Harvard University announced Tuesday that it will uphold its policy banning members of single-gender groups — namely, frats and sororities — from holding leadership positions on campus and from obtaining endorsements for awards like the Rhodes and Marshall scholarships, reported The Daily Caller. This latter restriction effectively barring fraternity and sorority members from those scholarships because endorsements are required to obtain them.
Frats and sororities are “a product of another era, a time when Harvard’s student body was all male, culturally homogeneous, and overwhelmingly white and affluent,” said Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust and Harvard Corporation senior fellow William F. Lee.
I love how this is introduced as some sort of rationale. Just because single-gender groups are from an era with different social norms, they must be eradicated. Sure, we apply this to things like slavery, segregation, and male-only suffrage, in which one group of people benefited at the cost of another, but that doesn’t mean we throw every institution from before a certain time period out the window.
This is the same mindset used by cultural Marxists to tear down Confederate statues, plaster Thomas Jefferson with blood or a shroud and sign that says “f*** white supremacy,” and burn a bust of Abraham Lincoln.
I have to give them credit: Harvard makes no secret that this boils down to a difference in principles.
“The tensions between freedom and equality, between the rights of the individual and the welfare of the community have long challenged American society and have been the focus of much of the [unrecognized single-gender social organization] debate,” said Faust and Lee.
“As a professor of history noted in last October’s Faculty meeting, ‘the freedom of association enjoyed by some of our students comes at the cost of excluding the majority of our students from those associations.'”
That’s some serious 20th century collectivism right there. First of all, siding with equality over freedom is code for embracing equal outcome instead of equal opportunity. Second, saying individual rights and community welfare are at odds is simply a straw man. Unlike slavery and other discarded institutions, single-gender groups aren’t state-sanctioned discrimination. Boys like hanging out with boys and girls like hanging out with girls, so they created organizations to facilitate those interactions. But that’s not stopping anyone from setting up co-ed organizations — in fact, there are tons of those!
But I guess we should be grateful Harvard’s still allowing frats and sororities to exist at all. A faculty committee at the school recommended banning the groups entirely back in July.
Whether Harvard penalizes single-gender group membership or bans it entirely, it’s doubtful that social dynamics will change all that much. Students will still form friend groups with those similar to themselves and network with those groups to get jobs and social benefits, those groups just won’t have those strange Greek letters.
Jeffrey Epstein donated $6.5 million to Harvard back in 2003, according to Newsweek. A few years later, the billionaire was the subject of a probable cause affidavit for sexual exploitation of minors and Harvard’s school paper asked the school if it planned on giving the money back.
“Mr. Epstein’s gift is funding important research using mathematics to study areas such as evolutionary theory, viruses, and cancers,” Harvard said. “The University is not considering returning this gift.”
Now remember that this was after 2002 to 2005, the dates during which court documents say Epstein put together his extensive network of underage victims, but before he was indicted in 2007, before Epstein got convicted of soliciting a teen for prostitution in 2008, and before Alexander Acosta, who stepped down as Labor Secretary Friday, made a deal not to prosecute Epstein that same year.
Harvard said last week that the $6.5 million Epstein had donated was already spent, but you’ve got to wonder if that was the case in 2008. And the school’s action is particularly curious given how in May, it outright fired Ronald Sullivan, a dean who was at one point representing accused rapist Harvey Weinstein, amid pressure from students and faculty.
If this kind of deranged guilty until proven innocent and guilt by association mindset is Harvard’s standard, what does taking money from Epstein say about the premier academic institution?
Whereas, after the Parkland massacre, Kyle Kashuv’s classmates David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez pushed for gun control, Kyle advocated for the removal of gun-free zones, background checks, and has called out the Broward County deputy who didn’t enter the school during the shooting. This made him really popular with conservatives like Ben Shapiro.
Kyle was ranked second in his Parkland class and got a 1550 on the SAT, according to The Daily Wire, and so got accepted to Harvard on what looked to be academic merit. But his activism made him a target and haters had a compelling reason to ask Harvard to rescind his admission after the release of a Google Doc between Kyle and other Parkland classmates in which Kyle said the n-word multiple times.
Kyle put out a statement saying he’s “embarrassed” by the remarks on the document, claiming that he and his fellow classmates were “using callous and inflammatory language in an effort to be as extreme and shocking as possible.”
Harvard sent Kyle a letter asking for a written explanation and Kyle responded with a similar note, suggesting that he had changed since he wrote those comments before the shooting. Harvard replied, saying that while the admissions committee “appreciated [his] candor,” it also “takes seriously the qualities of maturity and moral character.” The school proceeded to rescind Kyle’s admission offer.
Now, there are a few factors at play here. First of all, keep in mind that Kyle’s biggest defender, Shapiro, hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to defending speech: he agreed that ABC was right to fire Roseanne Barr and apparently told journalist Denise McAllister that she wasn’t welcome to write anymore at the Daily Wire after she made some remarks that were anti-gay, though nothing as taboo as the n-word. Back to Kyle, though, would it have made a difference if Kyle were pro-gun control instead of anti-gun control? I’m not so sure. Sure, the left wanted him booted, but Laura Loomer was also a big proponent for Harvard to pull its offer. Also, remember that Harvard rescinded its offers to at least ten students a couple years ago after the revelation that they had shared offensive memes in a private Facebook group.
There was no indication that those students were conservative or liberal, nor was there any massive campaign to get them booted. But Harvard’s decision was political in both that case and Kyle’s in the sense that it limits the free speech of prospective students, even if that’s freedom to say some pretty awful things. And don’t forget that the school now punishes students who join single-gender groups like frats or sororities.
After the Mueller report, some lefties are still not letting the whole Trump-Russia collusion fantasy die. One of them seems to be former vice president Al Gore, who spoke at Harvard’s commencement and suggested that President Trump is above the law, according to Campus Reform.
“Supporters of authoritarianism define loyalty to America’s core principles as treason against its new would-be sovereign,” said Gore. “This explains the appeal to would-be autocrats of multiple bromances with extreme authoritarians, at least one of whom, in our current time, has been allowed to sink his teeth into America’s democratic electoral process and play with it like a chew toy.”
OK so Gore was probably pretty proud at coming up with that metaphor, but how accurate is it really? Sure, you had the Russian troll farm accounts on social media, but 1) not all of the info put out by those accounts was false and 2) it really boils down to whether consumers or Big Tech corps are responsible for quality control of their news. I’d argue it’s the consumers’ responsibility, but hey, I’m totally cool with Facebook and Twitter taking the liability, as long they’re regulated as publishers, which means: bye-bye censoring conservatives.
And you’ve just got to ask yourself: who in their right mind, on a day of celebration, would want to subject themselves to a political diatribe? From the left or right? And it’s kind of scary to think that Generation Z, the zoomers, might get actual pleasure out of listening to this kind of claptrap. Anyways, Trump and Russia weren’t the only targets on Gore’s list.
Gore proceeded to talk about global warming and fossil fuels.
Perhaps the most telling part of Gore’s speech was when he outright admitted “I am also here to recruit you.”
