What's Behind the Disaster at Harvard?

               You may have heard about the disaster at Harvard. Claudine Gay, the president of the university, was forced to resign. She was asked in a congressional hearing if calling for the mass murder of Jews violated Harvard’s free speech code. She answered, “it depends on the context.” It depends on the context? Of course, outrage followed this limp wristed, politically calculated answer. Harvard immediately lost over a billion dollars in donations, enrollment applications dropped, and many called for Gay’s resignation. What followed next were credible allegations that Gay was serial plagiarizer, that she used the research of other scholars and called it her own. I can tell you as a college professor this is the worst sin in academia—the stealing of someone else’s research.  At first, the Harvard board defended her and stood by her as did famous alumni like Barack Obama. But in the end the scandal was too great and she had to resign. Claudine Gay had a very mediocre academic record, and even that turned out to be fraudulent. 

Headline after headline condemned the university. Can Harvard be Saved?, read one. What caused the moral rot at Harvard?, read another.

Why was she hired in the first place?  For religious reasons. She is a faithful high priestess of the Progressive cult that has come to control our universities; universities now hire leadership on the basis of their commitment to left-wing religion, not any objective criteria of leadership ability. She had a frothing at the mouth commitment to what is known as DEI—Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. For those of you who don’t know, DEI is textbook Marxism. If a university does not show enough diversity then admissions and hiring have to be changed to correct this. Merit and ability are thrown out the window in favor of groups the Progressive Left has determined to be oppressed. As I have pointed out in other videos, the Left derives religious meaning from helping the oppressed. They get even more religious satisfaction out of punishing oppressors. To put it simply, Harvard has replaced the God of the Bible and the Christian worldview with a Progressive, Left-wing idolatry, and now we are seeing the consequences.

In her resignation letter did she take responsibility for her academic sins? Of course not. She blamed racism.  As John Masko points out in Unherd, Gay asks us to disregard the shoddiness of her work and judge her by her conclusions. In other words, if you arrive at doctrinal conclusions accepted by the Progressive hierarchy it does not matter how you arrived at those conclusions. And it doesn’t matter if they are true. Only if they are politically correct. 

Don’t weep for her. She will continue as a professor with a salary of $900,000 a year. I wonder what she will do if she finds a student guilty of plagiarism?

Harvard was founded to train men to teach others about the true God of the Bible.  Its original motto was “Glory to Christ.”  It shortly lost that commitment but when you reject the God of the Bible you then turn to different religions—terrible religions. And that’s what Harvard has done. Like Israel in the Old Testament they have turned to idols and the result is catastrophe. Isaiah 2:8: Their land is filled with idols;
    they bow down to the work of their hands,
    to what their own fingers have made.

Make no mistake, Harvard is overtly hostile to God and His people. Ryan Burge has pointed out that about half of their incoming freshman do not believe in God. America is 50% protestant but the number is only 5% at Harvard. So protestant Christians are underrepresented by a factor of ten to one. But the DEI folks don’t seem worried about that. Protestants are almost as rare at Harvard as they are at the Vatican. Burge calls Harvard’s religious makeup “weird” but it is only weird if you are not a Leftist.

Harvard is proud that its chaplain is an atheist.

The faculty itself is overwhelmingly on the left with only about 5% claiming to be any kind of conservative. Conservatives are far more rare at Harvard than they are at the Vatican.

Is Harvard alone in this? Hardly. Virtually every other major university has bowed its knee to the new Baal.

Harvard’s current high status is undeserved. There are many talented people working there but that is not the focus of the university. Its commitment is to spreading the false religion of Progressivism and all the doctrinal errors that involves.

What does the future hold? Andrew Walker is not hopeful. “The school is still plagued by a toxic campus culture, ideological corruption, and bureaucratic bloat that stifle open inquiry and free discourse…..[Wokeism] is a form of cultural Marxism at odds with freedom of expression, moral responsibility, national unity, and cultural sanity. Christians should oppose it vehemently.”

Harvard will continue to promote its cultic doctrines. They already believe that Hamas is a righteous group. How long before human sacrifice is Ok? The extermination of the weak?   Clearly the suppression of free speech which has largely already been attained. FIRE rated Harvard as the worst university in America on free speech. Harvard specializes in punishing dissent. Harvard will not change its behavior until it changes its religion. It will only be saved if it returns to the Judeo-Christian heritage that produced it—and its greatness—in the first place.

More: From World Magazine, why people like Gay are hired in the first place; https://wng.org/opinions/whats-really-going-on-at-harvard-1704285639?mkt_tok=NzEwLVFSUi0yMDkAAAGQbvp_l5FV9u9QlD4l-Wk7dq6iE_kmDBHdK1-qsdrT9H-IXuVDhGBg1F6zvV1m16dRcgWAfAmkSb8DL4oiAbvnGMsKZSaq3qo8HOMGlSLtBk5e

Ayaan Hirsi Ali; The Mafia of Mediocrity: https://unherd.com/?p=495545?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3

Harvard humiliated itself for the sake of an ideology, as opposed to plain nepotism. Until that ideology is extirpated not just from one university but from American education as a whole, the mafia of mediocrity will continue to march on — and produce many more Claudine Gays along the way.

Ryan Burge on the religious makeup of Harvard’s student body: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/how-weird-is-the-religious-composition?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

John Masko in Unherd; https://unherd.com/thepost/why-did-claudine-gay-get-a-free-pass/

 Heather McDonald on why Gay’s resignation will change nothing; https://www.city-journal.org/article/unrepentant-dei-at-mit

Ilya Shapiro argues that the rot at Harvard continues; https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-real-problem-remains

Andrew Walker hopes that the Claudine Gay scandal will erode the power of cultic wokeness that plagues Western universities: https://wng.org/opinions/the-mind-virus-is-finally-breaking-1704318478?mkt_tok=NzEwLVFSUi0yMDkAAAGQc6UpfAGHBGHHZHt8nZnWqSX02n_LoKrvnGpKZm9HaUY5w7hT5NWV-VhkRqKc4JT6y_iFCWRGmGDxOYHhtudTqegZflzB3rfml9CP12_Xb4i9

My belief, though, is that the high point of wokeness has crested, and America is finally breaking free of the virus that once captivated and captured America’s mind into adopting absurd and simplistic categories for navigating social interactions.

  In that, Harvard is by no means alone.

Claudine Gay is a mediocre scholar…and was elevated for advancing progressive orthodoxy while checking the right intersectional boxes.

Heather McDonald on Gay’s resignation: https://www.city-journal.org/article/harvard-presses-on-with-inclusiveness

A university can be meritocratically excellent or it can be demographically inclusive. It cannot be both. That is why inclusiveness must be affirmed as a separate value from excellence. In a meritocratic world, the only values a university would care about including are those pertaining to academic achievement.