The discussion over Claudine Gay’s resignation ignores a key issue: Harvard and the Ivy League should in fact be razed to the ground.

After that, progressives should extirpate the entire Ivy League.

Should Claudine Gay have resigned as president of Harvard? Are conservatives right that a rabidly pro-Hamas left has captured Harvard? Are liberals correct that the fascistic right has launched an all-out assault on academic freedom, at Harvard? The New York Times has explored these questions (about Harvard) over the course of almost 17,000 articles.

These are indeed fascinating topics. However, they ignore a key issue: That for anyone with a progressive perspective, Harvard should neither be reformed (to eliminate its wokeness) nor protected (from the forces of reaction). Rather, it should be razed to the ground.

Then, after Harvard has been razed, we must salt the earth, Carthage-style, so a new Harvard does not grow in its place. Next we have to destroy the rest of the Ivy League. Finally, anyone with enough energy left over should sail an emissions-free ship through the Panama Canal to California and obliterate Stanford.

Let’s start with a story that explains why I’m so personally committed to this cause. Then we can move on to a more rational explanation of why you should be too.

read more: https://theintercept.com/2024/01/06/claudine-gay-harvard-university-ivy-league/

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    1•6 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    As I watched Baghdad being bombed, and untold numbers of humans being converted into wet, red scraps of flesh, a tide of emotion swept over me unbidden.

    I had unknowingly absorbed a vague sense that there were these dusky foreigners out there, led by a two-bit dictator who’d gotten too big for his britches, who thought that they could defy us, and were being taught that they could not.

    But I’m glad I experienced it, because it gave me a visceral sense of how the world feels to the people who ultimately run places like Harvard and Yale.

    This gatekeeping would be bad enough if these schools — or anyone — could reliably measure some type of “merit.” People change all their lives, and we shouldn’t have to rely on a cohort of 50-year-olds who fit through an incredibly narrow aperture when they were 18 or 22.

    (Christopher Rufo, the right-wing activist instrumental in bringing down Claudine Gay, is “senior fellow and director of the initiative on critical race” there.)

    But Salam — Harvard ’01 — once argued, “Kids who attend elite schools are a mixed bag, and the vast majority are crashing bores.

    The original article contains 1,515 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!