There has to be a lawsuit here. The only way this shit stops, is a staggering award by a judge or jury against Princeton for lacking due process in the way he (or Sabatini at MIT) was treated.
Here's hoping but I wonder why the alumni are not speaking out, or more importantly, withholding financial support. At the end of the day, money is the only thing cowardly administrators respond to.
Seriously, why do alumni not speak out about this? I emphasized my Michigan degree on my resume back in the day, and was proud to have attended, but now I'm embarrassed at their role in destroying our country.
Word has it that the moral narcissists are now gunning for outspoken Ivy League alums via their alum groups. The pathology doesn't end in the Ivory Tower. It's coming for us all.
They all cowards God knows why they won’t stand up and I think money and those large endowments play a very big part the woke community is on a roll at the moment not sure how long they can sustain it but I think when it goes down it will go down big!!!
Wealthy alumni (the donors who might be listened to) don't speak out because they went to Princeton in order to become wealthy members of the elite, and they're terrified of losing their status.
While it's true they're behaving cowardly, most of us are cowards when to taking large risks against significantly more powerful and vengeful enemies, and rightly so.
Brian the average American doesn’t want to behave like a coward we aren’t cowards we have endured 2 years of sheer madness in the name of these lockdowns and survived the elite control us at the moment they tell us what we can read tell us what we can say ruin peoples lives when they feel threaten by someone who fights back or stands up they are the government so if a lot of us stand up and cause disruptions without burning and breaking it’s called civil disobedience the month of July cancel you Netflix subs the month August cancel Disney trips September cancel cable the media are the enemy of the people anyway their misinformation and brainwashing beggars belief don’t buy on line for October buy local shop at your mall nobody will starve remember we can always go back to Disney we can always reinstate Netflix etc we fighting for the heart and soul of America we have 21/2 years till 2024 we can do real damage by just standing up and being an American this is who we are!
Michelle, you're actually making my point for me. Cancelling your Netflix subscription? Forgoing Disneyland? Don't shop at WalMart in October?
These are not courageous things. If you believe woke capitalism is a threat, should you do them? Absolutely! But they entail no risk and only minor inconvenience.
When I say most of us are cowards, don't take it the wrong way. Most humans, in all times and places, have been cowards. We celebrate the martyrs and the saints precisely because we know most of us wouldn't do what they did; we know we would cave. Common Sense exists because 1 woman was willing to stand up and take a huge professional risk. Bari is NOT a coward. But based on my actions (or lack thereof) so far in this war, I am.
All of my actions have been, not performative, but largely risk free. We homeschool our kids in order to keep the insanity away from them, but, like opting out of Disney and NetFlix, that's just opting out of public schools. I haven't gone to a school board that my wife teaches in and spoken up about critical race theory infecting our local schools. The reason I haven't is because it would be extremely dangerous for her professionally and therefore for our family. That's what I mean by cowardice.
Jon, absolutely right. I think Katz is going after the lawyers conducting the school's investigation for the cause you cite: lack of due process. But I would like to see him go after the student with whom he had an affair with for defamation of character. He may not win - but people who slander others with no concrete proof of anything have to know they will have to do it the hard way and defend themselves in a court of law. Perhaps then we'll see less of these public witch hunts we've been witnessing.
I don't agree that a lawsuit is the only solution - or even an effective solution. Historically, there has been two overlapping periods in our nation's long intellectual history where the private elite institutions in the East Coast seemed irreparably broken - the ~1930-1960 period in which they enacted a complex system of admissions, recruitment and tenure policies designed for the sole purpose of limiting Jewish enrollment and faculty (similar to what's happening to East Asians today - but more extensive), and the 1950-1975 period in which virtually all of the Ivy League social science departments were dominated by far-leftists - around half of which self-identified as Marxist - and were beginning to purge every single liberal (i.e. believer in free market capitalism) in their departments.
These periods of insanity didn't end with lawsuits. They were solved by a much stronger concept: competition. Thousands of talented Jewish students who were shut out of Columbia simply went next door to NYU; those shut out of Harvard went next door to MIT (and to a lesser extent BC/BU/Tufts); and many also took less expensive options at public universities. The emergence of these alternative institutions took place in exactly the same period that the Ivy League was trying to maintain its rigid WASP culture. These students (mostly, not all Jewish) built up campus cultures and alumni networks that matched the best of the Ivy Leagues while being much more open-minded, pluralist and meritocratic - a fact that was widely known by the 1960s and threatened the Ivy League's very existence. By the 1970s all of the Ivy Leagues were forced to abolish their discriminatory policies against Jews and even took up the mantle of diversity to reach out to African-Americans and Hispanics (ironically, the same principle that has now been corrupted to create racial and political barriers today).
Competition played the same role in ending the far-left grasp on social science departments. From the 1950s to 1975 or so, talented young social-science PhDs who didn’t have a portrait of Lenin in their bedrooms were self-exiled to regional universities in the Mid-west, South and West of the country where they set up spaces for rigorous intellectual inquiry. UChicago’s economics department, barely considered top 20 in 1950, quickly rose to became the undisputed best department and graduate program in economics by 1980 (with MIT a close second, benefitting in some measure from the Jewish exodus from Harvard as well). Minnesota, Rochester, Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie-Mellon, Caltech, UCLA all went from second-rate departments to producers of Nobel prizes within a few decades, maintaining amongst them their own economic journals and conferences which threatened to surpass the economic orthodoxy. Over a 25 year period 1975-2000, only one Princeton-affiliated economist received a Nobel prize, the brilliant theorist John Nash; for Yale and Harvard that figure was zero. In the UK, a similar story occurred with the LSE quickly surpassing Oxford/Cambridge in prestige. By the time of the 1980s, the rigorous methodological and intellectual changes in economics had spilled over to the neighboring fields of sociology and political science, upending a largely qualitative and Marxian establishment in those fields as well. Perhaps most consequentially, the new wave of rigorous social science researchers – generally called behaviorists – also took a leading role in setting up graduate schools of business (a hitherto unknown concept) that became another source of competition to traditional social science departments – producing research publications that encompassed almost all traditional fields of social science, with the qualifier that the same faculty must regularly teach business students and thus be *forced* to reconcile some of their research with actually-existing society, and in this clever way gradually clearing out the navel-gazing rotten core of social science hierarchy. By the 1980s, most of the “saltwater” economics departments had surrendered and hiring extensively from places like UChicago, Minnesota and Rochester; and by the 2000s graduate students in sociology and political science were taking classes on statistics and social inquiry rather than the latest batch of post-structuralist theory from Paris and Frankfurt.
These efforts worked because they provided a clearly-better *alternative* than the corrupted core of elite institutions. In both cases, economic self-interest played a key role. Large companies that were hiring out of NYU, rather than Columbia, forced Columbia to internally reform. Private-sector R&D divisions that were increasingly collaborating with MIT STEM faculty – and injecting a massive amount of funding to their research – forced the Harvard faculty to examine why they’re missing out on a slice of the pie. Similarly, social science faculty at places like Chicago and Rochester took care to establish small, rigorous programs of study where they maintained open spaces and seminars, freely mixing with their graduate students, and ensuring that they all become good teachers on their own - and it’s this tremendous human capital investment that eventually convinced aspiring young academics to abandon the Ivy League social science departments where a disproportionate amount of PhD graduates failed to maintain academic careers.
You need to produce something of value to dislodge a failing monopoly. Lawsuits don’t do that. The threat of legal compensation simply forces their activities into more subtle mechanisms. Instead of outright firing a centrist/center-right tenured faculty member, they can, for instance, dramatically expand the scope of their inquiry during the recruitment and tenure process, forcing any tenured hires to agree to terms of agreement that filtered out anyone with non-PC beliefs (without being explicitly discriminatory), and thus ensuring anyone who reaches tenure stage would carefully toe the party line. On the opposing end, if legal payouts are normalized, a disgruntled tenured faculty member who wants to retire might *intentionally* provoke the university establishments into firing him by stepping out of line - getting well compensated in the process, and doing nothing to help repair the broken state of affairs in elite institutions. Economic incentives need to be aligned towards the actual supply of good research and good teaching under a free environment - not for protesting the lack of it in rotten institutions.
While I agree completely that, over time, competition is the only way to solve the problem of the Ivies . . . lawsuits are necessary for the personal harm caused to specific professors caught in the dragnet of Rightthink. I believe both are needed--lawsuits for personal damages, competition for structural. Neither, alone, will cover the other's need.
My concern is that the infrastructure of our permanent government, media and academia have been so thoroughly corrupted by wokeness that competition alone will never solve the problems in academia, unless a movement to create more 2 year specialty degrees to support STEM careers starts to make the traditional 4 year degree obsolete. Also, way too many HR departments build Masters degrees into job requirements to make interviewing easier, but I don't see an end result in that either.
Also, I'm wondering why every state in the union hasn't moved to create a Hilldale or UAustin as an alternative to the bloated indoctrination alternatives.
I'm sorry, I just don't think waiting for an organic solution is the answer, and let me say, I hate litigation as a solution for anything, but it's the only answer I can see. It does, if nothing else, highlight that a court finds these practices illegal, and shines light on the problem.
Finally, your post was excellent, even though I may disagree with some aspects of it.
I agree. Wokeness has become too all-pervasive, and it is led by people who will stop at nothing. I fear that accreditation boards will make competition impossible by refusing to allow non-Woke schools to operate.
Well that’s my point on litigation something has to shake this system the non woke kids/people/professors won’t be able to work in the real world amidst all the pandemic havoc now they are still cancelling 5 star profs daily creating BDS groups on their campus
Also the Dept of Education and expanded student loan program happened in 1979. Both of those factors have shielded the Universities from normal market pressures, and in fact, have created a strong, reliable source of liberal indoctrination, which the DNC will fight viciously to protect.
Sy, I don't believe that your prediction that the 'market corrects' will hold in this case.
I like your thought process on this. But even by using it we have had 30 years or so since 1930 when they were not off-track. It seems to me to be a recurring pattern of failure.
The only way this shit stops is a class action against all the woke universities Joshua and David have nothing to lose they are only 2 of the profs that Bari has put on there are many more and watching Jonny Depps trial against Amber Heard I think the white male is fighting back and could be winning and like Joshua’s wife there are people who are standing with them and it’s definitely growing we all need to stand up for them!!!
I am a VP of Operations for a federal contractor that does consulting and IT work. I hire a lot of people every year.
Being perfectly honest, I now discount anyone coming from the Ivy league and here is why.
The SINGLE most important characteristic when I hire is character. If someone is not a good person, a good team player, has a level of personal and intellectual humility, then no matter how smart or how educated they are, ultimately they are more trouble than they are worth. If they lack real empathy with people unlike them, then they will make horrible managers and will fail at working with clients.
Increasingly I find that the best people are coming from what are normally thought of as second or even third tier schools or have taken unconventional paths such as taking 6 yrs to graduate while working through school to pay for it.
I was on the corporate board tasked with identifying a new general counsel about 6 months ago. We had applicants from various places, many of whom had come from the top tier law schools like Yale and Georgetown. Ultimately, we picked a youngish woman who graduated from the University of Nebraska and went to law school in Florida. She has proved to be amazing at her job and is really enjoyed as a person by her peers.
It is time to admit that our "elite" schools are no longer so elite and that they are producing weak people with poor character. Oh...they may have plenty of power under the mental hood, but they are useless to an organization. Of course, that is a generalization. I am sure that there are quite a few good kids coming out of those places, but an elite degree no longer carries the cache it once did.
Twenty years ago the Wall Street Journal wrote basically the same thing: Hire a bargain from a state school with a demonstrated work ethic, character and grit instead of an indoctrinated Ivy Leaguer. Sadly, the kids at Nebraska, Penn State and UCLA are now equally corrupt and sporting "degrees" in how to piss off their first boss.
I just shared your comment with my husband to send to a friend of his. The friend went to Penn & Wharton. His very brilliant daughter is an over achieving senior in high school who did not get admitted to one Ivy that she applied to. GPA over 4.0 high level SAT scores, academic extracurriculars, everything one would think is needed for admittance. No idea what these schools are now looking for if a person like this isn’t it. (Well, I probably do, but not going there now.)She is devastated, as is her family. She lives in Florida and will be attending the University of Miami. I told them that’s great, because she will probably be a standout and graduate top of her class, and the world will be her oyster anyway. Thank you for this insightful comment
My niece just went through that. Got turned down or wait listed at every single Ivy and Ivy light school. Top grades. Great SAT scores. Captain of her travel soccer team.
First, I am gonna assume your friends daughter is white. That does not help.
Then, she is female. Women are now making up 59% of the undergraduates. SO...she might have had more luck had she been male.
They do not need another white woman. Sad, but true.
Though, I would wonder what major she indicated she was interested in. That seems to matter too.
My daughter went through something similar. Graduated a year early from prep school with a 4.6 GPA, 2nd in her class by .03, high SAT, High ACT, ranked 14th in the nation for Olympic archery, ran her own business coaching archery, and she ran an annual charity event to raise money for the SPCA. Got wait listed at Georgetown and Stanford and turned down by Harvard and Duke. UVA gave her a lousy financial aid package. SO, she ended up going to Virginia Tech where she graduated Phi Beta in 3 yrs with a degree in neuroscience and minors in economics and philosophy. She worked the whole way through school and graduated with almost no debt.
I grew up in Boston. Spent a lot of time around Harvard students and Harvard graduates. Amazing the number of them that go on to have mediocre lives and careers. I told my daughter when she was applying to college that nobody is gonna give a damn where she did her undergrad 5 yrs after she graduates.
Well, she ended up getting a full ride to law school. This time, she specifically did NOT apply to any of the big names. Instead, she chose to go to a very good 2nd tier school that is ranked 1st in the nation in legal writing and 3rd for preparing trial attorneys. No big name BUT...she got a full ride.
SO, when she graduates, she will have almost no debt and very likely walk into a 6 figure salary.
I would also tell you, that as a hiring manager, the LAST thing I look at is the education section of a resume unless I am hiring a brand new grad. As I said above, I care about character first. Then I look at what people have actually DONE in their careers. Then, I will look at education and even then I am more interested in professional certifications than I am in where they did their undergrad. In certain specialties I might be interested if they got an advanced degree but only if it has a direct application to what I am hiring for.
The fact is....that an education from an Ivy is no better or worse than from almost any other school. What IS or what USED TO BE different, was that the Ivy's took only the very very best high school grads, the kids who are gonna win no matter where they go. They vetted out in advance the best and the very brightest. Once they set aside that mission and concluded that they needed to meet quotas and diversity targets, that no longer held true. Now they are just any other university and their degrees carry no more or less weight.
Interesting thought about being a white woman. She is actually what I guess we are now calling brown? They are of Indian descent & as I’m sure you are aware, their culture is very strict about education & very dedicated to high levels of success. Maybe the schools had hit their quota of Asians. (Eye roll) Our friend was absolutely incensed that Penn rejected her, since she has both legacy and the right qualifications. He wrote to them to tell them he will no longer make donations to his alma mater.
Wrong kind of brown. If she had written an application essay about all her hardships and how even so she knows she needs to listen to and learn from the right kind of brown people and be their ally (actually that's insufficient now, I believe the latest term is "accomplice" [seriously]) and devote herself to achieving social justice for them -- that *might* have helped. Also if she were nonbinary, genderfluid, pansexual, and/or non-cis. But all that may not have compensated for being the wrong kind of brown. In the end, there are quotas to be met.
Please wish her luck from me she is going to stand out at her university and in life where ever she goes she will be a credit to her folks and her community
How true. I hire engineering students for my business, and I prefer those who have failed and gone back. High marks mean nothing, what matters is humility and perseverance.
An emphatic thumbs up on this. Raging narcissism, nihilism and the absence of humility is the plague we are facing. A legacy of an education system that has indulged little egos from early age. From my perspective, birthed out of the "self-esteem" movement that indulged our children in the mindset of "you are special... you are unique..." and we should be surprised that after 2 generations it turned many of our kids into graduates of the school of "see me/affirm me" narcissism and impassioned followers of identity ideology. Spend 4 years at an "elite" university and we've honed their "character" even further to produce legions of smug, dismissive & arrogant, 20-something narcissists who see themselves as having a birthright to destroy the personal and professional lives of those they see as "heretics." The fun has just begun...
I greatly sympathize with author's personal story regarding her husband, but the seed that led to his professional destruction was sown years ago and the future consequences should have been abundantly evident. We spent the last 2 generations institutionalizing this garbage and we're going to have to deal with for quite some time to come.
Brilliant Fisher you have summed it up to a tee now to deal with these upstarts let’s see how well they going to cope going forward with America in a recession and all these fancy degrees no jobs available a lifestyle of absolute privilege let’s watch the meltdown it’s not going to be pretty the kids who have had to work and study the kids who don’t come from so much privilege are the kids I’m watching they are our future in everything from politics to theater to medicine name it
I don’t think it’s a generalization they are all weak and bad from the Ivy League varsities to privilege to spoilt to much power and no brains if I was looking I definitely look further down at second tier those kids are much more solid and seem to have a better value system
Well, Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka blessed UPenn with their brilliance (aka $$$$$). If this doesn't tell you all about the institution, what else would?
Very poor another person suffering from TDS I would be very happy if my kids turned out like DJT’s kids they great work hard abd a tight family unit it’s what we all need
You'll find many of my posts, scattered about the comments sections of Bari's article, promoting the same. How can Alums keep writing checks that support this kind of behavior. I stopped years ago.
It might be a salubrious lesson to Princeton (and other universities) to send them a letter once a year reminding them as to why you will no longer donate. Wouldn't hurt to send that letter to the letters to the editor of a publication. Send to several and one may print it.
It’s worse they will just throw it in the bin and call the anonymous person a coward a racist a bigot anything else you can think of for not putting your name to it
A letter will make no difference all that will do is get you cancelled the print and MSM media will hunt you down and kill you without posting a Facebook post or a tweet we need somebody powerful to stand up and say you carry on like this there is no more federal funding instead we have Brandon who keeps telling us about the Great Reset the green economy Transition and how bad MAGA people are We have had more shocking tragedies in the past week that have shaken us to our core all we have had from the administration is it’s the gun lobby the NRA, how many guns per family Americans own not a peep about security in schools or how to lock your school up after classes have started no surveillance no fencing etc we have spent billions of $$$ on cleaning material PPE even after schools weren’t allowed to go back or once back an outbreak again billions of $$$ on cleaning again but nothing on security even after Sandy Hook which happen 10 years ago the parents should sue the government they just don’t care
I like that as a movement. A single letter would mean nothing. But if they received many letters every year (comparable to the number of ongoing donors), then when they got into a budget crunch in the future, some administrator will have to look at that as an "untapped market". A bit like the "get woke, go broke" concept in other markets.
Lots of people complained to Netflix about what seemed to be an incipient bias, but it wasn't until other market factors made them hungry for retaining subscriptions that they decided to stop catering to that one viewpoint. They didn't become right wing, but more strongly supported diverse viewpoints for a mixed audience.
This is an entirely different topic, and one I hope Bari and her amazing network will go harder after, but the bastardization of “not for profits” is ridiculous. I believe the only hope for this country is repealing the 16th amendment, so debating tax policy is a little ridiculous for me, but if we’re going to have a federal tax code the idea that you can donate to essentially yourself (university endowments for your childrens future or better sports tickets or access you can only buy, etc… or the “bill and Melinda gates foundation” which is literally a donation to yourself) and take massive tax deductions for doing so is absolutely ridiculous
I would like to eliminate all nonprofits and make them all pay taxes. I've seen too many "nonprofits" rake in millions, and theyshould pay like the rest of us.
Yes. Endowments, accrediting agencies, and tenure form a loop that grows crazier every year. All the profit goes to the most trivial and crazy stuff. There's no profit in sanity or realism or genuine customer service for students.
A lot to unpack in a short question - as I stated, I don’t believe the federal government should tax it’s citizens so in my faux reality their fair share would be 0%.
But my opinion on such a thing is only as relevant as my 1/150M voting share so pay federal taxes we shall. And in a world where we pay federal taxes - yes, I do believe everyone should pay their “fair share,” though that has wildly different definitions to different people so I will state it thusly; the single greatest indicator of a regressive society is unjust application of the law. In a country that now has as many laws as we do (cause all these idiots we pay for have to do something with this time so they might as well make up laws to make everything worse) it is impossible for them to be justly applied and justly enforced. If we are going to have a tax code it should be a simple flat tax, something that can reasonably be justly applied and justly enforced. Eliminate ALL tax exemptions - go back to the founding rates of an escalating tax schedule from 0-7% based on income tier, and away we go. And in the meantime the massive reduction in tax revenue will massively reduce the size of the government and we’ll all be MUCH better off because of it…
Most university endowments are more or less Ponzi scheme in structure. They’re highly leveraged assets primarily invested in things like commercial real estate and mortgage backed securities… those assets, to put it lightly, are feeling the market these days and some of them, like real estate, absolutely require continued funding as additional assets to borrow against. If university donations actually dried up for five consecutive years and people gave to actual charities that supported people actually in need you’d see a LOT of pain at a lot of very prestigious universities
Agreed. I’m from an elite law school and quit donating years ago when it had slid too far leftward for me. Now, judging from the alumni magazine, it’s simply a factory churning out social justice warriors.
Paraphrasing Thomas Paine, we are again in "times that try men's souls."We also are in times that demonstrate who has character and who does not, and who are your friends and who are not. I imagine many who read the various articles provided by Bari have learned and relearned the foregoing lessons on a personal level the past two years . The current faculty and many students at Princeton have made clear that they may be filled with book knowledge but they possess empty hearts and souls. It is time for Princeton alumni who are the best and brightest and courageous to stand up and let their voices be heard in public shouts and not private whispers.
Michael, a great post. I have always believed that the “greatest generation” became a little greater because they learned not to fear death, literal or figurative. As we emerge from a pandemic where people still cower in their homes and glare at unmasked strangers, there is an appalling fear in our culture that can only be broken by the virtuous. The age screams out for moral leadership, and it is our greatest and most democratic calling.
My father always said that you couldn't tell a thing about a man when things were going well. "It's always, 'Hail, Fellow, well met!'" It was when you had been accused of a heinous crime, with all the newspaper stories against you, and sitting in a jail cell that you would see who were your friends.
The University of Austin is getting started. They need Joshua Katz. Please contact them. You may already know some of the founders.
There are many of us out here in flyover country who love learning but would never have had the opportunity to go to Princeton. Why not set up a class, or a Substack, and let us take out subscriptions?
There is another point to consider. People as brilliant and capable as Joshua Katz and Ms. Gold must step up and speak out. We with no voice, position, or deep pockets need you to be our voice. Take a page from Jordan Peterson. There is a new world out there that needs you. We need you. Don't allow this ignorant, murderous mob to destroy our Western Civilization.
Maybe someone will get the word to Prof. Katz and Ms. Gold. Dr. Malone reads his Substack comments and will comment on them. Cynthia Chung does as well. I haven't noticed that from any of the other Substacks I follow.
For what it’s worth, this is the same way many feel about their alma maters.* and it’s ironically complicated by the fact that Princeton hosted Dorian Abbott when my alma mater cancelled his invitation to give last year’s Carlson Lecture because he opposed the psychosis that is DEI. One day someone will probably unearth that last sentence and burn me at the stake for it.
But I say mazel tov, Solveig. Living well is the best revenge. And being with those whom you love and by whom you are loved is about as good as it gets.
* I probably wrote the plural incorrectly: only one year of Latin in what used to be called jr. high.
I would love to throw bouquets at Princeton for hosting Dorian Abbott but the truth is a bit more complicated. Abbott was actually hosted by an entity called the James Madison Program, which is an academic center on Princeton's campus and staffed by Princeton employees, but is semi-independent from the University. Think of the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Thank you for sharing this story! I’m a college professor and the witch hunts/burnings currently taking place over consensual relationships between faculty, grad, and undergraduate students are ridiculous. I know that many of the ivies have banned relationships between faculty and students for decades, but my university only implemented the policy a few years ago. My university go so far as to ban relationships between ALL undergraduate students and faculty, regardless of whether the individuals involved have an academic relationship; a math professor who starts dating an English major must report this to their department head to comply with the policy. I was involved in conversations with administrators when this policy was being debated and vehemently opposed any restrictions on relationships that did not occur within the context of direct instruction between a faculty member and a student. And I can scream about how this infantilizes women (because we always assume it’s young women dating these older male professors, which is completely sexist, and heterosexist), but a bigger concern that I had with this policy was that it would be used to punish people who are unpopular or controversial, whereas everyone else who breaks this rule but is well liked, brings the University lots of grant money, and/or is a renowned scholar will never be held to the same standard as someone who gets punished for violating a policy like a consensual relationship ban between faculty and students. I thought it would get used to punish the unpopular, but now I see it as a tool of extreme sanction for holding controversial views, and another way for students to destroy faculty they don’t like for any old reason. It’s also another way to weaken the institution of tenure. I think we are burying the lead when we ignore how many tenured faculty are being fired for trivial infractions or baseless claims.
Not only does it infantilize women, but ignores the power that a charming and intelligent woman has in the equation. I worked in hospitals for 30 years, and many a doctor was the target of a young nurse/rad tech/med tech. that chose their career in order to marry a doctor, regardless of whether that doctor were already married. I'm not saying that there weren't also many instances of the doctor initiating the relationship, I'm saying it goes both ways.
As we all know, being a young hot sexually comfortable woman is a powerless position in our society, whilst being a rich married doctor, especially if white and male, makes one the worst kind of oppressor. A sexual relationship between the two is only the result of the doctor manipulating and oppressing the woman, regardless of consent or desire.
When my doctor retired and a female doctor took over his practice, the drug reps switched from attractive young women to handsome young men almost overnight.
So, imagine how hard it was for a hospital administrator to control pharma costs when you had the very intelligent, homecoming queens flirting with the docs and promoting the newest most expensive drugs, or flying them on fishing trips to Alaska.
It's much different now, but not because pharma has become more ethical.
The relationship part was a way of getting rid of Prof. Katz. If they hadn't had that to fall back on, it would have been something else. They were determined to be rid of him and the relationship made it easy.
Yup. It's always been this way. Department heads can't write "I don't like this guy" on a bureaucratic form, but they can write "Communist" or "sexual harasser" or "Republican" or "anti-vaxxer" according to the fashions of the time.
Also, hate needs to flow to the Black Justice League and the many ridiculous, stupid, and frankly racist movements being supported because they have the right amount of melanin.
Interesting. More evolution towards the elimination of privacy and the weaponization of personal information for the purposes of social conformity. These universities are leading the way and creating the models. Hopefully we stop following their leadership.
It’s so controlling. Next they’ll require students to register every relationship, even if it’s with another student. They’ll have a weekly check in where the women are asked about sexual consent. Just to keep everyone safe.
The Elitist Universities are now where “ Sheep “ are made and freedom and critical thinking are doomed by the Mob. Hang in there Ms Gold and Mr. Katz. You are on the right side of history.
I am a Princeton graduate (1968) and I am shocked and dismayed by the persecution inflicted on Professor Katz. I thought that President Eisgruber was above those stalinst tactics. I will wthhold further contibutions until Katz is reinstated with sincere aplogies.
This is a heartbreaking story. Your husband sounds like a great friend and a decent man. His former friend who he helped to achieve his documented status should be ashamed of himself. What he did is dishonorable and quite frankly perhaps he should be disciplined for his former transgression. I’d never advise anyone to go to the Ivy League. My prayers are with you guys.
Seems to me that she has a lot of friends. I’ve been reading what they’ve written right here. I would like to be able to count myself among them, even never having met them.
It boggles the mind to think that there are so many miserable people who.don't have the brains or integrity to make any decent contribution to human kind, but instead can only advance their esteem by denigrating others. I think it was Audrey Hepburn who said the "best way to judge a person is by what they say about others". One of the many things she got right, and that you have also gotten right, Solveig. You are both too good for such a place.
Why would anyone wish to get their “education” in a place like that?
I always wanted an education. Without the opportunity for a variety of reasons, I managed to go the route to become registered nurse and enjoyed my career immensely. I also, along the way, educated myself in subjects of interest. Today, after hearing the horror stories of what life is like on campuses all over the country, and especially the precious ivy league ones, I am so glad to know I missed out on nothing.
Thank you for this, Solveig. I wish you and your husband a wonderful life.
As I posted on the story about the school shooting, it is time we turn back to God. I’m a Christian, but one who has been too shy to speak about it. Now I will start being bold. Find God. Hear the messages of love, peace, faith, truth and beauty.
It seems we live in an age of resentment. In the story of Cain and Abel, we now think Cain is the good guy. After all, he just wanted equitable treatment.
John Comer, in his recent book Live No Lies, posits that “the litmus test of our faith is the degree to which we love our enemies.” Of course this is simply the teaching of Jesus which is impossible without Love dwelling within us. Nothing is more desperately needed now. Easy to say. Hard to live. It is the only way forward. As Jesus added to his invitation to love our enemies, we must also pray for those who treat us unjustly as Katz and his wife were treated. I have found that even a simple prayer for those who are my enemies can be the almost imperceptible start of love not only being released in my heart, but into this love-starved world.
So if you buy the assertion that "the great replacement" is merely "an evil conspiracy," take the case of Joshua Katz and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Katz, according to Gold's account, helped Peralta get documented. Peralta then helps Katz get REPLACED. I was privy to a Classics convention posted on youtube a few years ago, where this Peralta jerk holds court. It wasn't a classics conference. It was an "anti-racist" struggle session. The asshat presented his goal to tear down the Classics. Some other speaker of color appeared to spend his time seeking to prove his bias that not enough black classics academics are getting published in journals -- rather than writing the academic work that would get his black self published in said journals. I dare say the racist intolerance of some POC academics are indeed tearing down the very institutions that support them -- and replacing the authentic academics like Katz in the process. At the university where I teach, we now have a black president who graduated from Princeton. This person's lack of education, ironically, is painfully evident in the misguided, politically motivated foaming at the mouth emails they blast across the university. Case in point: the Rittenhouse trial. How anyone could label Rittenhouse a "racist white supremacist" is beyond me. Couldn't possibly have known ANYTHING of substance about the trial, yet sends out this email. Now we have "black graduation" and "Faculty of Color" meetings where THEY get to discuss whether THEY are treated with the prescribed amount of respect. Meanwhile, any one of these people can deliberately misinterpret something a white professor says and it's the end of their career. This is how white men are getting REPLACED. And the white people buying and promoting it are a disgrace.
Whether from the perspective of Great Replacement Theory or that of Critical Race Theory, at the root it’s just a reversion to the baseline ethnic strife seen throughout human history. Those on the CRT side are actually quite honest about their intention to invert the existing hierarchy.
Before Rittenhouse, think of Geoge Zimmerman, also labelled a 'racist'. George was writing letters to his local newspaper criticizing police treatment of Black homeless people. And he had a Black girlfriend. A reeeeal 'white supremacist'. Suuure.
Yeah - I think you are a bit out on a limb on this one (replacement) but I have to agree with some of your comments. I sum it up as these differential policies are causing nothing but divisiveness and making students weak and unprepared for the real world.
Haha. You gave enough details to tell me that you teach at the New School where the President is Dwight McBride, Princeton Class of 1990. Personally, a great guy but seems to be very misguided, especially on the Rittenhouse issue.
The other presidents were far more responsible and objective in their messaging, out of consideration for the various viewpoints that define the word 'university.'
Disgraceful behaviour by the university obviously. Surprising it is not. Might I suggest to Solveig however that she hold back on the teenage ‘love gush’ about her (what appears to be) idolisation of her husband. It adds nothing to the sense of injustice and unfairness. It comes across as My perfect privileged bubble life is no more. Thats just SO unfair. Less broadcasting more broadside please.
I felt the same way after reading this. I am disgusted by Princeton’s treatment of Dr. Katz but this piece left me cold. He presented his case very well in Quillette and the WSJ and hopefully, will eventually do so in Court.
I am glad I am not the only person to react in this way - and I am more than a little uncomfortable with lionizing an older male professor who has had serial relationships with students - up to and including the woman, his wife, who wrote this piece and is presumably at least 20 years his junior. I don’t think what happened to Katz is fair but I also don’t necessarily think he is the most admirable person, either.
I know I should have more sympathy for the professor in this story but I don't. When I see these professors I wonder if they ignored the decades of the water slowly coming to a boil. How could they not see what was happening on campus!? And I'm old fashioned and still think college professors shouldn't date those over whom they have POWER. The baker, small business owner, doctor, and nurse who get cancelled should concern us much more than one more college professor who has been at the root of this evil for decades and done nothing.
Michael, that is a high bar that reminds me of how a pro-reparations movement can lash out at Americans whose ancestors were pro-abolition farmers in New Hampshire during the 19th Century. The fact that Katz worked in a university when surrounded by Marxists is not something to be dismissed out of hand, but I share the rage and give not a dollar to my selective liberal arts college.
Those in a quagmire often cannot see the forest for the trees. Such situations are very similar to life in a cult.
The author isn’t asking for sympathy, I don’t think, but she is doing everyone who reads her story a big favor in letting us know what these places of so-called “higher learning” are really about.
I appreciate your view. However, I still wonder how so many professors have kept the blinders obscuring their peripheral vision to the point of not just ignoring but denying things were getting bad on campus. Then "suddenly??" we have people, races, and religions getting cancelled on campuses all over. You are kind to view this article as a warning. I don't! A warning usually comes before the ship is going down.
Thanks. I certainly would not excuse any of them who knowingly look the other way. But, you may be right and perhaps for some it is because there is something in it for those who perpetuate this culture. For many others, however, “de-programming” oneself is a process, a peeling of the proverbial onion, and fear of consequences is not an insignificant deterrent to pulling back the blinders. Fear can cause below-conscious scotomas.
It takes courage to stand up for principle because you often stand alone. I have new heroes. Jordan Peterson at the top of the list, Governor Ron DeSantis, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heyring, Bari Weiss, and the person who started the list some years ago, my personal living hero, Justice Clarence Thomas.
We read the same people, and I heartily agree. Put Glenn Loury on the list, and dust off the works of Thomas Sowell while he is still alive and here to be praised. Douglas Murray also a very articulate canary in the coal mine.
I have followed Thomas Sowell for decades and have several of his books. He is such a prolific author that I can't hope to read even a potion his books.
Yes, to Douglas Murray. He is so articulate he is in a class of his own.
Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi as well. They're viewed a traitors by the left, but are more concerned with free speech and transparency than carrying the progs water.
Have followed them all since before the inception of Eric Weinstein’s “IDW” (Intellectual Dark Web). Peterson, whom I have followed since his Bill C-16 protest hit the news, I think has suffered the most for his good works. He never let it stop him. Bless his soul.
Right there beside you, Sister. Clarence Thomas is a gift to the country and he continues to write brilliantly about our Constitution and to think independently in a way that we shall miss when he passes on. The hypocrisy of the Left , the party that "cares" about minorities but put him through that disgraceful SCOTUS hearing - led by Joe Biden as head of the Judiciary Committee - leaves me shaking with rage. I am glad and proud that he has these years to put his stamp on American jurisprudence.
They haven't finished with him yet. Now they are going after Ginnie, his beloved wife. He can't speak anywhere because they protest and shut him down. The Left are the racists. They demonstrate their contempt for intelligent darker skinned people daily.
It angers me. The man is brilliant, and after Justice Scalia, an anchor on the bench and a firm protector of the Constitution.
You are obviously a kind person. I'm more of a jerk and tend to be very pessimistic. It's nice to see a pleasant, well-written argument. Thanks for that.
P.S. There is good reason for pessimism sometimes, to be sure. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been discouraged to the bone. But, I try to keep in mind that the human race has one over-arching (or should I say undergirding) drive, and that is to _survive_ which is why we have not wiped ourselves out . . . . yet.
It would be great if it were just some colleges but this whole attitude has permeated every level of education, every profession, and every news outlet. I hope we are not doomed but I fear the worst.
There are some happy outliers. Hillsdale, for one. Some of the traditional Catholic schools like Franciscan U Steubenville, Wyoming Catholic College, Ave Maria, etc., are still doing excellent work. Maybe sending contritions to colleges like these rather than just stopping contributions to the Ivies (and the Ivy-lights) would be great.
The University of Austin isn’t encouraging development. Jordan Peterson was also talking about doing a disruptive University, but I think he is busier than he expected following his time off the lecture circuit. Any of these start up heterodox universities will have to contend with the lack of a 200 year reputation, but I am cheering for all of them.
Agreed. I would seriously rethink sending my kid to a Princeton-type school and defer to starting a small business instead. This witch-hunt ideology is everywhere now, even at state universities and community colleges. Before you invest in higher education, parents, seek wisdom from those before you. It could be like the local state prison — mental walls with a very good library
There has to be a lawsuit here. The only way this shit stops, is a staggering award by a judge or jury against Princeton for lacking due process in the way he (or Sabatini at MIT) was treated.
"There has to be a lawsuit here".
Here's hoping but I wonder why the alumni are not speaking out, or more importantly, withholding financial support. At the end of the day, money is the only thing cowardly administrators respond to.
I have my B.A. from Oberlin and Ph.D. from Michigan (analytical chemistry) and do not donate to them, but rather to colleges that focus on learning.
Seriously, why do alumni not speak out about this? I emphasized my Michigan degree on my resume back in the day, and was proud to have attended, but now I'm embarrassed at their role in destroying our country.
Word has it that the moral narcissists are now gunning for outspoken Ivy League alums via their alum groups. The pathology doesn't end in the Ivory Tower. It's coming for us all.
That may be where they make their fatal error. Actual wage earning citizens won't be cowed like tenured faculty, and could turn on them.
They all cowards God knows why they won’t stand up and I think money and those large endowments play a very big part the woke community is on a roll at the moment not sure how long they can sustain it but I think when it goes down it will go down big!!!
They are. Princeton has plenty of money, so they can let this blow over. But if the alumni stop volunteering, that's a bit of a different story.
Wealthy alumni (the donors who might be listened to) don't speak out because they went to Princeton in order to become wealthy members of the elite, and they're terrified of losing their status.
While it's true they're behaving cowardly, most of us are cowards when to taking large risks against significantly more powerful and vengeful enemies, and rightly so.
Brian the average American doesn’t want to behave like a coward we aren’t cowards we have endured 2 years of sheer madness in the name of these lockdowns and survived the elite control us at the moment they tell us what we can read tell us what we can say ruin peoples lives when they feel threaten by someone who fights back or stands up they are the government so if a lot of us stand up and cause disruptions without burning and breaking it’s called civil disobedience the month of July cancel you Netflix subs the month August cancel Disney trips September cancel cable the media are the enemy of the people anyway their misinformation and brainwashing beggars belief don’t buy on line for October buy local shop at your mall nobody will starve remember we can always go back to Disney we can always reinstate Netflix etc we fighting for the heart and soul of America we have 21/2 years till 2024 we can do real damage by just standing up and being an American this is who we are!
Michelle, you're actually making my point for me. Cancelling your Netflix subscription? Forgoing Disneyland? Don't shop at WalMart in October?
These are not courageous things. If you believe woke capitalism is a threat, should you do them? Absolutely! But they entail no risk and only minor inconvenience.
When I say most of us are cowards, don't take it the wrong way. Most humans, in all times and places, have been cowards. We celebrate the martyrs and the saints precisely because we know most of us wouldn't do what they did; we know we would cave. Common Sense exists because 1 woman was willing to stand up and take a huge professional risk. Bari is NOT a coward. But based on my actions (or lack thereof) so far in this war, I am.
All of my actions have been, not performative, but largely risk free. We homeschool our kids in order to keep the insanity away from them, but, like opting out of Disney and NetFlix, that's just opting out of public schools. I haven't gone to a school board that my wife teaches in and spoken up about critical race theory infecting our local schools. The reason I haven't is because it would be extremely dangerous for her professionally and therefore for our family. That's what I mean by cowardice.
Jon, absolutely right. I think Katz is going after the lawyers conducting the school's investigation for the cause you cite: lack of due process. But I would like to see him go after the student with whom he had an affair with for defamation of character. He may not win - but people who slander others with no concrete proof of anything have to know they will have to do it the hard way and defend themselves in a court of law. Perhaps then we'll see less of these public witch hunts we've been witnessing.
I don't agree that a lawsuit is the only solution - or even an effective solution. Historically, there has been two overlapping periods in our nation's long intellectual history where the private elite institutions in the East Coast seemed irreparably broken - the ~1930-1960 period in which they enacted a complex system of admissions, recruitment and tenure policies designed for the sole purpose of limiting Jewish enrollment and faculty (similar to what's happening to East Asians today - but more extensive), and the 1950-1975 period in which virtually all of the Ivy League social science departments were dominated by far-leftists - around half of which self-identified as Marxist - and were beginning to purge every single liberal (i.e. believer in free market capitalism) in their departments.
These periods of insanity didn't end with lawsuits. They were solved by a much stronger concept: competition. Thousands of talented Jewish students who were shut out of Columbia simply went next door to NYU; those shut out of Harvard went next door to MIT (and to a lesser extent BC/BU/Tufts); and many also took less expensive options at public universities. The emergence of these alternative institutions took place in exactly the same period that the Ivy League was trying to maintain its rigid WASP culture. These students (mostly, not all Jewish) built up campus cultures and alumni networks that matched the best of the Ivy Leagues while being much more open-minded, pluralist and meritocratic - a fact that was widely known by the 1960s and threatened the Ivy League's very existence. By the 1970s all of the Ivy Leagues were forced to abolish their discriminatory policies against Jews and even took up the mantle of diversity to reach out to African-Americans and Hispanics (ironically, the same principle that has now been corrupted to create racial and political barriers today).
Competition played the same role in ending the far-left grasp on social science departments. From the 1950s to 1975 or so, talented young social-science PhDs who didn’t have a portrait of Lenin in their bedrooms were self-exiled to regional universities in the Mid-west, South and West of the country where they set up spaces for rigorous intellectual inquiry. UChicago’s economics department, barely considered top 20 in 1950, quickly rose to became the undisputed best department and graduate program in economics by 1980 (with MIT a close second, benefitting in some measure from the Jewish exodus from Harvard as well). Minnesota, Rochester, Wisconsin-Madison, Carnegie-Mellon, Caltech, UCLA all went from second-rate departments to producers of Nobel prizes within a few decades, maintaining amongst them their own economic journals and conferences which threatened to surpass the economic orthodoxy. Over a 25 year period 1975-2000, only one Princeton-affiliated economist received a Nobel prize, the brilliant theorist John Nash; for Yale and Harvard that figure was zero. In the UK, a similar story occurred with the LSE quickly surpassing Oxford/Cambridge in prestige. By the time of the 1980s, the rigorous methodological and intellectual changes in economics had spilled over to the neighboring fields of sociology and political science, upending a largely qualitative and Marxian establishment in those fields as well. Perhaps most consequentially, the new wave of rigorous social science researchers – generally called behaviorists – also took a leading role in setting up graduate schools of business (a hitherto unknown concept) that became another source of competition to traditional social science departments – producing research publications that encompassed almost all traditional fields of social science, with the qualifier that the same faculty must regularly teach business students and thus be *forced* to reconcile some of their research with actually-existing society, and in this clever way gradually clearing out the navel-gazing rotten core of social science hierarchy. By the 1980s, most of the “saltwater” economics departments had surrendered and hiring extensively from places like UChicago, Minnesota and Rochester; and by the 2000s graduate students in sociology and political science were taking classes on statistics and social inquiry rather than the latest batch of post-structuralist theory from Paris and Frankfurt.
These efforts worked because they provided a clearly-better *alternative* than the corrupted core of elite institutions. In both cases, economic self-interest played a key role. Large companies that were hiring out of NYU, rather than Columbia, forced Columbia to internally reform. Private-sector R&D divisions that were increasingly collaborating with MIT STEM faculty – and injecting a massive amount of funding to their research – forced the Harvard faculty to examine why they’re missing out on a slice of the pie. Similarly, social science faculty at places like Chicago and Rochester took care to establish small, rigorous programs of study where they maintained open spaces and seminars, freely mixing with their graduate students, and ensuring that they all become good teachers on their own - and it’s this tremendous human capital investment that eventually convinced aspiring young academics to abandon the Ivy League social science departments where a disproportionate amount of PhD graduates failed to maintain academic careers.
You need to produce something of value to dislodge a failing monopoly. Lawsuits don’t do that. The threat of legal compensation simply forces their activities into more subtle mechanisms. Instead of outright firing a centrist/center-right tenured faculty member, they can, for instance, dramatically expand the scope of their inquiry during the recruitment and tenure process, forcing any tenured hires to agree to terms of agreement that filtered out anyone with non-PC beliefs (without being explicitly discriminatory), and thus ensuring anyone who reaches tenure stage would carefully toe the party line. On the opposing end, if legal payouts are normalized, a disgruntled tenured faculty member who wants to retire might *intentionally* provoke the university establishments into firing him by stepping out of line - getting well compensated in the process, and doing nothing to help repair the broken state of affairs in elite institutions. Economic incentives need to be aligned towards the actual supply of good research and good teaching under a free environment - not for protesting the lack of it in rotten institutions.
While I agree completely that, over time, competition is the only way to solve the problem of the Ivies . . . lawsuits are necessary for the personal harm caused to specific professors caught in the dragnet of Rightthink. I believe both are needed--lawsuits for personal damages, competition for structural. Neither, alone, will cover the other's need.
My concern is that the infrastructure of our permanent government, media and academia have been so thoroughly corrupted by wokeness that competition alone will never solve the problems in academia, unless a movement to create more 2 year specialty degrees to support STEM careers starts to make the traditional 4 year degree obsolete. Also, way too many HR departments build Masters degrees into job requirements to make interviewing easier, but I don't see an end result in that either.
Also, I'm wondering why every state in the union hasn't moved to create a Hilldale or UAustin as an alternative to the bloated indoctrination alternatives.
I'm sorry, I just don't think waiting for an organic solution is the answer, and let me say, I hate litigation as a solution for anything, but it's the only answer I can see. It does, if nothing else, highlight that a court finds these practices illegal, and shines light on the problem.
Finally, your post was excellent, even though I may disagree with some aspects of it.
I agree. Wokeness has become too all-pervasive, and it is led by people who will stop at nothing. I fear that accreditation boards will make competition impossible by refusing to allow non-Woke schools to operate.
Well that’s my point on litigation something has to shake this system the non woke kids/people/professors won’t be able to work in the real world amidst all the pandemic havoc now they are still cancelling 5 star profs daily creating BDS groups on their campus
Also the Dept of Education and expanded student loan program happened in 1979. Both of those factors have shielded the Universities from normal market pressures, and in fact, have created a strong, reliable source of liberal indoctrination, which the DNC will fight viciously to protect.
Sy, I don't believe that your prediction that the 'market corrects' will hold in this case.
Thank you Sy well written abd well research comment!
I like your thought process on this. But even by using it we have had 30 years or so since 1930 when they were not off-track. It seems to me to be a recurring pattern of failure.
The only way this shit stops is a class action against all the woke universities Joshua and David have nothing to lose they are only 2 of the profs that Bari has put on there are many more and watching Jonny Depps trial against Amber Heard I think the white male is fighting back and could be winning and like Joshua’s wife there are people who are standing with them and it’s definitely growing we all need to stand up for them!!!
Yeah. If money is a problem.. Well, there are plenty-a avenues to get donations these days.
That Sabatini debacle is awful!
I think he did file defamation suits, but am not positive. I truly hope he winds up owning the place.
Bust em NOW!!!
I am a VP of Operations for a federal contractor that does consulting and IT work. I hire a lot of people every year.
Being perfectly honest, I now discount anyone coming from the Ivy league and here is why.
The SINGLE most important characteristic when I hire is character. If someone is not a good person, a good team player, has a level of personal and intellectual humility, then no matter how smart or how educated they are, ultimately they are more trouble than they are worth. If they lack real empathy with people unlike them, then they will make horrible managers and will fail at working with clients.
Increasingly I find that the best people are coming from what are normally thought of as second or even third tier schools or have taken unconventional paths such as taking 6 yrs to graduate while working through school to pay for it.
I was on the corporate board tasked with identifying a new general counsel about 6 months ago. We had applicants from various places, many of whom had come from the top tier law schools like Yale and Georgetown. Ultimately, we picked a youngish woman who graduated from the University of Nebraska and went to law school in Florida. She has proved to be amazing at her job and is really enjoyed as a person by her peers.
It is time to admit that our "elite" schools are no longer so elite and that they are producing weak people with poor character. Oh...they may have plenty of power under the mental hood, but they are useless to an organization. Of course, that is a generalization. I am sure that there are quite a few good kids coming out of those places, but an elite degree no longer carries the cache it once did.
Twenty years ago the Wall Street Journal wrote basically the same thing: Hire a bargain from a state school with a demonstrated work ethic, character and grit instead of an indoctrinated Ivy Leaguer. Sadly, the kids at Nebraska, Penn State and UCLA are now equally corrupt and sporting "degrees" in how to piss off their first boss.
equally corrupt and sporting "degrees" in how to piss off their first boss.
I love this line.
I just shared your comment with my husband to send to a friend of his. The friend went to Penn & Wharton. His very brilliant daughter is an over achieving senior in high school who did not get admitted to one Ivy that she applied to. GPA over 4.0 high level SAT scores, academic extracurriculars, everything one would think is needed for admittance. No idea what these schools are now looking for if a person like this isn’t it. (Well, I probably do, but not going there now.)She is devastated, as is her family. She lives in Florida and will be attending the University of Miami. I told them that’s great, because she will probably be a standout and graduate top of her class, and the world will be her oyster anyway. Thank you for this insightful comment
My niece just went through that. Got turned down or wait listed at every single Ivy and Ivy light school. Top grades. Great SAT scores. Captain of her travel soccer team.
First, I am gonna assume your friends daughter is white. That does not help.
Then, she is female. Women are now making up 59% of the undergraduates. SO...she might have had more luck had she been male.
They do not need another white woman. Sad, but true.
Though, I would wonder what major she indicated she was interested in. That seems to matter too.
My daughter went through something similar. Graduated a year early from prep school with a 4.6 GPA, 2nd in her class by .03, high SAT, High ACT, ranked 14th in the nation for Olympic archery, ran her own business coaching archery, and she ran an annual charity event to raise money for the SPCA. Got wait listed at Georgetown and Stanford and turned down by Harvard and Duke. UVA gave her a lousy financial aid package. SO, she ended up going to Virginia Tech where she graduated Phi Beta in 3 yrs with a degree in neuroscience and minors in economics and philosophy. She worked the whole way through school and graduated with almost no debt.
I grew up in Boston. Spent a lot of time around Harvard students and Harvard graduates. Amazing the number of them that go on to have mediocre lives and careers. I told my daughter when she was applying to college that nobody is gonna give a damn where she did her undergrad 5 yrs after she graduates.
Well, she ended up getting a full ride to law school. This time, she specifically did NOT apply to any of the big names. Instead, she chose to go to a very good 2nd tier school that is ranked 1st in the nation in legal writing and 3rd for preparing trial attorneys. No big name BUT...she got a full ride.
SO, when she graduates, she will have almost no debt and very likely walk into a 6 figure salary.
I would also tell you, that as a hiring manager, the LAST thing I look at is the education section of a resume unless I am hiring a brand new grad. As I said above, I care about character first. Then I look at what people have actually DONE in their careers. Then, I will look at education and even then I am more interested in professional certifications than I am in where they did their undergrad. In certain specialties I might be interested if they got an advanced degree but only if it has a direct application to what I am hiring for.
The fact is....that an education from an Ivy is no better or worse than from almost any other school. What IS or what USED TO BE different, was that the Ivy's took only the very very best high school grads, the kids who are gonna win no matter where they go. They vetted out in advance the best and the very brightest. Once they set aside that mission and concluded that they needed to meet quotas and diversity targets, that no longer held true. Now they are just any other university and their degrees carry no more or less weight.
Interesting thought about being a white woman. She is actually what I guess we are now calling brown? They are of Indian descent & as I’m sure you are aware, their culture is very strict about education & very dedicated to high levels of success. Maybe the schools had hit their quota of Asians. (Eye roll) Our friend was absolutely incensed that Penn rejected her, since she has both legacy and the right qualifications. He wrote to them to tell them he will no longer make donations to his alma mater.
Ah...the Asian quota. Yep. Seeing that al over the place. Kinda sick. If the kid has worked hard and earned it then that should be all that matters.
We should be running a strict meritocracy. Ethnic background should be meaningless.
She definitely got screened out for being Asian. What shameful bullshit.
Wrong kind of brown. If she had written an application essay about all her hardships and how even so she knows she needs to listen to and learn from the right kind of brown people and be their ally (actually that's insufficient now, I believe the latest term is "accomplice" [seriously]) and devote herself to achieving social justice for them -- that *might* have helped. Also if she were nonbinary, genderfluid, pansexual, and/or non-cis. But all that may not have compensated for being the wrong kind of brown. In the end, there are quotas to be met.
Funny……but also not because you’re probably right
Please wish her luck from me she is going to stand out at her university and in life where ever she goes she will be a credit to her folks and her community
How true. I hire engineering students for my business, and I prefer those who have failed and gone back. High marks mean nothing, what matters is humility and perseverance.
An emphatic thumbs up on this. Raging narcissism, nihilism and the absence of humility is the plague we are facing. A legacy of an education system that has indulged little egos from early age. From my perspective, birthed out of the "self-esteem" movement that indulged our children in the mindset of "you are special... you are unique..." and we should be surprised that after 2 generations it turned many of our kids into graduates of the school of "see me/affirm me" narcissism and impassioned followers of identity ideology. Spend 4 years at an "elite" university and we've honed their "character" even further to produce legions of smug, dismissive & arrogant, 20-something narcissists who see themselves as having a birthright to destroy the personal and professional lives of those they see as "heretics." The fun has just begun...
I greatly sympathize with author's personal story regarding her husband, but the seed that led to his professional destruction was sown years ago and the future consequences should have been abundantly evident. We spent the last 2 generations institutionalizing this garbage and we're going to have to deal with for quite some time to come.
Brilliant Fisher you have summed it up to a tee now to deal with these upstarts let’s see how well they going to cope going forward with America in a recession and all these fancy degrees no jobs available a lifestyle of absolute privilege let’s watch the meltdown it’s not going to be pretty the kids who have had to work and study the kids who don’t come from so much privilege are the kids I’m watching they are our future in everything from politics to theater to medicine name it
“Wow! I’m getting a trophy!!!??? I didn’t do $hit, and everybody knows it. Well, OK…it is kind of shiny.”
I don’t think it’s a generalization they are all weak and bad from the Ivy League varsities to privilege to spoilt to much power and no brains if I was looking I definitely look further down at second tier those kids are much more solid and seem to have a better value system
Yep I am not surprised, and the new woke graduates it will be worse
Well, Donald Trump and his daughter Ivanka blessed UPenn with their brilliance (aka $$$$$). If this doesn't tell you all about the institution, what else would?
An empty and poorly crafted argument for this topic
Very poor another person suffering from TDS I would be very happy if my kids turned out like DJT’s kids they great work hard abd a tight family unit it’s what we all need
Rob...thank you
and then Penn turned around and gave the money to Biden for a no-show professorship.
Wrong out...melds well with the post, a crown. thanks
Money talks . There should be a coordinated effort by alums to not give a penny for 5 years . Do it every university in the country .
You'll find many of my posts, scattered about the comments sections of Bari's article, promoting the same. How can Alums keep writing checks that support this kind of behavior. I stopped years ago.
IMO I think it should not be university specific . Let them all suffer - which is the only way to their attention
I agree. I stopped donating to Princeton several years ago for more or less the same reason.
It might be a salubrious lesson to Princeton (and other universities) to send them a letter once a year reminding them as to why you will no longer donate. Wouldn't hurt to send that letter to the letters to the editor of a publication. Send to several and one may print it.
And if you don’t want them to know your identity- write it anonymously. That’s better than not sending it at all.
That's cowardly.
That's what they're used to. Think of all the people who swept Katz under the rug anonymously.
It’s worse they will just throw it in the bin and call the anonymous person a coward a racist a bigot anything else you can think of for not putting your name to it
A letter will make no difference all that will do is get you cancelled the print and MSM media will hunt you down and kill you without posting a Facebook post or a tweet we need somebody powerful to stand up and say you carry on like this there is no more federal funding instead we have Brandon who keeps telling us about the Great Reset the green economy Transition and how bad MAGA people are We have had more shocking tragedies in the past week that have shaken us to our core all we have had from the administration is it’s the gun lobby the NRA, how many guns per family Americans own not a peep about security in schools or how to lock your school up after classes have started no surveillance no fencing etc we have spent billions of $$$ on cleaning material PPE even after schools weren’t allowed to go back or once back an outbreak again billions of $$$ on cleaning again but nothing on security even after Sandy Hook which happen 10 years ago the parents should sue the government they just don’t care
I like that as a movement. A single letter would mean nothing. But if they received many letters every year (comparable to the number of ongoing donors), then when they got into a budget crunch in the future, some administrator will have to look at that as an "untapped market". A bit like the "get woke, go broke" concept in other markets.
Lots of people complained to Netflix about what seemed to be an incipient bias, but it wasn't until other market factors made them hungry for retaining subscriptions that they decided to stop catering to that one viewpoint. They didn't become right wing, but more strongly supported diverse viewpoints for a mixed audience.
I canceled Netflix when they launched Cuties. I am against child sexual exploitation.
I agree, but then there are the endowments. The DEI apparatchiks wield the power, and access to those enormous endowments.
Tax their damned endowments.
This is an entirely different topic, and one I hope Bari and her amazing network will go harder after, but the bastardization of “not for profits” is ridiculous. I believe the only hope for this country is repealing the 16th amendment, so debating tax policy is a little ridiculous for me, but if we’re going to have a federal tax code the idea that you can donate to essentially yourself (university endowments for your childrens future or better sports tickets or access you can only buy, etc… or the “bill and Melinda gates foundation” which is literally a donation to yourself) and take massive tax deductions for doing so is absolutely ridiculous
I would like to eliminate all nonprofits and make them all pay taxes. I've seen too many "nonprofits" rake in millions, and theyshould pay like the rest of us.
I would be in favor of something like this if churches were included, especially megachurches.
Yep, them too. The claim that they are apolitical has been long disproved. Tax everyone and maybe the rates can drop for everybody.
Yes. Endowments, accrediting agencies, and tenure form a loop that grows crazier every year. All the profit goes to the most trivial and crazy stuff. There's no profit in sanity or realism or genuine customer service for students.
It’s bizarre it’s a shy show these foundations get tax breaks that are beyond belief
Dear data, you mean have them pay their "fair share?"
A lot to unpack in a short question - as I stated, I don’t believe the federal government should tax it’s citizens so in my faux reality their fair share would be 0%.
But my opinion on such a thing is only as relevant as my 1/150M voting share so pay federal taxes we shall. And in a world where we pay federal taxes - yes, I do believe everyone should pay their “fair share,” though that has wildly different definitions to different people so I will state it thusly; the single greatest indicator of a regressive society is unjust application of the law. In a country that now has as many laws as we do (cause all these idiots we pay for have to do something with this time so they might as well make up laws to make everything worse) it is impossible for them to be justly applied and justly enforced. If we are going to have a tax code it should be a simple flat tax, something that can reasonably be justly applied and justly enforced. Eliminate ALL tax exemptions - go back to the founding rates of an escalating tax schedule from 0-7% based on income tier, and away we go. And in the meantime the massive reduction in tax revenue will massively reduce the size of the government and we’ll all be MUCH better off because of it…
As the old saying goes its the thought that counts. In this case, nice thought but don't hold your breath
Right! Speaking of “paying their fair share” ….
Most university endowments are more or less Ponzi scheme in structure. They’re highly leveraged assets primarily invested in things like commercial real estate and mortgage backed securities… those assets, to put it lightly, are feeling the market these days and some of them, like real estate, absolutely require continued funding as additional assets to borrow against. If university donations actually dried up for five consecutive years and people gave to actual charities that supported people actually in need you’d see a LOT of pain at a lot of very prestigious universities
YES!!! Tax them to death like they tax us
Agreed. I’m from an elite law school and quit donating years ago when it had slid too far leftward for me. Now, judging from the alumni magazine, it’s simply a factory churning out social justice warriors.
My alumni magazine goes right in the trash, along with the copy my wife gets. Pretty sure my oldest daughter's does too.
Paraphrasing Thomas Paine, we are again in "times that try men's souls."We also are in times that demonstrate who has character and who does not, and who are your friends and who are not. I imagine many who read the various articles provided by Bari have learned and relearned the foregoing lessons on a personal level the past two years . The current faculty and many students at Princeton have made clear that they may be filled with book knowledge but they possess empty hearts and souls. It is time for Princeton alumni who are the best and brightest and courageous to stand up and let their voices be heard in public shouts and not private whispers.
Michael, a great post. I have always believed that the “greatest generation” became a little greater because they learned not to fear death, literal or figurative. As we emerge from a pandemic where people still cower in their homes and glare at unmasked strangers, there is an appalling fear in our culture that can only be broken by the virtuous. The age screams out for moral leadership, and it is our greatest and most democratic calling.
"can only be broken by the virtuous" and the COURAGEOUS.
Amen
My father always said that you couldn't tell a thing about a man when things were going well. "It's always, 'Hail, Fellow, well met!'" It was when you had been accused of a heinous crime, with all the newspaper stories against you, and sitting in a jail cell that you would see who were your friends.
https://princetoniansforfreespeech.com/
Good link. TY
The University of Austin is getting started. They need Joshua Katz. Please contact them. You may already know some of the founders.
There are many of us out here in flyover country who love learning but would never have had the opportunity to go to Princeton. Why not set up a class, or a Substack, and let us take out subscriptions?
There is another point to consider. People as brilliant and capable as Joshua Katz and Ms. Gold must step up and speak out. We with no voice, position, or deep pockets need you to be our voice. Take a page from Jordan Peterson. There is a new world out there that needs you. We need you. Don't allow this ignorant, murderous mob to destroy our Western Civilization.
I bet they could deliver a great substack.
Naomi...nice, and i think your points will get action.
Maybe someone will get the word to Prof. Katz and Ms. Gold. Dr. Malone reads his Substack comments and will comment on them. Cynthia Chung does as well. I haven't noticed that from any of the other Substacks I follow.
No, it doesn't seem to be a thing done. Dunno.
Good points, all..
For what it’s worth, this is the same way many feel about their alma maters.* and it’s ironically complicated by the fact that Princeton hosted Dorian Abbott when my alma mater cancelled his invitation to give last year’s Carlson Lecture because he opposed the psychosis that is DEI. One day someone will probably unearth that last sentence and burn me at the stake for it.
But I say mazel tov, Solveig. Living well is the best revenge. And being with those whom you love and by whom you are loved is about as good as it gets.
* I probably wrote the plural incorrectly: only one year of Latin in what used to be called jr. high.
I would love to throw bouquets at Princeton for hosting Dorian Abbott but the truth is a bit more complicated. Abbott was actually hosted by an entity called the James Madison Program, which is an academic center on Princeton's campus and staffed by Princeton employees, but is semi-independent from the University. Think of the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
I've been in your home, Joe. Any attempt to burn you at the stake would be, IMHO, a very low-yield proposition.
Living well IS the best revenge. Agree!
Thank you for sharing this story! I’m a college professor and the witch hunts/burnings currently taking place over consensual relationships between faculty, grad, and undergraduate students are ridiculous. I know that many of the ivies have banned relationships between faculty and students for decades, but my university only implemented the policy a few years ago. My university go so far as to ban relationships between ALL undergraduate students and faculty, regardless of whether the individuals involved have an academic relationship; a math professor who starts dating an English major must report this to their department head to comply with the policy. I was involved in conversations with administrators when this policy was being debated and vehemently opposed any restrictions on relationships that did not occur within the context of direct instruction between a faculty member and a student. And I can scream about how this infantilizes women (because we always assume it’s young women dating these older male professors, which is completely sexist, and heterosexist), but a bigger concern that I had with this policy was that it would be used to punish people who are unpopular or controversial, whereas everyone else who breaks this rule but is well liked, brings the University lots of grant money, and/or is a renowned scholar will never be held to the same standard as someone who gets punished for violating a policy like a consensual relationship ban between faculty and students. I thought it would get used to punish the unpopular, but now I see it as a tool of extreme sanction for holding controversial views, and another way for students to destroy faculty they don’t like for any old reason. It’s also another way to weaken the institution of tenure. I think we are burying the lead when we ignore how many tenured faculty are being fired for trivial infractions or baseless claims.
Not only does it infantilize women, but ignores the power that a charming and intelligent woman has in the equation. I worked in hospitals for 30 years, and many a doctor was the target of a young nurse/rad tech/med tech. that chose their career in order to marry a doctor, regardless of whether that doctor were already married. I'm not saying that there weren't also many instances of the doctor initiating the relationship, I'm saying it goes both ways.
As we all know, being a young hot sexually comfortable woman is a powerless position in our society, whilst being a rich married doctor, especially if white and male, makes one the worst kind of oppressor. A sexual relationship between the two is only the result of the doctor manipulating and oppressing the woman, regardless of consent or desire.
I was trying to be a bit more diplomatic. Your post is closer to my actual thinking, complete with sarc.
Drug reps, anyone?
When my doctor retired and a female doctor took over his practice, the drug reps switched from attractive young women to handsome young men almost overnight.
You would not believe how out in the open it all is.
So, imagine how hard it was for a hospital administrator to control pharma costs when you had the very intelligent, homecoming queens flirting with the docs and promoting the newest most expensive drugs, or flying them on fishing trips to Alaska.
It's much different now, but not because pharma has become more ethical.
Ha! I have a neighbor who used to be a drug rep. I tease her about it all the time. They're pretty easy to pick out of a crowd.
The relationship part was a way of getting rid of Prof. Katz. If they hadn't had that to fall back on, it would have been something else. They were determined to be rid of him and the relationship made it easy.
Yup. It's always been this way. Department heads can't write "I don't like this guy" on a bureaucratic form, but they can write "Communist" or "sexual harasser" or "Republican" or "anti-vaxxer" according to the fashions of the time.
Also, hate needs to flow to the Black Justice League and the many ridiculous, stupid, and frankly racist movements being supported because they have the right amount of melanin.
Hate? I would rather say reality. It's the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon. Everyone can see he's naked but no one has the courage to say it.
Interesting. More evolution towards the elimination of privacy and the weaponization of personal information for the purposes of social conformity. These universities are leading the way and creating the models. Hopefully we stop following their leadership.
It’s so controlling. Next they’ll require students to register every relationship, even if it’s with another student. They’ll have a weekly check in where the women are asked about sexual consent. Just to keep everyone safe.
You are correct! And once the student is graduated and gone, they can still call it "grooming." Insanity!
The Elitist Universities are now where “ Sheep “ are made and freedom and critical thinking are doomed by the Mob. Hang in there Ms Gold and Mr. Katz. You are on the right side of history.
I am a Princeton graduate (1968) and I am shocked and dismayed by the persecution inflicted on Professor Katz. I thought that President Eisgruber was above those stalinst tactics. I will wthhold further contibutions until Katz is reinstated with sincere aplogies.
Just withholding does nothing. You need to tell them why.
This is a heartbreaking story. Your husband sounds like a great friend and a decent man. His former friend who he helped to achieve his documented status should be ashamed of himself. What he did is dishonorable and quite frankly perhaps he should be disciplined for his former transgression. I’d never advise anyone to go to the Ivy League. My prayers are with you guys.
Brilliant in one area doesn't mean brilliant across the board. Nor does it convey any sense of true character.
sad to say they never had any real friends , hope they do find some REAL freinds
This is what COVID revealed
Same old…right?
Sweet
Seems to me that she has a lot of friends. I’ve been reading what they’ve written right here. I would like to be able to count myself among them, even never having met them.
It boggles the mind to think that there are so many miserable people who.don't have the brains or integrity to make any decent contribution to human kind, but instead can only advance their esteem by denigrating others. I think it was Audrey Hepburn who said the "best way to judge a person is by what they say about others". One of the many things she got right, and that you have also gotten right, Solveig. You are both too good for such a place.
Total...Bober
Why would anyone wish to get their “education” in a place like that?
I always wanted an education. Without the opportunity for a variety of reasons, I managed to go the route to become registered nurse and enjoyed my career immensely. I also, along the way, educated myself in subjects of interest. Today, after hearing the horror stories of what life is like on campuses all over the country, and especially the precious ivy league ones, I am so glad to know I missed out on nothing.
Thank you for this, Solveig. I wish you and your husband a wonderful life.
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.
Words we used to learn before society killed God.
As I posted on the story about the school shooting, it is time we turn back to God. I’m a Christian, but one who has been too shy to speak about it. Now I will start being bold. Find God. Hear the messages of love, peace, faith, truth and beauty.
It seems we live in an age of resentment. In the story of Cain and Abel, we now think Cain is the good guy. After all, he just wanted equitable treatment.
Great post. Be shy no more. The red letters have all the wisdom we need. It is the responsibility that comes with them that terrifies so many.
John Comer, in his recent book Live No Lies, posits that “the litmus test of our faith is the degree to which we love our enemies.” Of course this is simply the teaching of Jesus which is impossible without Love dwelling within us. Nothing is more desperately needed now. Easy to say. Hard to live. It is the only way forward. As Jesus added to his invitation to love our enemies, we must also pray for those who treat us unjustly as Katz and his wife were treated. I have found that even a simple prayer for those who are my enemies can be the almost imperceptible start of love not only being released in my heart, but into this love-starved world.
So if you buy the assertion that "the great replacement" is merely "an evil conspiracy," take the case of Joshua Katz and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. Katz, according to Gold's account, helped Peralta get documented. Peralta then helps Katz get REPLACED. I was privy to a Classics convention posted on youtube a few years ago, where this Peralta jerk holds court. It wasn't a classics conference. It was an "anti-racist" struggle session. The asshat presented his goal to tear down the Classics. Some other speaker of color appeared to spend his time seeking to prove his bias that not enough black classics academics are getting published in journals -- rather than writing the academic work that would get his black self published in said journals. I dare say the racist intolerance of some POC academics are indeed tearing down the very institutions that support them -- and replacing the authentic academics like Katz in the process. At the university where I teach, we now have a black president who graduated from Princeton. This person's lack of education, ironically, is painfully evident in the misguided, politically motivated foaming at the mouth emails they blast across the university. Case in point: the Rittenhouse trial. How anyone could label Rittenhouse a "racist white supremacist" is beyond me. Couldn't possibly have known ANYTHING of substance about the trial, yet sends out this email. Now we have "black graduation" and "Faculty of Color" meetings where THEY get to discuss whether THEY are treated with the prescribed amount of respect. Meanwhile, any one of these people can deliberately misinterpret something a white professor says and it's the end of their career. This is how white men are getting REPLACED. And the white people buying and promoting it are a disgrace.
Whether from the perspective of Great Replacement Theory or that of Critical Race Theory, at the root it’s just a reversion to the baseline ethnic strife seen throughout human history. Those on the CRT side are actually quite honest about their intention to invert the existing hierarchy.
Before Rittenhouse, think of Geoge Zimmerman, also labelled a 'racist'. George was writing letters to his local newspaper criticizing police treatment of Black homeless people. And he had a Black girlfriend. A reeeeal 'white supremacist'. Suuure.
Yeah - I think you are a bit out on a limb on this one (replacement) but I have to agree with some of your comments. I sum it up as these differential policies are causing nothing but divisiveness and making students weak and unprepared for the real world.
So-seeking employment elsewhere? That sounds soul killing...
Haha. You gave enough details to tell me that you teach at the New School where the President is Dwight McBride, Princeton Class of 1990. Personally, a great guy but seems to be very misguided, especially on the Rittenhouse issue.
The other presidents were far more responsible and objective in their messaging, out of consideration for the various viewpoints that define the word 'university.'
Disgraceful behaviour by the university obviously. Surprising it is not. Might I suggest to Solveig however that she hold back on the teenage ‘love gush’ about her (what appears to be) idolisation of her husband. It adds nothing to the sense of injustice and unfairness. It comes across as My perfect privileged bubble life is no more. Thats just SO unfair. Less broadcasting more broadside please.
I felt the same way after reading this. I am disgusted by Princeton’s treatment of Dr. Katz but this piece left me cold. He presented his case very well in Quillette and the WSJ and hopefully, will eventually do so in Court.
I am glad I am not the only person to react in this way - and I am more than a little uncomfortable with lionizing an older male professor who has had serial relationships with students - up to and including the woman, his wife, who wrote this piece and is presumably at least 20 years his junior. I don’t think what happened to Katz is fair but I also don’t necessarily think he is the most admirable person, either.
Hate to agree with the 'love gush' comment, but yeah. She has what she thinks is a great relationship. And maybe it is, I hope it is.
But it does come across with a teenage crush element to it.
That said, she is sticking by her husband, which makes her a true friend, as opposed to those fake friends who turned on him.
Having a spouse you love who is also a real friend, that's a pretty good place. I wish them the best.
I know I should have more sympathy for the professor in this story but I don't. When I see these professors I wonder if they ignored the decades of the water slowly coming to a boil. How could they not see what was happening on campus!? And I'm old fashioned and still think college professors shouldn't date those over whom they have POWER. The baker, small business owner, doctor, and nurse who get cancelled should concern us much more than one more college professor who has been at the root of this evil for decades and done nothing.
Michael, that is a high bar that reminds me of how a pro-reparations movement can lash out at Americans whose ancestors were pro-abolition farmers in New Hampshire during the 19th Century. The fact that Katz worked in a university when surrounded by Marxists is not something to be dismissed out of hand, but I share the rage and give not a dollar to my selective liberal arts college.
Those in a quagmire often cannot see the forest for the trees. Such situations are very similar to life in a cult.
The author isn’t asking for sympathy, I don’t think, but she is doing everyone who reads her story a big favor in letting us know what these places of so-called “higher learning” are really about.
I appreciate your view. However, I still wonder how so many professors have kept the blinders obscuring their peripheral vision to the point of not just ignoring but denying things were getting bad on campus. Then "suddenly??" we have people, races, and religions getting cancelled on campuses all over. You are kind to view this article as a warning. I don't! A warning usually comes before the ship is going down.
Thanks. I certainly would not excuse any of them who knowingly look the other way. But, you may be right and perhaps for some it is because there is something in it for those who perpetuate this culture. For many others, however, “de-programming” oneself is a process, a peeling of the proverbial onion, and fear of consequences is not an insignificant deterrent to pulling back the blinders. Fear can cause below-conscious scotomas.
It takes courage to stand up for principle because you often stand alone. I have new heroes. Jordan Peterson at the top of the list, Governor Ron DeSantis, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heyring, Bari Weiss, and the person who started the list some years ago, my personal living hero, Justice Clarence Thomas.
We read the same people, and I heartily agree. Put Glenn Loury on the list, and dust off the works of Thomas Sowell while he is still alive and here to be praised. Douglas Murray also a very articulate canary in the coal mine.
I have followed Thomas Sowell for decades and have several of his books. He is such a prolific author that I can't hope to read even a potion his books.
Yes, to Douglas Murray. He is so articulate he is in a class of his own.
Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi as well. They're viewed a traitors by the left, but are more concerned with free speech and transparency than carrying the progs water.
Yes. I have a subscription to Glenn Greenwald's Substack.
Have followed them all since before the inception of Eric Weinstein’s “IDW” (Intellectual Dark Web). Peterson, whom I have followed since his Bill C-16 protest hit the news, I think has suffered the most for his good works. He never let it stop him. Bless his soul.
Right there beside you, Sister. Clarence Thomas is a gift to the country and he continues to write brilliantly about our Constitution and to think independently in a way that we shall miss when he passes on. The hypocrisy of the Left , the party that "cares" about minorities but put him through that disgraceful SCOTUS hearing - led by Joe Biden as head of the Judiciary Committee - leaves me shaking with rage. I am glad and proud that he has these years to put his stamp on American jurisprudence.
They haven't finished with him yet. Now they are going after Ginnie, his beloved wife. He can't speak anywhere because they protest and shut him down. The Left are the racists. They demonstrate their contempt for intelligent darker skinned people daily.
It angers me. The man is brilliant, and after Justice Scalia, an anchor on the bench and a firm protector of the Constitution.
You are obviously a kind person. I'm more of a jerk and tend to be very pessimistic. It's nice to see a pleasant, well-written argument. Thanks for that.
I doubt you’re a jerk, but to the extent you think you are, the positive is that you are not a waffler! Thanks for the kind words. 😉
P.S. There is good reason for pessimism sometimes, to be sure. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve been discouraged to the bone. But, I try to keep in mind that the human race has one over-arching (or should I say undergirding) drive, and that is to _survive_ which is why we have not wiped ourselves out . . . . yet.
The ship is going down.
It would be great if it were just some colleges but this whole attitude has permeated every level of education, every profession, and every news outlet. I hope we are not doomed but I fear the worst.
There are some happy outliers. Hillsdale, for one. Some of the traditional Catholic schools like Franciscan U Steubenville, Wyoming Catholic College, Ave Maria, etc., are still doing excellent work. Maybe sending contritions to colleges like these rather than just stopping contributions to the Ivies (and the Ivy-lights) would be great.
Thank you. I am a donor to each of the ones you name, plus Christendom College.
The University of Austin isn’t encouraging development. Jordan Peterson was also talking about doing a disruptive University, but I think he is busier than he expected following his time off the lecture circuit. Any of these start up heterodox universities will have to contend with the lack of a 200 year reputation, but I am cheering for all of them.
I hope we can salvage the ship before it sinks but you may be right...we waited too long.
They honestly don't think it could happen to them. Very trusting and too secure in their positions.
Agreed. I would seriously rethink sending my kid to a Princeton-type school and defer to starting a small business instead. This witch-hunt ideology is everywhere now, even at state universities and community colleges. Before you invest in higher education, parents, seek wisdom from those before you. It could be like the local state prison — mental walls with a very good library
Hollydays...that's it , right to her point. Amazement, how some people nip away, i figure, some feel good while shin kicking...respect
And they most likely all vote democrat.