrators.
I cannot disagree with the fact that tenure will lock in the employ of many of these people who are not up to the usual standards of accomplishment for Harvard. It used to be that a very low number of candidates for tenure at Harvard got it; the departments would advertise the position and compare the internal candidate's accomplishments with the best of the CVs from the applicant pool, if the internal candidate was not better than every other applicant, that candidate did not get tenure. I don't know what the actual success rates were, but in the physical sciences, getting tenure at Harvard was atypical. (In Chemistry, some of those who were denied tenure went elsewhere, prospered and won Nobel Prizes...) It would be interesting to know if that changed with the onset of DEI over the last 10-15 years. One wonders if the rate of success is different in the social sciences and humanities versus the hard sciences and biology? Also does the probability of obtaining tenure at Harvard in any discipline vary with the race of the candidate? These are all fair questions, and answers should be forthcoming, but Harvard is not likely to release such data - at least not willingly. Maybe, that is a valid role that the DOJ and DoED can play - to force transparency.
The onset of DEI happened as early as the 1990s in some departments. In one humanities department, several tenured faculty left as a consequence, including one with a prestigious (named) university professorship.
Agree. Those blunt and ineffective internal DEI hiring practices pissed off and alienated many faculty, and an internal reckoning was coming even before the October 7 fall-out, but watching a sitting administration existentially threaten private academic institutions like this is so depressing. As for Rufo's empathy for the white men who have allegedly lost jobs at Harvard, I have no empathy when he simultaneously supports an administration that allows a woman studying child psychology to be taken off a public street by masked agents, loaded into an SUV, and then flown to a detention center in Louisiana all because she co-wrote an op-ed in Tuft University’s newspaper. If we are really worried about ideology corrupting higher education, why don’t we start by resisting state censorship?
I don't think it will take very long for truly esteemed Harvard faculty, and alumni to demand a correction, if the administrators persist in this non-meritorious approach. I have colleagues in the Paulson school who are doing world-class research with outstanding graduate students; trust me they are not for this nonsense. They want to hire the best and the brightest. That is why Harvard was Harvard. But let the leadership do this for a while, then see the results, and I am certain there will be a significant correction. But the federal government should not be involved, unless they break the law, and quotas are unlawful.
No. Their negotiated Facilities and Administration (Overhead) rate is about 70%. But it does not apply to all the direct cost items. So imagine a contract or grant with direct costs of say $1 million for three years. Since the F&A rate does not apply to all the lines of expense, you can guessitmate the overhead cost as say 50% of the direct costs, or $500,000. Thus the total grant or contract cost to the government would be $ 1.5 million. That makes the F&A cost about 1/3 or $0.33 per dollar direct. Remember this rate is negotiated with the cognitive agency - DHHS for Harvard. Other Schools negotiate with DoD...If this is reduced to 15%, schools will put more direct costs back into the cost proposal, which means negotiations will be done on every contract and grant. I know you won't believe this, but schools lose money overall on research (as most also do on DI athletics). Facilities and administrative costs are not fully covered by the negotiated F&A rates. But bringing down admin costs is not easy due to all sorts of government requirements. Compliance measures = jobs...not a good dynamic, but one party loves it.
Thank you for the clarifying comment. I run an Aerospace company that has DoD work so have some idea of the regulatory hoops you have to jump through. If the research is valuable I'd say we are getting value for our money. Reducing the regulatory load would be ideal.
Depends on the agency. NSF required applicants to apply the indirect cost rate to the proposal, so a $300,000 proposal would include about $133,000 in indirect costs. A different $300,000 proposal to the NIH would have a bit over $200,000 in indirect costs awarded, if the grant was funded in full -- and it usually wasn't funded in full.
Harvard's Board of Trustees is ultimately to blame for Harvard's tragic downfall. They allowed this death spiral to happen. Either they actually believed in the Marxist, woke, Leftist mind virus and shaped the university as such, or they were asleep at the wheel while it happened under their noses at the admin level. The BoT must be held accountable either way. And likely it must be entirely reconstituted with actual diversity of thought and people who will take accountability and pay attention.
Bbbut . . . my lived experience! My volunteer work at the shelter for addicted gay poor people of color! Surely these qualify me more than this cis white patriarchal emphasis on "scholarship." Shakespeare? Never read him. He's just another dead white male from a colonial oppressor nation who needs to be expunged from the canon in favor of African diasporic writers. Esthetics? Art? More fetishization of elitist white systems of oppression that exclude the marginalized and silences their more authentic voices.
See? It's easy to learn the patois once you hear it often enough.
I've noticed that people say less about MIT than "the group." However, having witnessed a covid-time graduation from there (well, at least we didn't have the plane trip) I can say that the undergrads were kids delighting in diversity in an over-the-top way. On the good side, I watched a son's "orals" for 2 Masters' Degrees. Bravo, him, as they are useful for his work. Still, he adopted the liberal mindset in many ways and we do not communicate per his choice.
Wait. What. You don't communicate with your adult, educated son because of politics? My kids are very progressive and we disagree almost everything and I still talk to them every week. We just stay away from topics where we know we'll have disagreements. I also paid for my kids college educations (Masters and Doctorate) so perhaps they feel obligated to talk with me. Your story makes me sad.
Makes me sad too. Fortunately I was able to indoctrinate my two daughters into using their brains & forming their own opinions which has resulted in them finding themselves in a minority at university. Having now experienced reality, they remain willingly near to my political & religious campground. Periodically they encounter like-minded, family-centric, theistically sound libertarians which is always cause for a celebratory phone call home. Bless their wonderful intellect & I call shame on all their woke university lecturers for trying to turn my kids to the dark side…
In short, it began with his wife's mother who has TDS and flowed from there. We have tried calling, figuring it out, because in the end, everyone loses. He has a younger brother who is special needs and his brother does not understand why he has not visited in years. Since we are not overbearing we just stopped calling except I have sent him texts that were kind (happy birthday) but this is too one-sided. He got through on scholarship. We are not "victims" but he does need a good talking-to by someone and his father is not stepping-up. It is what it is. VERY wrong.
It is undoubtedly the same for almost every university in the US. The taxpayer shouldn't fund any private universities. There can continue to be funding to public universities but they will have to be reined in as a condition of receiving the funding.
Every one has known this but it never changes and discrimination continues. I thought Harvard was already under orders to stop discriminating against Asians. If they failed to follow through on the remedy prescribed by the courts shouldn't that be a violation too?
Take all funding take tax exempt status refuse to future loans via the government.
Let them do what they want on their on dime. Also block all visas for foreign born students to enroll until such a time as they can follow the law.
Administrators must pay the legal price ( whatever that is) for violating federal law.
You can shut down the Colorado cake maker for decades for refusing to make a gay marriage cake.....
That was an admissions complaint. Hiring is still being caught up in the courts for any number of organizations. Trump's revocation of Affirmative Action Programs has stripped away any pretense of legal cover - any demographic goals for hiring are now clearly in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many organizations will pay big money for their failure to understand the changing legal landscape.
Thousands of Harvard employees were indoctrinated to follow a political mission in college. They were hired to further that mission, which is inextricably bound up with racial discrimination and misandry. The entire apparatus has been constructed to do this ONE THING.
The idea that it'll just stop, because some outside pressure is leveraged, is asinine.
I remember reading an op-ed at Harvard Crimson from a female black student who was outraged that she was one of the handful of US-born black students, majority of black students were foreign students from Africa. She was outraged that her racial quota was spent on those whose ancestors were not enslaved by the white people. The entire premise of making up for the sins of slavery was thrown out and turned into the open racial discrimination.
Whether people are disfavored due to skin color or favored due to skin color the result is the same. Everyone suffers. Regardless of one’s stated intention, looking through a racial lens IS racism, pure and simple.
Wow… very interesting reply. So the act of being “owned” by other human beings, traded into chattel slavery, worked to death w/o compensation, raped by their “masters”, and the potential of being sold and separated from their families by the whims of their enslaver is not grounds for recompensation? And what you just invoked are two separate things: just because West Africa is not developed as much as the United States and other countries in the West, does not mean that the descendants of the Enslaved should not be compensated because of the economic debt that has been carried down from their ancestors being enslaved. And this does not even include the 120 years of Apartheid where the US government systematically discriminated against Black Americans through laws/Supreme court decisions of “Separate but Equal” wherein different facilities were provided w/o equal funding, amongst other things. Additionally, they suffered terroristic attacks from white people through enacting government coups, like they did South Carolina, against duly elected black Congressmen, and racial riots/bombing from whites to places such as Black Wall Street in Oklahoma. Let alone from the fact that they did not benefit from things such as the New Deal fully and the GI benefits granted after World War 2. Case in point, blacks did not enjoy the full breath of benefits coming from America, namely they were second-class citizens, and were systematically terrorized by the Us Government and white citizens. So even if they’re doing relatively better than their cousins in Africa does not take away from the fact that the US government sanctioned an immoral system that trumps any form of slavery the world has ever seen. That was a complete non-sequitur and has no bearing on the terror that the descendants of the American enslaved went through; maybe you want to adjust your faulty reasoning a bit
But who compensates the descendants of dead Union soldiers who fought and thus ended slavery? Justice is here and now at an individual level. The greatest injustice is that future generations do not have equal opportunity in find land to live on.
And how about a bit of compensation from the Arabs and the Turks for all the Europeans and their women enslaved since around 650 AD when the Arabs invaded the East Roman Empire?
This is definitely a valid concern because the original intention of Affirmative action as designed by Lyndon B. Johnson was to attempt redress for Jim Crow/Apartheid discrimination through inclusive hiring practices that allowed for QUALIFIED, emphasis on qualified, black ADOS applicants to be accepted in employment/admissions processes wherein they were never considered before. If the original intention was to provide aide through fair hiring practices for people who’s ancestors were enslaved and discriminated against, why should it it be expanded to white women, “poc”, gays (and specifically white gays), Caribbean and African applicants whom are not applicable in the US government harming them as a group, enbys/trans, and anyone else who’s had a whiff of plight at any point — that also includes the J.D Vance’s of the world who also benefit from things such as the “rural tax” and being economically poor. That’s the point the individual was making, or at least I presume from the details given, I’d have to read it myself. This also goes for the 14th Amendment and laws like it that are means in which to help the descendants of the enslaved who resided in America.
I don't understand what all this "making up for being descended from enslaved africans". My take on this is that they should compare the quality of life and opportunities open to them in the USA (or anywhere in the West) to that of the descendants of those not sold by their ancestors currently residing in their homelands.
The Kmer Rouge ruled the country of Cambodia. They were the state, and they literally slaughtered their people, especially the educated ones. In the time it takes to graduate from Harvard, the Kmer Rouge killed 2 million people. Harvard is a private university. It is rich. It is influential. But Harvard is not a state, and it doesn't have the power of a state. But you know who does?
I’m keeping up just fine. I just thought we’d left “every institution I don’t like is Pol Pot” behind in middle school debate club. Sorry for bringing adult literacy to a meme fight.
It was hilarious when Harvard said as a private university it should receive federal funds without question or conditions . So what should public universities get? I am delighted Trump started this assault early on in his tenure. Plenty of time to see this through and establish real justice. Maybe by diverting Harvards grants to the community college system?
I have experienced first hand the fact that “at other universities, faculty candidates who respond to such inquiries by saying that they treat all individuals equally regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex get excluded from consideration.”
What was maddening is the fact that my colleagues on the hiring committees were over-ruled in many cases by the administrator, the apparatchik present to ensure the hiring process made this racist "diversity" crap the top priority over experience and favorable teaching evaluations.
Of course, I was never sure that my failure to even gain an interview for a tenure-track spot was because of this or because my credentials were simply substandard in comparison to others in the pool of applicants, but in the long run it didn't matter to me, either professionally or monetarily.
My standard reply to questions like those listed in the link to Harvard was, "I treat all students the same, as individuals, and evaluate their work according to the criteria agreed upon by the English department's rubric that we developed as a team."
One time early in my career I tried to play ball by claiming I selected reading material for rhetorical analysis "from writers of color to whom my students could relate," or some other such horse manure, but I did this only once because of the shame and self-loathing I felt afterwards.
Harvard (and other institutions) policy is, to paraphrase George Wallace, "Racial favoritism today, racial favoritism tomorrow, racial favoritism forever."
It is completely appropriate to cut off Harvard from all Federal funding and to end their tax exempt status. They are in violation of the Constitution. In 1976, Bob Jones University lost its tax exempt status because it practiced racial discrimination. Harvard is no different. They MUST lose all Federal funding and lose their tax exempt status. Since they are rich it probably won’t change a thing at Harvard except the number of employees. But that will be a start.
Bob Jones lost its tax-exempt status in 1976 because it banned interracial dating and explicitly taught white supremacy as a theological doctrine. That was was state-sanctioned segregation in the name of God.
Actually it was because they wouldn’t admit single black people to the school. They also held that the races should not intermarry. But the rationale for the loss of their tax exempt status was racial discrimination, which is exactly what Harvard is practicing in admissions, hiring and promotions.
A fish rots from the head down. The Harvard Board of Trustees is chaired by billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, Obama’s secretary of commerce and Jay Pritzker's sister. Seize the endowments. Use them to pay off student loans and settle the tsunami of lawsuits they richly deserve. Name and shame the Obamassars: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-get-into-harvard-gay-bobo-corporation
"All of the Communist Parties, upon attaining power, have become completely merciless.
But at the stage before they achieve power, it is necessary to use disguises.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Warning To The West
Land Acknowledgments, stating pronouns and dutiful submission of DEI compliance are filters for stochastic entryism.
Inclusion is only for compliance/ proof of predatory/parasite collaboration
This is how ideological infection/intoxication rates among faculty are nearly100% and administrators have bloated to almost a one-to-one ratio with students, themselves victims of K – 12 indoctrination/abuse.
Better than my idea!
@Yuri- and don't stay at any Hyatts.
Yuri. Please confirm you do not have suicidal ideations
And the irony is they deeply believe they are the righteous ones who are practicing noblesse oblige in a virtuous way, to make up for sins of the past. The world according to intersectionality and critical social justice. My wife graduated from Harvard’s arts education program, and she said it was full of critical consciousness, but took her a while to unpack it all after it was done. We still get their Ed. magazine, which is anything but politically diverse. They are all in.
I am going to take a different position on this. My feeling is that the federal government should let elite private universities (not public universities) do as they wish; let them follow this path of extreme DEI hiring and do nothing. (Maybe tax their enormous endowment, but that is a separate and valid issue). It is a free country. Don't stop them and don't punish them. If they double-down on hiring people on the basis of race and not talent, then in a matter of a few years, the school will suffer the very real consequences of having done so. People of color who were hired for their skin color and "lived experiences," rather than requisite talent will perform poorly compared to historical expectations at Harvard and other Itop vies. Further, these people will be given tenure which means they will have lifetime appointments and their lackluster performances will be uncorrectable. Lower individual performance will become the norm, thus diminishing the school's overall performance. Those people with high talent, whether white or of-color, will be expected to perform at even higher levels to compensate for low performers. This will create anger, resentment and division in the faculty and staff ranks. (This is already happening, but fear of reprisal keeps it under wraps.) Overall there will be a steady downward spiral of quality and outcomes in education, research and scholarship. The metrics (if any) and rhetoric of values will shift to match the new reality and with that will come a further diminution in quality, actual prestige and the value of the degree. My feeling is that this "process" or phenomena is already well underway at Harvard, Princeton and Yale, and may be also happening at Penn too. It is a shame and the tendency is to want to fix it, but the government should do nothing. Let it happen naturally, but at the same time enforce merit-based hiring and viewpoint diversity at state schools. Also cut the federal funding of research that is based in DEI and CRT. If this plan were to be followed, then within a decade the results of such folly will be evident to all and the outcomes will be clear, and new leaders will return to merit and color blindness in hiring and promotion. But trying to force change from the outside of these institutions and from the top down with big government is the wrong way to approach this problem. Sometimes, sadly in human affairs, one must let failure happen before positive change can be made.
Maybe so. But not with access to my taxpayer dollars.
Agreed. Though the medical research with federal dollars being done at Harvard is world class.
World Class? Maybe.....search Dana-Farber Cancer center retracts 6 research papers due to data manipulation.
Sadly, false reports have become a problem in medical science for sure, but I stand by my statement without equivocation.
And in hard science. Been there in it. We've provided a service without compromising on supposed merit.
Yes, they are at the top in chemistry, physics and mathematics.
if it's world class, they should have no problem replacing much of the taxpayer funding with private money and the rest can be obtained from their $50+Billion endowment.
Why can't the medical research be spun off
For all intent and purposes the medical enterprises at Harvard, Penn and Yale have very little to do with the workings of the colleges that they are attached to...you never hear from the truly excellent medical researchers, scientists and physicians...you hear from a radical group of students who have been ginned up by even more radical faculty in quite unimportant niches of study...Trust me, if you are a student in the hard sciences or engineering as these schools, you are spending hours and hours just trying to keep up with the immense workload...Honestly, it is true at almost all universities, but no one dares to say it.
Trust me, at this point, DEI has infiltrated into the sciences, too.. That's the sad fact that "no one dares to say..."
I agree with you. The value in these schools historically was as much the networking opportunities as the education. The education is of questionable value and if they do away with legacy admissions (as they've discussed) and only admit DEI applicants then you have neither of the very things that attracted prior students. Poor education and instead of rubbing elbows with the high and mighty you end up in an encampment with the low and needy! Fuck that.
Well said!
I think your point is valid. Same with other businesses that insist on DEI hiring practices. Let them be overcome with incompetence and have their businesses fail. End of problem.
Exactly. The market is magnificent at weeding out the weak and less well adapted.
Disney and InBev are learning the hard way.
It is indeed. Except when it isn’t.
Institutional ESG investing subverts natural market forces (as well as basic fiduciary responsibility) to help buoy and sustain the incompetence of these policies.
The biggest problem being Vanguard, Blackrock, Fidelity et al handling corporate retirement vehicles … there’s no telling how many Johnny and Jane Public are investing in ESG without even realizing.
Sorry. Racial and gender discrimination does not get a pass under the guide of the US being "a free country."
I agree that quotas are illegal. That should be enforced.
Nope. Not if they want Federal money.
The problem is the "they" who are angering you and many more is a small minority of ultravocal students, faculty and administrators who have taken highly visible positions. The rest of the faculty, staff and students are among the hardest working people you will find anywhere, highly accomplished and driven to make discoveries.
then they should have no problems finding jobs at universities with access to funding.
In other words, you'd say, like an alcoholic, they have to hit bottom first. That might take a long time, and during that long time, many students and faculty will be indoctrinated, or at least prevented from reaching their full intellectual potential. Trump as usual overreaches, but I do hope federal intervention will speed up the evolutionary process. For instance, by getting rid of some administrators.
I cannot disagree with the fact that tenure will lock in the employ of many of these people who are not up to the usual standards of accomplishment for Harvard. It used to be that a very low number of candidates for tenure at Harvard got it; the departments would advertise the position and compare the internal candidate's accomplishments with the best of the CVs from the applicant pool, if the internal candidate was not better than every other applicant, that candidate did not get tenure. I don't know what the actual success rates were, but in the physical sciences, getting tenure at Harvard was atypical. (In Chemistry, some of those who were denied tenure went elsewhere, prospered and won Nobel Prizes...) It would be interesting to know if that changed with the onset of DEI over the last 10-15 years. One wonders if the rate of success is different in the social sciences and humanities versus the hard sciences and biology? Also does the probability of obtaining tenure at Harvard in any discipline vary with the race of the candidate? These are all fair questions, and answers should be forthcoming, but Harvard is not likely to release such data - at least not willingly. Maybe, that is a valid role that the DOJ and DoED can play - to force transparency.
The onset of DEI happened as early as the 1990s in some departments. In one humanities department, several tenured faculty left as a consequence, including one with a prestigious (named) university professorship.
IMHO when it comes to funding there is "no compromise".
Agree. Those blunt and ineffective internal DEI hiring practices pissed off and alienated many faculty, and an internal reckoning was coming even before the October 7 fall-out, but watching a sitting administration existentially threaten private academic institutions like this is so depressing. As for Rufo's empathy for the white men who have allegedly lost jobs at Harvard, I have no empathy when he simultaneously supports an administration that allows a woman studying child psychology to be taken off a public street by masked agents, loaded into an SUV, and then flown to a detention center in Louisiana all because she co-wrote an op-ed in Tuft University’s newspaper. If we are really worried about ideology corrupting higher education, why don’t we start by resisting state censorship?
Survival of the fittest
I don't think it will take very long for truly esteemed Harvard faculty, and alumni to demand a correction, if the administrators persist in this non-meritorious approach. I have colleagues in the Paulson school who are doing world-class research with outstanding graduate students; trust me they are not for this nonsense. They want to hire the best and the brightest. That is why Harvard was Harvard. But let the leadership do this for a while, then see the results, and I am certain there will be a significant correction. But the federal government should not be involved, unless they break the law, and quotas are unlawful.
Is it true that Harvard takes 69 cents of every grant dollar for administrative overhead?
No. Their negotiated Facilities and Administration (Overhead) rate is about 70%. But it does not apply to all the direct cost items. So imagine a contract or grant with direct costs of say $1 million for three years. Since the F&A rate does not apply to all the lines of expense, you can guessitmate the overhead cost as say 50% of the direct costs, or $500,000. Thus the total grant or contract cost to the government would be $ 1.5 million. That makes the F&A cost about 1/3 or $0.33 per dollar direct. Remember this rate is negotiated with the cognitive agency - DHHS for Harvard. Other Schools negotiate with DoD...If this is reduced to 15%, schools will put more direct costs back into the cost proposal, which means negotiations will be done on every contract and grant. I know you won't believe this, but schools lose money overall on research (as most also do on DI athletics). Facilities and administrative costs are not fully covered by the negotiated F&A rates. But bringing down admin costs is not easy due to all sorts of government requirements. Compliance measures = jobs...not a good dynamic, but one party loves it.
I believe you when you say that they lose money on research, but does that include all the backend profits when patents and other IP pay off?
Thank you for the clarifying comment. I run an Aerospace company that has DoD work so have some idea of the regulatory hoops you have to jump through. If the research is valuable I'd say we are getting value for our money. Reducing the regulatory load would be ideal.
Depends on the agency. NSF required applicants to apply the indirect cost rate to the proposal, so a $300,000 proposal would include about $133,000 in indirect costs. A different $300,000 proposal to the NIH would have a bit over $200,000 in indirect costs awarded, if the grant was funded in full -- and it usually wasn't funded in full.
Harvard's Board of Trustees is ultimately to blame for Harvard's tragic downfall. They allowed this death spiral to happen. Either they actually believed in the Marxist, woke, Leftist mind virus and shaped the university as such, or they were asleep at the wheel while it happened under their noses at the admin level. The BoT must be held accountable either way. And likely it must be entirely reconstituted with actual diversity of thought and people who will take accountability and pay attention.
Harvard is grooming a new ruling class which - not chosen on merit but on background - will create three things:
1. A slow decline in achievement, objectively measured, when merit no longer matters
2. Mighty yelps into the void about imaginary achievements based on recognitions of various forms of Political Correctness
3. Further and further distance from the people whose actual, effective work at producing goods and services supports it with tax dollars.
Americans can choose to be in this fight on the right side or not. In many coountries, it is not even possible yet.
Bbbut . . . my lived experience! My volunteer work at the shelter for addicted gay poor people of color! Surely these qualify me more than this cis white patriarchal emphasis on "scholarship." Shakespeare? Never read him. He's just another dead white male from a colonial oppressor nation who needs to be expunged from the canon in favor of African diasporic writers. Esthetics? Art? More fetishization of elitist white systems of oppression that exclude the marginalized and silences their more authentic voices.
See? It's easy to learn the patois once you hear it often enough.
Your Honour, permit me to present Exhibit A...
I remember when lived experience was just called an anecdote.
I've noticed that people say less about MIT than "the group." However, having witnessed a covid-time graduation from there (well, at least we didn't have the plane trip) I can say that the undergrads were kids delighting in diversity in an over-the-top way. On the good side, I watched a son's "orals" for 2 Masters' Degrees. Bravo, him, as they are useful for his work. Still, he adopted the liberal mindset in many ways and we do not communicate per his choice.
Wait. What. You don't communicate with your adult, educated son because of politics? My kids are very progressive and we disagree almost everything and I still talk to them every week. We just stay away from topics where we know we'll have disagreements. I also paid for my kids college educations (Masters and Doctorate) so perhaps they feel obligated to talk with me. Your story makes me sad.
Makes me sad too. Fortunately I was able to indoctrinate my two daughters into using their brains & forming their own opinions which has resulted in them finding themselves in a minority at university. Having now experienced reality, they remain willingly near to my political & religious campground. Periodically they encounter like-minded, family-centric, theistically sound libertarians which is always cause for a celebratory phone call home. Bless their wonderful intellect & I call shame on all their woke university lecturers for trying to turn my kids to the dark side…
I am heartbroken but will not be a victim.
In short, it began with his wife's mother who has TDS and flowed from there. We have tried calling, figuring it out, because in the end, everyone loses. He has a younger brother who is special needs and his brother does not understand why he has not visited in years. Since we are not overbearing we just stopped calling except I have sent him texts that were kind (happy birthday) but this is too one-sided. He got through on scholarship. We are not "victims" but he does need a good talking-to by someone and his father is not stepping-up. It is what it is. VERY wrong.
Sorry to hear. Thanks for your honest story.
You are the reason your kids are progressive. Perhaps if they had skin in the game they would think differently.
Struggle is good for the soul.
The problem parents like create must be shared by the rest of society. And that pisses me off.
It is undoubtedly the same for almost every university in the US. The taxpayer shouldn't fund any private universities. There can continue to be funding to public universities but they will have to be reined in as a condition of receiving the funding.
Hillsdale College in MI has never taken any public funds. It is a healthy thriving institution.
Every one has known this but it never changes and discrimination continues. I thought Harvard was already under orders to stop discriminating against Asians. If they failed to follow through on the remedy prescribed by the courts shouldn't that be a violation too?
Take all funding take tax exempt status refuse to future loans via the government.
Let them do what they want on their on dime. Also block all visas for foreign born students to enroll until such a time as they can follow the law.
Administrators must pay the legal price ( whatever that is) for violating federal law.
You can shut down the Colorado cake maker for decades for refusing to make a gay marriage cake.....
That was an admissions complaint. Hiring is still being caught up in the courts for any number of organizations. Trump's revocation of Affirmative Action Programs has stripped away any pretense of legal cover - any demographic goals for hiring are now clearly in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many organizations will pay big money for their failure to understand the changing legal landscape.
Thousands of Harvard employees were indoctrinated to follow a political mission in college. They were hired to further that mission, which is inextricably bound up with racial discrimination and misandry. The entire apparatus has been constructed to do this ONE THING.
The idea that it'll just stop, because some outside pressure is leveraged, is asinine.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/leviathan
I remember reading an op-ed at Harvard Crimson from a female black student who was outraged that she was one of the handful of US-born black students, majority of black students were foreign students from Africa. She was outraged that her racial quota was spent on those whose ancestors were not enslaved by the white people. The entire premise of making up for the sins of slavery was thrown out and turned into the open racial discrimination.
Whether people are disfavored due to skin color or favored due to skin color the result is the same. Everyone suffers. Regardless of one’s stated intention, looking through a racial lens IS racism, pure and simple.
Wow… very interesting reply. So the act of being “owned” by other human beings, traded into chattel slavery, worked to death w/o compensation, raped by their “masters”, and the potential of being sold and separated from their families by the whims of their enslaver is not grounds for recompensation? And what you just invoked are two separate things: just because West Africa is not developed as much as the United States and other countries in the West, does not mean that the descendants of the Enslaved should not be compensated because of the economic debt that has been carried down from their ancestors being enslaved. And this does not even include the 120 years of Apartheid where the US government systematically discriminated against Black Americans through laws/Supreme court decisions of “Separate but Equal” wherein different facilities were provided w/o equal funding, amongst other things. Additionally, they suffered terroristic attacks from white people through enacting government coups, like they did South Carolina, against duly elected black Congressmen, and racial riots/bombing from whites to places such as Black Wall Street in Oklahoma. Let alone from the fact that they did not benefit from things such as the New Deal fully and the GI benefits granted after World War 2. Case in point, blacks did not enjoy the full breath of benefits coming from America, namely they were second-class citizens, and were systematically terrorized by the Us Government and white citizens. So even if they’re doing relatively better than their cousins in Africa does not take away from the fact that the US government sanctioned an immoral system that trumps any form of slavery the world has ever seen. That was a complete non-sequitur and has no bearing on the terror that the descendants of the American enslaved went through; maybe you want to adjust your faulty reasoning a bit
But who compensates the descendants of dead Union soldiers who fought and thus ended slavery? Justice is here and now at an individual level. The greatest injustice is that future generations do not have equal opportunity in find land to live on.
And how about a bit of compensation from the Arabs and the Turks for all the Europeans and their women enslaved since around 650 AD when the Arabs invaded the East Roman Empire?
This is definitely a valid concern because the original intention of Affirmative action as designed by Lyndon B. Johnson was to attempt redress for Jim Crow/Apartheid discrimination through inclusive hiring practices that allowed for QUALIFIED, emphasis on qualified, black ADOS applicants to be accepted in employment/admissions processes wherein they were never considered before. If the original intention was to provide aide through fair hiring practices for people who’s ancestors were enslaved and discriminated against, why should it it be expanded to white women, “poc”, gays (and specifically white gays), Caribbean and African applicants whom are not applicable in the US government harming them as a group, enbys/trans, and anyone else who’s had a whiff of plight at any point — that also includes the J.D Vance’s of the world who also benefit from things such as the “rural tax” and being economically poor. That’s the point the individual was making, or at least I presume from the details given, I’d have to read it myself. This also goes for the 14th Amendment and laws like it that are means in which to help the descendants of the enslaved who resided in America.
I don't understand what all this "making up for being descended from enslaved africans". My take on this is that they should compare the quality of life and opportunities open to them in the USA (or anywhere in the West) to that of the descendants of those not sold by their ancestors currently residing in their homelands.
Khmer Rouge at Cambridge.
No worries. And it’s Khmer. Don’t make it a good day make it a great day!
The Kmer Rouge ruled the country of Cambodia. They were the state, and they literally slaughtered their people, especially the educated ones. In the time it takes to graduate from Harvard, the Kmer Rouge killed 2 million people. Harvard is a private university. It is rich. It is influential. But Harvard is not a state, and it doesn't have the power of a state. But you know who does?
For someone who appears so educated, you obviously don’t understand Snark. Try to keep up rookie.
I’m keeping up just fine. I just thought we’d left “every institution I don’t like is Pol Pot” behind in middle school debate club. Sorry for bringing adult literacy to a meme fight.
It was hilarious when Harvard said as a private university it should receive federal funds without question or conditions . So what should public universities get? I am delighted Trump started this assault early on in his tenure. Plenty of time to see this through and establish real justice. Maybe by diverting Harvards grants to the community college system?
I have experienced first hand the fact that “at other universities, faculty candidates who respond to such inquiries by saying that they treat all individuals equally regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex get excluded from consideration.”
What was maddening is the fact that my colleagues on the hiring committees were over-ruled in many cases by the administrator, the apparatchik present to ensure the hiring process made this racist "diversity" crap the top priority over experience and favorable teaching evaluations.
Of course, I was never sure that my failure to even gain an interview for a tenure-track spot was because of this or because my credentials were simply substandard in comparison to others in the pool of applicants, but in the long run it didn't matter to me, either professionally or monetarily.
My standard reply to questions like those listed in the link to Harvard was, "I treat all students the same, as individuals, and evaluate their work according to the criteria agreed upon by the English department's rubric that we developed as a team."
One time early in my career I tried to play ball by claiming I selected reading material for rhetorical analysis "from writers of color to whom my students could relate," or some other such horse manure, but I did this only once because of the shame and self-loathing I felt afterwards.
Harvard (and other institutions) policy is, to paraphrase George Wallace, "Racial favoritism today, racial favoritism tomorrow, racial favoritism forever."
It is completely appropriate to cut off Harvard from all Federal funding and to end their tax exempt status. They are in violation of the Constitution. In 1976, Bob Jones University lost its tax exempt status because it practiced racial discrimination. Harvard is no different. They MUST lose all Federal funding and lose their tax exempt status. Since they are rich it probably won’t change a thing at Harvard except the number of employees. But that will be a start.
Bob Jones lost its tax-exempt status in 1976 because it banned interracial dating and explicitly taught white supremacy as a theological doctrine. That was was state-sanctioned segregation in the name of God.
Actually it was because they wouldn’t admit single black people to the school. They also held that the races should not intermarry. But the rationale for the loss of their tax exempt status was racial discrimination, which is exactly what Harvard is practicing in admissions, hiring and promotions.
The irony, of course, is the more they blatantly discriminate, the easier it will be to beat them in court. So I say to Harvard: go for it!