I’m in the middle of trying to figure out person-years (still) and writing up a fairly tedious piece on it - but it’s taking me ages.
Meanwhile, I wanted to comment on the extraordinary events of the last week. Not that I can add much to what’s already been said, of course.
I refer, of course, as implied by the title of this piece, to Claudine Gay, the president of Hardtard Harvard. It looks like she will be staying in the job because the board of Harvard have voted to keep her in it. I think they may well end up regretting their decision.
What were Harvard thinking when they hired this prize prat? What are they thinking now, when they’ve decided to support her?
She was asked a fairly straightforward question about whether calls for genocide by students constituted something Harvard would take action on.
Apparently, it’s OK to say stuff like this and Harvard will only take action when it “crosses into conduct”. Jewish students must be thrilled by this. I’m sure they feel very ‘safe’ and secure knowing that Harvard takes a stand against actual genocide, because trying to do it would be “actionable”, but calling for it is fine.
I’m not really a free speech absolutist - pretty close to it I reckon - but I recognize that there are things which ought to be proscribed and not protected under free speech laws. Calls for actual violence against individuals being one of those things. You don’t get to make death threats, for example.
Most jurisdictions take a dim view of incitement to violence - not waiting until it “crosses into conduct”. In sane jurisdictions the bar for what constitutes ‘incitement’ is set rather high - as it should be.
I’m not quite sure of the mental gymnastics required to be able to distinguish a call for genocide from a call for violence - but, hey, I’m not university president material, obviously. These folk have some serious flexi-brains that I wasn’t gifted with.
Of course, if we’re going to allow that calling for the genocide of one group is acceptable and not actionable behaviour, then we have to allow that calling for the genocide of any group of people is similarly acceptable. I wonder if Harvard would be quite so tolerant of people calling for black genocide, or trans genocide, or queer genocide, or the genocide of the handicapped?
What am I thinking? They have a freakin hissy fit over the ‘wrong’ pronouns for eff’s sake! Calling for black genocide, for example, would definitely not be tolerated. But calling for the genocide of Jews - that’s just free speech, innit?
There’s probably some academic drivel detailed explanation of what the difference is.
I know that some people are OK with calls for genocide against an entire people being protected under free speech legislation. I am not sure.
On the other hand, it’s probably for the best that people are allowed to reveal who they really are. On the principle of “give ‘em enough rope” I might be persuaded that a call for genocide ought to fall under the protection of free speech.
You see, I wasn’t really implying that people should actually hang themselves here - it was just a figure of speech, a metaphor.
Gay would probably have some kind of nuclear meltdown if someone suggested that a man could not become a woman, or that black people have never had it better in the US1. These would probably be “actionable” statements in her world.
Even representing Harvey Weinstein - surely even he was entitled to a decent legal defence - was an “actionable” offence according to Harvard. Ronald Sullivan was removed from his position as faculty Dean at Harvard when he decided to help with Weinstein’s defence.
Can’t have those effing lawyers represent bad people now, can we?
Obviously, if you’ve been charged with a crime you must be guilty, right?
It was quite a spectacle watching the three stooges the three university heads not being able to properly condemn calls for genocide. The similarity of their phrasing and answers suggested they’d all got together beforehand, with their legal defence team no doubt2, to agree on the emphasis and weaselosity of their statements.
This last few weeks has been a roller-coaster ride down Hinge-Free Highway. The events of October 7th and the inevitable subsequent response have unhinged a lot of people; myself included. I’m kind of still in a state of shock and probably still not thinking straight about it all. God only knows what people in Israel (and Gaza and Palestine) must be feeling.
The commentary has ranged from the insightful to the almost delirious. We’ve witnessed a kind of Holocaust Denial v2.0 as so many people scrabbled to try to excuse Hamas’ actions, or claim it was all done by the IDF, or pick up on some of the claims of excessive brutality as if trying to discredit all of the claims.
It’s been rather bizarre. It has been almost a case of “well, they didn’t chop all of his limbs off, they left him with an arm”. As if that makes it all OK.
This has left a lot of people wondering what the hell is happening when Hamas’ actions can’t be wholly condemned without equivocation or a heavy dose of whataboutism?
And then we get Gay and her two fellow academic sophists. If Hamas revealed their dark soul on Oct 7th, and the subsequent attempts to sanitize Hamas’ actions have revealed a dark sickness in our societies, then Gay & Co. have revealed the dark and deranged underbelly of academia.
Thousands of articles have been written about the woke sickness at the core of Higher Education and perhaps they’ve had some effect at the margins, but these 3 clowns might have greatly accelerated that process of necessary awareness.
I can only certainly hope so.
Would it be wrong of me to call for the genocide of DIE?
I want DIE to die - it’s a cancer that has to be eliminated. It is a disastrous ideology that is rotting everything. Hiring based on anything but merit3 is an affront to everyone’s dignity. It’s also fucking dumb.
Even kids know this. Remember those games at school where each side would pick from a group? They didn’t pick Wobbly William the Useless first did they? No, you’d want the best at each round of picking for your team. I don’t know what it’s like for kids today, but if someone had suggested a ‘diversity-based’ method of picking team members back then, it would have been a case of “fuck diversity - I want him on my team”.
If you happened to be Wobbly Willie, then I’m sorry, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles (if you haven’t eaten it).
Having been in the position of the hapless Willie myself, I know what it feels like. It sucks. But crying about it and demanding ‘fairer’ treatment wasn’t the answer. Getting better, and fitter, was.
Gay is clearly a diversity hire. She’s only got the thinnest slice of beef in her academic sandwich. You could argue that universities are multi-million dollar businesses and the last person you’d want running the show is an actual academic. I have some sympathy with that view, but Gay seems to be a bit shit on all fronts. She’s been in the job for less than a year, but she has brought more ruination on Harvard’s reputation than anyone in all of its nearly 400 year history. That, I suppose, is quite an achievement.
I suspect there will be a heavy financial price to pay for that ‘achievement’. I hope Harvard think it will all have been worth it.
It all reminds me of The Princess Bride all this woke stuff. Time and again I hear stuff, or read stuff, only to think “that doesn’t mean what you think it means”.
As I listened to those 3 stooges give their non-answers I realized that none of what they were saying meant what they were trying to get us to think it meant. They only mean ‘free speech’ insofar as it is speech in favour of their pet causes and ideology. We all know this - we’ve seen countless examples of their double standards. They haven’t cared at all about this because, so far, they’ve been winning. But the events of the last few weeks might have done more to open people’s eyes to what’s going on than we realize.
Might we be able to look back on this time in future and see that it was the turning point?
Let’s hope so. Meanwhile, it’s fine to be gay, but not so fine to be Gay.
These are just examples of something someone should be allowed to say without repercussion - whether or not you agree with these statements.
Who, presumably, have not been sacked from their positions for having the temerity to help someone in a legal matter.
OK - it’s not quite everything. You definitely don’t want to hire Hannibal Lecter, no matter how brilliant he is.
I really must protest against using weasel as a pejorative. They are adorable little mustelids, especially the smallest kind which is only about 4" long, nose to tip of the tail. Also, very helpful and useful little critters as they are far better than cats when it comes to keeping down the population of rodents.
Comparing that quota hire black something-or-other to a weasel is unfair. So there!
My immediate reaction, upon hearing their responses, was, “Is speech not a type of conduct?” For I could describe the way these presidents conducted themselves as appalling, though all they did was flap their face holes. The problem here isn’t free speech— it’s the lack of visceral disgust at extreme anti-semitism. The problem isn’t that the students (and admins) don’t fear disciplinary action, it’s that they don’t fear social condemnation. The other day I was on a university campus joking about not understanding their recycling system— “it’s ok, I’m a republican” I explained as I threw all my trash and recyclables into the same ambiguous bin. I wish people who called for genocide of Jews on campus received even a quarter of the scorn I got for lumping together my aluminum and plastic.