With David Hogg admission, Harvard circles the drain

By admitting semi-literate anti-2nd Amendment activist David Hogg, Harvard shows how intellectually corrupt tax-payer supported higher education has become.

David Hogg HarvardI believe I’ve made it clear over the years how little I think of Harvard or many of its graduates. My disdain for Harvard started with losing respect for Harvard Law School – something that happened long before Obama appeared on the political scene. I’ve been working as a lawyer for more than thirty years and am hard pressed to think of a post-1984 graduate of Harvard Law School for whom I’ve had any respect.

Admittedly, my “N” of Harvard Law grads isn’t that large because I worked on the West coast, not the East. Still I’ve dealt with about 30-40 Harvard lawyers over the years. Some have been amiable dimwits, who clearly got into Harvard based upon criteria other than grades and overall academic ability (either race or interesting personal histories). I didn’t mind those people.

The Harvard lawyers who bugged me were the arrogant ones who felt that their Harvard law degree relieved them of the obligation to abide by rules of professional conduct or ordinary human decency. I know that there are decent, intelligent Harvard Law grads out there (and if you’re one who is reading this, I certainly don’t mean this screed to apply to you); I just didn’t ever come across them in my practice.

Over the years, my disdain for Harvard Law grads has extended to graduates of Harvard’s undergraduate program. Harvard manages to skim off the best and brightest from high schools across America and, at least in the liberal arts, then uses their four-year attendance to turn them into ill-educated, hard-Left drones. Any school that indoctrinates rather than educates is a lousy place in my estimation, and that’s true regardless of its reputation.

Harvard dropped even more in my eyes when it became apparent that it was systematically discriminating against Asian applicants in favor of applicants from other non-white groups. Off the top of my head, I can quickly come up with three reasons why this is wrong:

First, I tend to side with Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed that racism ends when we judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Second, I think it’s disgraceful to penalize people for doing well, which is what’s happening to Asian applicants. Third, I have no doubt about the accuracy of the study showing that non-white students who are “elevated” into colleges for which they are objectively unprepared become failures, whereas those who attend colleges that better match their skills and abilities succeed in life.

With all those strikes against Harvard (strikes, at least, according to my judgment), I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Harvard has extended an offer to David Piglet . . . er, David Hogg, the kid who was nowhere near the Parkland School shooting but who leveraged his attendance at that school into a very prominent anti-gun platform. Indeed, in some ways I admire Hogg’s initiative in surfing Leftist obsessions to achieve his own fame, but I don’t admire Hogg or anything he believes in or stands for.

One cannot get around the fact that neither Hogg’s grades nor his test scores would normally have brought him to Harvard’s attention. Moreover, his tweets revealed a young man who is barely literate and extremely ignorant. It is purely his hostility to the Second Amendment (about which he knows nothing) that sees him being invited to an institution that once produced people notable for actual accomplishments, rather than politically correct views.

By contrast, conservative Parkland student Kyle Kashuv, who supports the Second Amendment, shows himself to be informed, witty, literate – and in every way the type of student who would have been a Harvard shoo-in thirty years ago, but this year doesn’t stand a chance. (Incidentally, being Jewish, he wouldn’t have been a Harvard shoo-in 80 or more years ago. Harvard’s had issues for a while.)

Harvard is speedily reducing itself to academic irrelevance, at least in the non-STEM arena. The downward slide is currently still slow enough not to affect its reputation in Leftist circles, but at a certain point, its slide will become a plunge and it will be a school remembered for past, rather than present, greatness.

I’ll end here by saying, as I often do, that it’s time we withdraw all federal funds from higher education, whether in the form of grants to research coked up quail, student loans that encourage kids to waste years on such non-remunerative pursuits as Womyn’s or Queer studies, or any other form of direct or indirect funding. Schools such as Harvard have endowments sufficient to make federal funds unnecessary and all schools, whether Harvard or not, should compete in the marketplace of ideas like any other business.

It’s true that, when colleges and universities advanced actual knowledge, it made sense for Americans, citizens of the only nation standing tall after WWII, to advance taxpayer funds to these institutions for the benefit of all Americans. Now, though, these institutions are expending the greatest part of their time and money to create an elite class that loathes those it tries to control, and that marinates itself in Marxist ideology that bears no relationship to actual education and that, instead, seeks to undermine everything that made America a unique nation among nations.

Incidentally, in case you’re wondering what comes out of modern academia, you must read the following Twitter thread. I know that the quoted academic article comes from professors at Aarhus University and the Copenhagen Business School, but the intellectual corruption it reveals is the same throughout the Western world.

In addition to the fundamental silliness of telling us to learn horsie problem-solving skills for “posthuman leadership,” please note the impenetrable language that academics think makes them look smart while ordinary people understand is meant to hide stupidity and banality.


And no, I would not be at all surprised to learn that this “study” is yet another con, intended to reveal the emptiness at the heart of modern academia. The sad fact is that it’s impossible nowadays to tell the real academic garbage from the satire.