An instance of the mode we’re in right now. This is stuff that looks like News but really isn’t. It’s a snit about something that should be an open-and-shut case but can’t be allowed to be because so much is riding on it. A $2 billion hit against Harvard sounds like a big thing, but Harvard has a $53 billion endowment. A $53 billion endowment and a student body being charged $66,000 a year for the privilege of saying they went there, whether they learned anything useful or not. Bear in mind that a mere 50 years ago, Harvard tuition was $7,500 a year and the endowment was a staggeringly huge $1 billion.
Harvard will survive all this, but the damage to its reputation and legacy has already been locked into history. Done and dusted as they say in the Common Rooms on Mt. Auburn Street. More about that soon, but for now, we’re seeing all kinds of nostalgic liberal outrage about principle, separation of powers, and who in the hell can tell Harvard what to do.
My personal favorite was the brave position staked out by the sad-sack governor of New York, which I lampooned at my Facebook page:
I had fun compiling and writing it. No new ideas worth talking
about because I’d already talked about them here at IPR.
All the current hoopla is a combination of political deflection and inarticulate angst. The key question “Who can tell
Harvard what to do?” is a classic application of Occam’s Razor, discussed here recently (here’s the
EZ version of that discussion), meant to provide the easiest answer of all, which is “Move along, nothing to see here but us liberals being liberal.”
The damage they claim they’re trying to prevent was a Bunker Buster that fell on Harvard almost a year-and-a-half ago, in January of 2024. It was described in detail in a post titled “Seismic Cracks in the Icy Democrat Coalition.”
The introduction to that post said, in part:
“It’s complicated. We don’t like complicated. If you can’t say it in a tweet or a 30 second sound bite on teevee, don’t waste our time. I remember some decades ago when it was a great joke one year that USA Today had just won a Pulitzer Prize for “Best Investigative Paragraph.’ These days any argument that requires research, in-depth analysis, and careful piecing together of the people and partisan positions involved is easily dismissible as conspiracy theory, most likely by right wing fascist liars.
BUT…
…once you reject the idea that something, anything, is too complicated to understand you will start to perceive that the universe is sending out helpful clues about what’s going on. This is actually a feature of the universe, which is its own set of nested Chinese Dolls. If we can follow the doll sequence down far enough, there will eventually be a doll small enough to be studied in detail and thereby provide information about all the others as well.
We have just been given a doll of the perfect size. That is the role of the Claudine Gay story. She is a one-woman confluence of all the colliding parts of the Democrat shattering that is underway. What are the colliding parts? All the key components of the coalition: the Z Generation, the edifice of American education, women, blacks, Jews, LGBTQ’ers, muslim immigrants, and the overarching ideology of victimhood. Not to mention a native New Yorker, which is hardly a trivial credential. As a representative to one degree or another of all of these Dem constituencies, Claudine Gay was supposed to be clad in impenetrable armor, the kind that would make her an unstoppable weapon against all of the Democrat’s targeted enemies. That’s why and how she came to be Chosen by the most prestigious university in the land to be their President some several months ago.
But it has all blown up, almost like a Saturn rocket on liftoff. Why? Because the coalition is not really an alliance of the like-minded, not really a coalition but more like a cartel, which is defined as a truce between competitors who can agree on a handful of shared selfish objectives. Cartels always break apart when self interest finally forces differences into the open and what could once be blinked away becomes, finally, a deal killer. OPEC prospered as long as the member nations profited by gouging the United States on the price of oil. It crumbled when member states began to discover advantages, better deals, by dealing with customers under the table. Why shouldn’t they go for a better deal? It’s not like they were ever really all that fond of one another. There were always potentially disastrous differences hiding under OPEC’s magnificent conference room tabletop.”
What’s happening at Harvard is not simple. It’s not about principle. It’s about all kinds of things no one wants to look into deeply. Except that I looked into them and put them together in the linked post.
Now please read (reread) the post called “Seismic Cracks in the Icy Democrat Coalition.” It’s long but worth it.
Is that a bullet hole or a black hole?
P.S. Harbingers of things to come?
[All] Things Fall Apart
Wheels Within Wheels
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