At long last, accountability
A Harvard president's resignation proves the regime can no longer protect its minions.
As small a step as it may be, the at-long-last resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay nonetheless represents, in my opinion, something like a watershed moment.
Gay, of course, is still refusing to take any moral responsibility for her statement before Congress—echoed by two other university presidents—that calling for the genocide of Jews isn’t necessarily a violation of her institution’s code of conduct, depending on the “context.”
In a just published New York Times op-ed (I don’t link to systemically racist publications), Gay blames more or less everyone except herself. She proclaims instead that her resignation has been coerced by racists and a right-wing conspiracy that caught her in a “trap” during her congressional testimony.
This is, needless to say, barbarous nonsense. The simple truth is that she was criticized because her claim that a call for the genocide of Jews could be legitimate, depending on the “context,” was monstrously racist. Moreover, there was no “trap” set for her. She was, in fact, asked the easiest question imaginable. Had she given the blazingly obvious answer “yes,” she would at least have got away with her moral dignity intact.
Tangentially, it’s worth noting that Gay also continues to claim that she didn’t commit plagiarism. I went to university and know what plagiarism looks like, because it was drummed into my head, along with the warning that it is a career-ending transgression. I’ve seen the examples of Gay’s plagiarism and they’re literally a cut-and-paste job, so utterly blatant that it’s frankly inconceivable that no one realized it at the time. The only way she could possibly have avoided being kicked out of academia immediately is that someone made a conscious decision to let her get away with it.
Putting the details aside, however, her resignation represents a watershed moment in the general sense. Put simply, it is the first time the dictatorship of the professoriate has been held accountable. This regime has literally gotten away with murder for decades. It has operated with absolute impunity despite its systemic administrative corruption and often outright illegal conduct.
Now, Gay herself was obviously a figurehead. The regime runs things in academia and she had no power whatsoever over its behavior. This was proven by the simple fact of her testimony itself. She never would have hedged on the genocide question were it not for the fact that the regime does not only believe that killing Jews is a morally ambivalent phenomenon, but in the case of Israel is more or less a good thing.
Thus, if Gay had answered “yes,” she would have exposed the regime’s moral dementia, indicted the majority of her faculty and innumerable student organizations, and thus committed an act of treason. There was no conceivable way she was going to do this. As a result, she essentially had no way out. Had she answered “yes,” the regime would have destroyed her. To avoid this, she committed a kind of seppuku. Nothing better illustrates the totalitarian power the regime exercises over its subjects.
However, what is truly seismic about her resignation is not just the long-delayed accountability, but the fact that the regime could not protect her. Having been shown the ultimate act of loyalty, the regime found itself utterly impotent. This exposed the essentially limited nature of its power. It exercises total domination over academia, but outside it, it can do nothing.
We may hope, then, that the fear and intimidation that the regime uses to enforce its power may have been seriously damaged. Its subjects may now begin to realize, albeit slowly, that they don’t have to be silent. They can resist. Gay has unintentionally revealed that the regime is a paper tiger. Let’s hope those it has oppressed for decades will now begin the process of ripping it to pieces.
For some reason, I’ve recently been receiving a lot of emails from various anti-Israel organizations (how they got my info I cannot imagine), many of them inadvertently hilarious (the fact they’re sending them to me is hilarious enough).
They’re not just uproarious, however; they’re often very revealing. The latest I’ve received is a case in point.
It was something of a personal missive/fundraising request from Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the pseudo-Jewish advocacy group J Street, whose purpose is to legitimize anti-Israel activism as somehow expressive of the sentiments of the American Jewish masses.
Needless to say, this is ridiculous, especially today, when an American Jewish awakening is underway and American Zionism is perhaps more pervasive and powerful than ever.
Perhaps knowing this, Ben-Ami resorted to a rather interesting tactic; namely, histrionic pathos. He wrote: “These past weeks have been among the most difficult in my life, certainly the most difficult for J Street and all that we care about. I’m sure they’ve been unbearably challenging for you too.”
After some cursory lamentations on the Oct. 7 massacre, he then launched on to a lengthy peroration on the suffering of the people of Gaza and the endless anguish it’s causing him. He strongly implied that his anguish must be ended by some kind of US-imposed arrangement that, ironically, would by definition rescue Hamas and prolong the war indefinitely.
The particulars of Ben-Ami’s advocacy, however, are somewhat irrelevant. It’s standard progressive pablum that studiously ignores the fact that there’s a perfectly reasonable way of ending the fighting: Demand Hamas’s immediate and unconditional surrender. Anyone who claims to be concerned about civilian suffering but does not demand such a surrender is either a hypocrite, a fool, or consciously arguing in bad faith.
My guess is that Ben-Ami is simply a fool. But he’s a typical fool. A graduate of Princeton University and NYU, he’s just another scion of the professoriate regime who has been protected and privileged for his entire existence. As such, he cannot begin to conceive of the horrors of life. He can sit comfortably in Washington and pontificate in good conscience on what people who have had a bit more than a “difficult” few weeks ought to do in order to save their own lives and protect their country from barbarous Islamic Nazism.
It seems, in fact, that he considers his own suffering to be far more severe than theirs, and thus, as an anguished member of a self-appointed caste of saints, has a right not only to demand but to impose his morally and strategically bankrupt fantasies upon them.
This would normally be amusing, but when both Israel and Jews worldwide—including American Jews—are under mortal threat, it’s frankly sinister.
This may explain the most striking quality of Ben-Ami’s missive: Its utter desperation, expressed in the baroque pathos of its language. It emotes in a manner that is so over the top that it’s very close to outright parody.
Nonetheless, this relentless pathos is necessary. Whether he wants to admit it or not, Ben-Ami is essentially trying to rescue a genocidal terrorist organization. There is simply no reasonable or logical way to justify this. As a result, emotion is the last and only resort.
The problem with this is that emotion is not an argument. At best, it’s the easy way out. At worst, it’s simply emotional blackmail.
Ben-Ami resorts to it not only out of necessity. He also does so in order to protect his privilege, because my guess is that, given the American Jewish awakening now underway, J Street is essentially dead.
In the past, the Jewish mask it wore to conceal the fact that it was more or less just another Palestinian nationalist organization was barely credible. Now, however, J Street is facing the overnight radicalization of 90% of the American Jewish community. Post-Oct. 7, American Jews see organizations like J Street as irrelevant at best and risible at worst. In other words, J Street is finished and they almost certainly know it. What’s left but emotional blackmail?
These days probably are “the most difficult” of Ben-Ami’s life, but he does not seem to realize what this says about his organization and about him.
On a lighter note, I’ve been playing around a bit with Chat GPT (I remain terrified that it’ll eventually render my job irrelevant) and while I’ve found it very lacking on matters of fact (it seems to just channel Wikipedia), I took the eccentric measure of asking it to analyze a few of my dreams.
I requested both a Freudian and Jungian analysis of each one, and I must admit, its analyses were pretty interesting. I don’t know whether this is disturbing or not, but it seems that AI is actually a lot better at analysis and creative thinking than it is at providing basic information. Can AI therapists be far away?
It’s impossible to say; but if so, it’s a bit comforting that AI is more likely to replace psychologists than writers and editors.
Great dissection of the Harvard morass and unfathomable verbiage.
UPenn is promoting a new constitutional philosophy that potentially could be a corrective template towards the ongoing disintegration of American academia.
Terrifying to see but not unexpected given the menacing DEI debacle.
https://pennforward.com/
I wanted to thank you for sharing your insights on academia. It hadn't occurred to me that Gays backers didn't have the power to keep her in office. But that is a very reassuring concept, so I thank you for it. Even more reassuring, as she brings to the table the fact that she's both black and a lesbian. These days that's more important than almost any other characteristic a person has.