The hedge fund finishing school that is Harvard
Dominic Green
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How do you know if someone you’ve just met went to Harvard? They’ll tell you in the first two minutes. I plagiarized that joke from the English original about the false modesty of people who went to Oxford. Plagiarism is allowed at Harvard. Its president, Claudine Gay, is a serial plagiarist, but she still has her job. Like laws in the real world, academic rules are for the little people.
If I were Gay for a day, I could pad this column with a few paragraphs from “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Niall Ferguson’s article on the politicization of the universities, and then pass it off as all my own work. I could claim that it was me, not Chris Rufo and Chris Brunet, who exposed the unattributed borrowings in Gay’s research papers. I wouldn’t get away with it. Readers would spot my thefts at once. No one spotted Gay’s impostures for years. No one reads academic articles. When Gay became Harvard’s first black president, her peers saw what they wanted to see.
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Gay was under oath to a congressional committee when she said that calling for the genocide of the Jews may not constitute bullying or harassment, depending “on the context.” She now swears that this isn’t what she meant. “Substantively, I failed to convey what is my truth,” she told the Harvard Crimson. Gay may not have mastered the art of the footnote, but she has perfected the robotic mixture of legalese and semi-literacy that typifies our administrators.
Whenever anyone talks about “my truth,” they’re lying. As Maya Angelou said, “When they tell you who they are, believe them.” Gay told us who she is in her both-sides equivocating after the Hamas massacres, rapes, and abduction on Oct. 7 and her fatuous arrogance under oath before Congress. The hundreds of Harvard faculty who signed a petition in support of Gay have told us who they are, too. Most of the signatories are from the departments of what are still laughably called the humanities, but the rot has also reached the medical and law schools. Only the business school retains a sense of reality and decency.
The Ivy League was the first elite institution to pull away from the public — and the institution that, by training and credentialing the managers of all the other institutions, led the way in what Christopher Lasch called “the revolt of the elites.” The universities were careful not to tell us who they really were because they depended on their donors. The donors, as we see, still have trouble believing what America’s top universities now are: a hedge fund with a Maoist finishing school.
Many of the professors truly believe in the binary oppositions of race and class, black or white, oppressor or victim. Almost all of them are on the Left, so they see another historic binary, Jew and Gentile, as Marx defined it (the Jews as capitalist exploiters), and the New Left redefined it (the Jews as white oppressors). The professors privately believe in the biological binary of sex, too, but they run anyone off campus who says that aloud. How’s that for “the treason of the intellectuals”?
The Ivy League has pulled the greatest bait and switch since Socrates offered his students one-on-one mentoring in a sleepover. The profits of the free market in ideas, politics, and economy have been recycled to subsidize mass indoctrination in illiberal, antidemocratic, and anti-capitalist thought. The institutions that should train young people for service to a free society have been subverted into training grounds for the overthrow of law and liberty. The results are contaminating life like a turd in a swimming pool.
What now? Busting Gay for plagiarism is like prosecuting Al Capone for tax evasion. Firing Gay for damaging Harvard’s finances would be like whacking John Gotti for disrespecting the mobster’s code. Harvard has more than $50 billion in the bank. The faculty are tenured. The DEI bureaucracy is entrenched. The scholar’s ethic is already traduced by politics, the mass movement against the Jews already launched.
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Politics perverted the university in Nazi Germany (see: Ferguson, N., “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” Free Press, 2023). And the university helped to pervert politics: German academics led the way to Nazism by laundering racism and murder in the language of rationality. Since the late 1960s, the American university has turned against the principles of democracy, law, and liberalism, just as the German university rejected the principles of the Enlightenment.
“Antisemitism is the organization of politics against the Jews.” Which is to say, attacking the Jews is, like excluding the Asians, a means to a political end: the racial and social engineering of society. I could, as Gay would do, leave out the quotation marks and present this as my idea, but I won’t. I learned it from Ruth Wisse when I was at Harvard. Why, yes, seeing as you asked, I went to both Oxford and Harvard. But I don’t like to talk about it. I prefer to make an honest living.