Whirlwind Rocks Academia’s Elites

Rockne opined “4 yrs of football are calculated to breed in the average man more ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes”? Make that 10 TIMES MORE after Harvard’s pres sacked?

What a shellacking not only the elitists at Harvard but academia in general got on the PR gridiron thanks to Gay & two other Ivy league leaders who also testified before Congress in mystifying fashion about antisemitism on their campuses. As John Houseman once simply said of successful investment firm Smith Barney, “They earned it.” How? The WSJ’s editorial board's explaination was simple, too: “The former Harvard president’s defense [of hers’ & other educational institutions’ failure to punish antisemitism] reveals why elite educators have lost so much public respect.” Not only did her locker room speech before Congress smell like a sweaty jock strap, but her op ed in the New York Times after being shown the door, sniveling about being a victim of “racism,” smells like Al Sharpton’s sweaty hanky he never washes.

But, as the editors also noted, the stakes were bigger than one elitist’s job. As to her op ed they concluded: “Ms. Gay was correct in 1 respect: ‘The campaign [to oust] me was about more than one university & one leader.’ Her equivocation before Congress about whether calling for genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s code of conduct made her a symbol of progressive group-think infecting higher education & [many] American institutions ....” As former NY Times editor James Bennet wrote in the Economist recently, his ex-paper “is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.” If they’d take the Bible seriously again instead of mindlessly mocking its conservative messaging that's obviously worth listening to, they might realize the likelihood of reaping the whirlwind from what they sowed. Or, not.

Davd Soul