BBC News Lies #8: Harvard isn't an innocent bystander in the Culture War.
It is in fact, a staunch culture warrior for the left.
Nothing has exposed the elite ethno-socialist anti-cultural machine more than the October 7th massacre in Israel. The fallout has been extremely heavy in every direction, and its strong, irradiating presence was felt at the House Education Committee hearing in Congress on December 5th, 2023. Students across some of America’s most prestigious universities had celebrated the massacre of Israeli men, women, and children. Some had called specifically for the genocide of Jewish people in Israel and the destruction of the entire state. In response to the cultural crisis, the House Education Committee called for a hearing with three university presidents: Harvard University’s Claudine Gay, the University of Pennsylvania's Liz Magill, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sally Kornbluth. This hearing was a massacre; only Kornbluth is still a university president, less than a month later.
It was the single most-viewed Congressional hearing in history. It was filled with gaffe after gaffe after gaffe from the university presidents, and it exposed a deeply flawed racial hierarchy system embedded deep into Harvard policies. All accusations that they were soft on antisemitism were shrugged off by the presidents, without condemnation or concern. The most famous line came from then-Harvard president Claudine Gay, who said that calling for the genocide of Jews was not itself an act of harassment or bullying. The greater context here is that Harvard is a bastion for the safe-space, anti-racist, cancel culturing, micro-aggression, ethno-socialist belief systems that grip all elite Western institutions. It is the breeding ground for some of the most offensive ideologies infecting our dialogue and our culture today. So, when they’re silent on genocide but just for Jews, it’s a dead, rotting canary in the coalmine. One of the strangest responses given was that calling for Jewish genocide only becomes harassment if that speech is turned into action… wait what? Yes, that is an in-context and direct response from the leaders of the free world's most desirable university, saying that yes, carrying out the genocide of Jews would amount to harassment in their books. It was just far too on-the-nose, all because they simply wouldn’t say that calling for the genocide of Jews was considered bullying or harassment. Whereas a private institution can write its own rules, a bright light has been cast on the murky world of Harvard’s ethno-socialist ideology, and it’s clear who sits at the top, and who sits on the bottom.
It’s nothing new for Harvard. It’s a university whose history is steeped in racist policies drawn up by “intellectual liberals” that come up with new racial ideologies every generation or so, which eventually infect the rest of society. Shortly before World War II, Harvard introduced a variety of policies with the stated aim of reducing the number of Jews at the university down to 15%. It was considered a “Jewish problem." Harvard’s then President A. Lawrence Lowell reasoned that reducing the number of Jews would reduce the amount of anti-Semitic hatred, and he decried how Harvard wouldn’t “look like America” if there were too many Jews. It’s an ideological tradition that has continued to this day; they believe that by reducing the number of European descendants, they will reduce racism, and Harvard would look more like their idealised belief of what America is. Harvard has also been caught discriminating against Asian students, openly admitting to raising the grade requirements over those of other races. The ugliest example of Harvard racism is how they lower grade requirements for black people. It’s a tragic thing for the West to realise that one of its most treasured and desired centres of learning is an infected hive of bizarre racist ideologies, where the world's most cutting-edge intellectuals still believe you can fight racism with more racism.
The orthodox media has been attempting to run cover for this complete disaster of a hearing, and the language used makes it brutally obvious. However, not even the most radical leftists in the news can defend her adequately, as in reality there’s nothing to defend; she was specifically chosen as a racial tick-box, she stole a great chunk of her academic "work," she couldn’t bring herself to condemn or reprimand students for calling for the genocide of Jews, and she has a history of defending racist hiring and enrollment practices. Even for these people of reduced personal and intrapersonal standards, that is pretty grim. In today's BBC News Lies, we’re looking at an article that fits the description of “leftist orthodoxy's information-controlling activism.”
From the very title, we quickly get a whiff of orthodox bias. Anthony Zurcher has long been an opinionated journalist who doesn’t stray too far from “the message." Before us is another journalistic stain that omits important context, instead replacing it with government-approved fear mongering over anti-establishment sentiment. In the title, Zurcher chose to bemoan the loss of Harvard’s president as a loss against anti-establishment sentiment, which has nothing to do with her anti-Semitic rhetoric or the universities collective apathy for any kind of obvious Jewish hatred from their most leftist activist students.
“Claudine Gay's resignation as president of Harvard University is being celebrated as a high-profile victory by conservatives who have objected to her on ideological grounds since shortly after she took the job in July 2023.
Although allegations of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis were a factor in her exit from Harvard's top job, her departure is more than just an academic dishonesty scandal.”
It’s impossible to remove bias from one's interpretation of events. We’re always going to be shaped by the perspectives we are exposed to and the experiences we have. These will always shape our rhetoric and our beliefs, and thus how we consider events. All we can do is try our best to point it out or be clear and concise about our personal beliefs in our reporting. However, you have to be deep in the trenches of denial and orthodoxy defence to come up with an opening like that. The single most important point that Zurcher has immediately drawn our attention to is just a moan about how an icon of leftism has fallen, with a side note that she stole all of the academic work that got her that position in the first place.
“Dr Gay landed in hot water in December for her participation in a congressional hearing panel about antisemitism on college campuses. The tepid, bureaucratic answers by the panellists, including Dr Gay, on how to deal with calls for Jewish genocide prompted the resignation of University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill.
After that episode, Harvard offered continued support for Dr Gay's tenure as president. But the battle was not over.”
One of the key context points for the panel responses was the brutally anti-Semitic reaction from many of the most left-wing students across university campuses to the atrocity in Israel. Entire groups of young, naive kids celebrated when the bodies were still warm. Groups waving the Palestine flag and the Pride flag, honeycombed by pink-haired little girls and feminine-looking boys. They were openly harassing Jewish students without reprimand. Not for decades had such open racist subjugation been socially acceptable at American universities. It’s hardly a Holocaust, but it is certainly close to a Kristallnacht. Zurcher calls the panel's responses “tepid, bureaucratic," but truthfully, it seems the universities are clearly choosing between outrage and shoulder-shrugging depending on the race of those in question. Typically, this kind of racial profiling is highly offensive to Westerners. Failing to add this context to the article shows that there is a deep and stubbornly held bias here.
“For her right-wing critics, Dr Gay - who is black - represents much of what they loathe about modern American higher education, which they view as being dominated by a left-wing ideology that places a greater emphasis on ethnic and gender diversity than on academic rigour.
"It was a thinly veiled exercise in race and gender when they selected Claudine Gay," Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a Harvard graduate, wrote on social media after she announced her resignation.”
Here’s a quick snipe: she is black, and her critics are right-wing. You’re supposed to boo the critics and cheer her ethnicity. It’s also a little disingenuous to say that it is a “right-wing” view that American higher education is dominated by left-wing ideology, considering how no one disputes it. And yes, the universities do openly admit to placing racial and gender factors above academic rigour; it’s not a right-wing accusation, it is a statement of fact. But this has always been the case. Universities have always been breeding grounds for new inventions and discoveries, and this includes inventing new radical belief systems. Nazism prospered at German universities, just as communism prospered at American and European universities. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, bad ideologies tend to fester in universities because they are one of the few inventions that aren’t always immediately obvious in their flaws, and they’re so rarely tested properly before being rolled out as mandatory dogma.
Zurcher quotes Ramaswamy, who correctly states that race and gender were important factors in her hiring, another sad consequence of affirmative action. Later in the article, Zurcher even notes that Dr. Gay’s academic record is “relatively thin” and “includes no published books and 11 journal articles." Those that rally against affirmative action hiring are often discredited as racist themselves by left-wing pundits, despite the fact its practice produces worse results for everyone. Sowell identified that the top black students were being pushed into universities that were not a match for their academic skills, meaning more dropouts. As he put it, there’s no more prestige in being a dropout from Harvard than there is in being a graduate from another top university.
“The plagiarism allegations that led to Dr Gay's resignation were surfaced by Christopher Rufo, a right-wing activist best known for the cultural battle over alleged teaching of Critical Race Theory in US schools.
In a December social media post, Mr Rufo laid out what is a now-familiar strategy for conservatives seeking to generate coverage of stories they believe the mainstream media are ignoring.”
Critical Race Theory was being taught in US schools to even the youngest of children. Children were being given entirely new racist lenses to view the world through. It’s another one of those “right-wing conspiracy theories” that turned out to be completely true. Yet the orthodoxy elite continues to act like this was some kind of out-of-the-blue accusation from some lunatics on the "far right." Rufo was completely correct; the efforts to stamp out racist teaching from US schools are deeply important, especially in the rest of the West, wherever this radioactive ideology seeps.
Rufo has now exposed Dr. Gay for being a fraud; entire chunks of Dr. Gay’s thin portfolio of academic work were stolen from other authors. There are many questions here. What on Earth are her academic qualifications? Why has she been promoted to a position of such prestige with such an unimpressive record? Was she hired for her skin colour? Is that a moral thing to do in the West? How did her plagiarism get past the checking systems that universities all have? How was it that some conservative activists discovered this before Harvard? But instead, the BBC journalist Zurcher prefers to lament Rufo’s very clear, open, and concise breakdown of how he intended to make sure the mainstream media covered this scandal.
“In her resignation letter, Dr Gay said she was "subjected to personal attacks and threats fuelled by racial animus", adding that the last few weeks had made clear that more must be done to "combat bias and hate in all its forms".
It was a sentiment echoed, with more focused anger, by others on the left.
"So what we've learned is this: Bad-faith bigots pretending they're concerned about antisemitism will happily use women of colour - especially black women - as a scapegoat and lightning rod for large systemic issues," wrote novelist Celeste Ng on social media. "And that people invested in maintaining those systemic issues will comply.""
Dr. Gay has pulled the most classic defence in American history: the race card. The most powerful Pokémon card in the deck. Obviously, there are nasty voices everywhere on the internet. However, I don’t think anyone in the world believes that the furor is led by, motivated by, or is even fuelled in any way by her skin colour. The truth is, she could have been green, and the world would have found her position just as offensive. Even for those most vicious of online personal attacks, I find little pity in my heart for Dr. Gay after she shrugged off support for Hamas and hatred for Jews across her campus. She got a miniscule taste of what Jews and other ideologically subjugated races feel every day across college campuses, and she folded like laundry.
Celeste Ng has a particularly bizarre conspiracy theory about the backlash, theorising that organised (or even decentralised but somehow aligned) “bigots” are “pretending they’re concerned about antisemitism” and that they’re “using women of colour—especially black women—as a scapegoat."
Her concocted theory likely isn’t true. The panellists were very clearly displaying a total apathy for anti-Semitic hatred while still pedestalling other races so highly that they even have segregated racial spaces and graduation ceremonies. Ng is falling right into the ideological trap of ethno-socialism, not seeing the wood for the trees, not seeing the completely blatant systemic racism built into Harvard at every layer, written into their policies. She is punching at the fog of internet bigotry as if it were unreasonable and racist to criticise a poorly qualified, badly spoken diversity hire that stole academic work.
“The current Harvard controversy reached its culmination with Dr Gay's resignation, but the larger conservative effort to undermine - and ultimately supplant - liberal-dominated institutions of higher education continues.”
Here’s the bias in one neat quote. “Undermine”, “supplant”. The language makes it clear where Zurcher sits. According to Zurcher, this isn’t extremist left-wing ideology crumbling over its own stupidity; it’s a right-wing conspiracy to “destroy the universities." It’s not a victory over antisemitism; it’s a victory for “racists and bigots." It’s not a fair criticism of diversity hiring; it’s a "subterfuge." The right-wing activists aren’t exposing them; they’re "undermining." There isn’t a movement away from leftist ideological supremacy; it's “supplanting” by conservatives. This is exactly how the rest of the article crumbles into leftist bias.
“In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis - a current Republican presidential candidate - replaced the leadership of the New College of Florida, cancelling its diversity and inclusion programmes, firing faculty members and putting right-wing activists, including Mr Rufo, on its board trustees. His goal, in part, is to offer a conservative counterpoint to the modern liberal arts college.
Donald Trump, as part of his "Agenda 47" plan for a second term in office, has called for changes in how US universities are accredited, to emphasise "defending the American tradition and Western civilization". He has also pledged to end equity programmes, force universities to reduce overhead costs and tax the endowments of schools that do not comply.”
Governor Ron DeSantis catches a lot of fair criticism from both the moderate left and the right. The way he has dealt with the infiltration of ethno-socialism into universities and culture in Florida has been heavy-handed, although it’s good to see someone remove porn from children’s libraries and protect children from scissor-happy child genital surgeons. It’s certainly helping protect children in the rest of the West as a bastion against strange sex beliefs. He was right to remove race programmes from their state-sponsored university, as racism does not belong in Western society, and it is probably a fair move to counterbalance some of the more extremist left-wing elements with some more conservative voices. President Trump has also walked a similar line, looking to try to relax the grip of ethno-socialism on US universities while also trying to reduce the amount of money that students have to pay in order to get a degree. It’s funny; I think Zurcher intended all of those statements about both Trump and DeSantis to be accusatory and distressing but ended up making them sound like the only sane people in the room, which, for any US presidential candidate (or former President), is difficult.
“Harvard may ultimately replace Dr Gay with someone who has a similar academic and political disposition, who continues to defend ways to make Harvard's student body diverse.
But by toppling the president of one of the nation's most prestigious universities - the one involved in the Supreme Court fight over racial preferences in admissions earlier this year - conservatives have a substantial victory on which to build.”
These last two sentences are strong contenders for one of my most favourite sign-offs ever in BBC News Lies history. Simultaneously, only pixels apart, Zurcher says the disgraced academic plagiarist Dr. Gay is trying to defend some kind of ethnic diversity to reduce racism, and then admits that Dr. Gay was involved directly in defending racist hiring and enrollment practices at Harvard! What!! You have to be deep in those ethno-socialist trenches to even put these two sentences together. It is as if Zurcher hasn’t learned that diversity hiring is racist and bad and that having racial hierarchies is also racist and stupid. Decisions on university leadership were made for arbitrary reasons around race and gender, and they got the results they deserved. A failed academic thief who couldn’t care less about those at the bottom of her own biassed racial hierarchy. Dr. Gay was at the forefront of protecting students from any kind of backlash for celebrating Hamas atrocities, yet she is also at the forefront of promoting racist hiring and enrollment.
It seems that diversity is important at Harvard in every way except ideological. There is one way to frame race, one way to frame gender, and one way to frame identity.