A more wretched hive of scum and villainy than Mos Eisley? Try the administrations of Penn, Harvard and MIT.

Just a whiff of the old Roman circus but interesting none-the-less.  

Since October 7th, on many elite American universities, there have been numerous and repeated instances of bullying, harassment, intimidation and physical violence against individual students and the entire community by a toxic stew of professors and far left students eager to exhibit racist and anti-semitic viewpoints based on their support of Hamas and their visceral hatred of all Jews and those in Israel in particular.  

The mix of racists are largely far left students and Muslim students, seemingly a good number of whom are here on education visas, along with some unknown component of anarchists and Antifa types.  Their actions range from unauthorized marches and demonstrations to actual attacks on individuals identified as being Jewish.  

Actions which are illegal under the law, independent of whether the actions are consistent with that particular school's code of conduct.  And just to be clear, I have never come across a university code of conduct which would accept the actions.  Especially in these days of the secular worship of diversity, equity and inclusion amongst academia.

The administrations of these elite academic institutions, with a few honorable exceptions, have been deeply reprehensible.  They have effectively blessed violent anti-semitism with their silence and inaction, accepting attacks on their students, threats, suppression of free speech, and physical intimidation by the lowest cognitive trash of academia.

One of my alma maters, University of Pennsylvania, led by President Liz Magill has been an especial disgrace.  She has been seeking for several years to fire a Jewish law professor of some repute for the professor's clear articulation of unpleasant truths arising from academia's pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  Then along comes the violent Hamas supporting mob of anti-semites and Magill is quite comfortable turning a blind eye to their predations on the student body, especially Jewish students.

President Magill of Penn, along with President Gay of Harvard and President Kornbluth of MIT were called to account for their effective toleration of violent anti-semitism on their campuses; universities which are materially supported by US taxpayer funds.

A clip of their testimony.

The presidents of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism:

Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment?

The… pic.twitter.com/eVlPCHMcVZ

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) December 5, 2023

Impossible to not see a pattern of DEI appointments, completely incapable of defending their actions in a public forum.  Take them out of their privileged and protected cocoons and they show as the mediocrities they are and probably always have been.  

It has been my general experience working among the top level of corporations (C-suite and Boards) as well as State agencies, that when you encounter manifest failure or incompetence at senior levels, it is almost always masked by an individual's superior communication skills.  In other words, most people rise by their demonstrated capability but there are some who rise because their social skills combined with their rhetorical skills hide their lack of ability.  

The three blind mice of Gay, Magill and Kornbluth felt like an object lesson of mediocrity risen to power.

But where was the communication capability?

What struck me most was how sophomoric their testimony appeared, how coordinated with one another, and how badly it was delivered.

One of my other alma mater's, Georgetown University, is a Jesuit institution where precision and specificity of thought and spoken word is valued.  A tradition conducive to legalistic and rhetorical niceties but which has the drawback sometimes of appearing to be the argument of an ass.

Obviously Gay, Magill and Kornbluth are not Jesuits but they were dancing on the head of pins as they each tried to draw the distinction between mere spoken words and actual criminality.  An important distinction except when you are on the wrong side of logic and evidence.

Trying to claim that physically mobbing a Jewish student does not constitute anti-semitism would be challenging under the best of circumstances, with the sharpest of minds, and with the readiest of wits.  That is not what we see in the video.  

We have dull cognitive blades trying to carry a point which has no validity or really even any relevance.  Criminal acts were committed by anti-semites among their professors and their students and they are manifestly unwilling to hold those professors and students accountable to either the schools's own code of conduct or facilitate the prosecution of criminal cases where assaults and intimidation have occurred.  And they certainly appear unwilling to account for themselves to the American taxpayer who make their whole charade of administrative leadership possible.  

Magill especially came off poorly.  Kornbluth gave wretched answers but seemed, generally, to take the proceedings seriously.  Gay of Harvard was rhetorically quicker though trodding barren intellectual and moral ground.  

Magill delivered the same wretched argument that there had been no transgressions of the code of conduct because no genocide had been committed by the demonstrators but did so with supplicating grins, smirks and giggles.  

As a management consultant helping large corporations around the world, I am accustomed to helping executives deal with complex issues and to make difficult and unpleasant trade-off decisions.

The challenges presented by our universities and their administrations are relatively easy and straight-forward in comparison.  To a certain extent, people are policy.  Replace the bad apples, shrink the administrative bloat by 40% (as a start), enforce both the law and the university's own code of conduct, equally and consistently.  There.  Done.  Execute the plan, let it settle for a couple of years and then fine tune a bit.  We are only pretending that it is hard to fix.

UPDATE:  From The University presidents by Tyler Cowen.  Saying far more clearly what I was attempting to allude to regarding their Jesuitical responses and dancing on pins.  

1. Their entire testimony is ruled by their lawyers, by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups.  That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.  As Katherine Boyle stated: “This is Rule by HR Department and it gets dark very fast.”

[snip]

2. They are all in a defensive crouch.  None of them are good on TV.  None of them are good in front of Congress.  They have ended up disgracing their universities, in front of massive audiences (the largest they ever will have?), simply for the end goal of maintaining a kind of (illusory?) maximum defensibility for their positions within their universities.  At that they are too skilled.

[snip]

3. Not one came close to admitting how hypocritical private university policies are on free speech.  You can call for Intifada but cannot express say various opinions about trans individuals.  Not de facto.  Whether you think they should or not, none of these universities comes close to enforcing “First Amendment standards” for speech, even off-campus speech for their faculty, students, and affiliates.