Home » Harvard and Ronald Sullivan: the dancing bears of the university give in to student pressure

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Harvard and Ronald Sullivan: the dancing bears of the university give in to student pressure — 30 Comments

  1. In my opinion, the worst aspect of caving in to student pressure is that Harvard isn’t listening to intellectual powerhouses. These activists’ arguments, both spoken and written, never rise to the level of a varsity high school debate team (or quiz bowl team, to be more current). What are their majors?

    I admit my own bias, though. At my alma mater, “activism” often was a socially-acceptable way to blow off classes and get extensions from sympathetic instructors.

    It is positively “cringeworthy” to read Catharine MacKinnon’s comments, by the way. My classmates and I would have loved to have ousted several people from the Communications Department, including Jeffrey Masson, MacKinnon’s boyfriend. He was allowed to teach a class called “Media Harms” which seemed like one long discussion of his ongoing defamation suit against The New Yorker.

  2. Truly disgusting.

    And it will get worse.

    Of course, this “passionately intense” Orwellian mob can only be encouraged by the disingenuous moral genii of the Democratic Party (and others), whose current cri de coeur is that Trump IS—MUST BE! CAN ONLY BE—guilty in spite of Mueller’s disappointing failure to pin anything concrete on He-Who-Must-Be-Impeached….

    (“All animals are equal but some are more equal than others” has—so predictably—morphed into “Black lives matter but some matter more than others”…while still others—those who don’t think “right”—have to be exiled and disgraced. And driven far off into the wilderness….

    Time for the academy to wake up! (But I wouldn’t hold my breath at this point, as the toxins appear to have spread too wide, too deep—viz. MacKinnon, who is right on cue with the pitch-perfect, oh-so-“reasonable”-sounding perversity of Shakespearian proportions).

    And time for Dershowitz to step up—and not just offer support, though this is an encouraging and courageous, but no not surprising, step—since for him this debacle, this disaster is personal: seeing Harvard collapse like a house of cards MUST be perceived as the equivalent of kicking out those Jewish professors from German universities in the 30s, though in this case the impetus is ideological rather than racial “IMPURITY”. (To be sure, were Sullivan a Caucasian professor, the likelihood is that he would’ve been kicked out even more summarily. With a whole lot less fanfare. Without any “humanistic” and “caring” musings from Professor MacKinnon….)

    Alas, if the universities keep this up, then they are doomed.

  3. Incidents like this…and they are occurring almost every day…point out the extreme importance of ensuring that the Democrats do NOT take control in the next election.

  4. Academia is certainly doing its best to destroy its brand.

    Another nice touch is the announcement out today from the College Board that, from now on, SAT scores will be modified by adding a secret “adversity score” of between 1 and 100 extra points to make up for test takers “wealth advantage” or the lack thereof.

    “Colleges have long been concerned with scoring patterns on the SAT that seem unfavorable to certain racial and economic groups,” explained the New York Times. “Higher scores have been found to correlate with the student coming from a higher-income family, having better-educated parents, and being white or Asian rather than black or Hispanic.”

    Said the head of the College Board, “We can’t sit on our hands and ignore the disparities of wealth reflected in the SAT.”

    But, fear not, it’s all going to be so, so scientific, because in deciding how many extra adversity points a test taker should have added to their score, the Board is going to consider 15 different factors–“like the relative quality of the student’s high school and the crime rate and poverty level of the student’s home neighborhood.”

    And race, of course, will have nothing to do with this calculation.

    See https://pjmedia.com/trending/killing-education-sats-to-add-adversity-score-to-address-wealth-disparity-in-results/

  5. To the extent in which the image of a dancing bear presents us a nice incongruity; here an amusing, rhythmic and delicate being; all the while retaining (for our frisson of terror) a genuine element of frightful ferocity; a natural basis which we understand can potentially reemerge in any moment, unbidden — I cannot imagine any similar underlying nature in our current run of administrators or professors.

    Just ain’t any there there.

  6. There couldn’t be a clearer example of trying to artificially engineer “equality of outcome” vs. providing “equality of opportunity,” now could there?

    Who’d you rather hire, someone who could answer the questions correctly based on their education and native talent, or someone who couldn’t answer the questions correctly, but who had his SAT score artificially inflated, to make it appear that he could?

    Someone who had a better chance of doing the job, or someone who had less chance of doing the job?

  7. Useful idiots can always be counted upon to saw off the branch upon which they sit.

    Should these sheep succeed in banishing their sheepdogs, neither the Stalinists, the Maoists nor the Islamists will allow them their illusions.

    As many ‘object lessons’ will be made, as are needed. Maduro is providing the latest demonstration of what wolves do with sheep.

    It has ever been thus, “If God did not want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep…” Mexican bandit Calvera (Eli Wallach) explaining why they preyed on the innocent, peaceful villagers.

  8. The left is recreating the religious concept of the pariah. There is no need to take legal or extralegal action. Those who decide what is right-think and wrong-think simply have to declare someone guilty (a pariah), and the howling wolves of political correctness do all the heavy lifting for them.

    The poor unfortunate souls that have been so designated have no appeal and no hope. They have been banished, and that is that. And this from the very people who prided themselves on their tolerance and liberalism.

  9. “When I was in college it was pretty clear: students were not adults. For the most part, we couldn’t legally drink. We couldn’t vote. Women not only didn’t live in men’s dorms and vice versa, we couldn’t even go upstairs in each other’s dorms. Women had curfews every single night; men did not.”

    I was a freshman in the early ’70’s and virtually everything was the opposite. We could vote, I got a draft lottery number, alcohol was legal (not in dorm rooms but was OK in dorm rec rooms), and the opposite sex was just around the corner in the hallways. Commercial bars and the grad student bar were a few blocks away. No curfews of any sort.

    The university had subsumed an all women’s college years prior, and they had a few women only dorms for those who wanted that.

    I can’t say there was a huge amount of debauchery probably because most the students I knew were busting their butts with course work. While there were left wing student protests on occasion, they were largely ignored. Excepting the seizing of the admin building, or course.

    I also took a 6 week summer school course for advanced high school students between their junior and senior year, that was held at my home state’s state univ. campus. In that circumstance there were many students that went completely berserk with their new found freedoms.

    Those were tumultuous times. A great deal changed from ’65 through ’85.

  10. David Foster on May 16, 2019 at 5:13 pm at 5:13 pm said:
    Incidents like this…and they are occurring almost every day…point out the extreme importance of ensuring that the Democrats do NOT take control in the next election.
    * * *
    Add it to the lengthening list.
    The most frightening thing, to me, is that, once again, the Rabid Left are attacking one of their formerly favored own, with nary a Republican, conservative, or white supremacist in sight.

    Sullivan also defended a few other leftist icons in his career, according to the Crimson article (which is, indeed, quite long, with additional discussion in the comments as to the credibility of the charges against the deans).

    https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2019/5/10/winthrop-climate/

    Appointed as the first African American faculty deans at the College in 2009, Sullivan and Robinson both teach at Harvard Law School, where Sullivan also serves as the director of the Criminal Justice Institute. Aside from Weinstein, Sullivan has taken on other high-profile clients including former New England Patriots tight-end Aaron Hernandez in his 2017 double murder trial and the family of Michael Brown, a black man who was fatally shot by a white police officer in 2014. Robinson served as chief counsel to the late United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54.

    While I agree that every defendant, no matter how scurrilous, is entitled to the most competent attorneys he/she/it can pay for, anyone who takes a long-term position as counsel to Ted Kennedy, whose own imputed and known behavior is not far removed from Weinstein’s, has some serious moral compartmentalization going on.
    However, that choice of defendant did not distress any of the wilting snowflakes at Harvard, did it? I wonder, though, how he would fare in the #MeToo climate of today, as it is mostly the province of the young and enthusiastic, rather than the old and treacherous (ditto the communism and anti-Semitism of the New Skul congresspersons), and not beholden to the Kennedy dynasty in any way, neither captives of the Kennedy mystique.

    For those concerned about the climate of tar-and-pitchforks at universities in general, and especially the complaints that Sullivan should be removed because he hurt peoples’ feelings, here is an account of a case which ends up on the Right Side of History.

    The first two links are variations-on-a-theme, but contain slightly different sets of events and opinions; the third is the judge’s decision, which any legal-beagles here ought to enjoy immensely (it’s a rarified choice of entertainment, though).

    https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/04/22/the-splendid-peter-ridd-court-judgment/

    https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/04/24/peter-ridd-vs-the-dishonourables/

    https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/ridd-v-james-cook-university-2019-fcca-997-.pdf

  11. Actually, the thing that puzzles me most, which I haven’t seen anyone address yet, is why Sullivan made the decision to defend Weinstein in the first place.
    He had to have known it would be controversial in the current climate of “believe the victim” hysteria (and I use that word deliberately), so why take the risk?
    Especially in defending the man who actually served as the catalyst for the #MeToo movement in the first place.

    As one of the Crimson commenters said, harking back to the Ward Churchill Effect from Boulder a few years ago, although he probably doesn’t know anything about it:

    ron Bagehot • 6 days ago
    the point of this article is that perhaps if your house isn’t clean you might not want to bring more attention to it like a high-profile case about sexual assault to a college campus with a 31% rate of sexual assualt. ijs.

    I certainly hope the sexual assault rate is not that high* — although if students do in fact believe it is correct that might explain most of the protesting — but the rest of the remark is pertinent.

    What was Sullivan thinking??

    FWIW, when I went searching for that comment, the word “why” got exactly zero hits in the Crimson article.

    *on college assault stats

    https://spectator.us/diversocrats-take-harvard/

    One of the most authoritative studies carried out in the US, using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, found that between 1995 and 2013 the incidence of rape among female college students was 1.4 per 1,000. (If you include sexual assault, it rises to 6.1 per 1,000.) The change.org petition calling for Sullivan’s scalp claimed that ‘sexual assault and rape on campus…has now reached new, unparalleled heights’. In fact, rapes and sexual assaults of female college students in the US fell by more than 50 percent between 1997 and 2013 and in the same period the rate of rape and sexual assault was 1.2 times higher for non-students than for students.

  12. Let’s not forget Sullivan’s wife, Stephanie Robinson, who has been considered collateral damage in the Dancing Bears’ routine in most of the reports. She is mentioned only once or twice by the Spectator and TownHall and Atlantic, but an astounding 41 times by the Crimson, which pairs her name with Sullivan’s in all but a few instances, and definitely includes her as a full partner in the alleged toxicity at Windsor House.

    https://spectator.us/diversocrats-take-harvard/

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t any victims of such crimes among Winthrop House’s 400 or so residents, but there’s no reason why Sullivan’s joining Weinstein’s defense team should be ‘trauma-inducing’ for them. After all, acting for Weinstein isn’t tantamount to expressing skepticism about the veracity of their stories, or, indeed, the truthfulness of Weinstein’s accusers. Far less is it an expression of sympathy for Weinstein or other powerful men accused of sex crimes. As Sullivan has said in his own defense, everyone is entitled to due process, including the most reviled. He is not in any sense ‘siding’ with Weinstein. Rather, he is just affirming his conviction that civil liberties and constitutional rights should be extended to all US citizens.

    In re the bolded sentence, look back at the Crimson excerpt.

    “Robinson served as chief counsel to the late United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy ’54.”

    Sullivan is getting most of the pixel-inches, but his wife and co-dean Robinson was the one who worked for Chappaquiddick Kennedy.
    This official website post may not be up much longer.

    https://winthrop.harvard.edu/masters-0
    “Faculty Dean Stephanie Robinson

    Stephanie Robinson, Esq. is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, a national media figure, author, former Chief Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and the President and CEO of The Jamestown Project, a national think tank focusing on democracy.
    ..
    For five years, between 2008 and 2013, Ms. Robinson was Political Commentator for the Tom Joyner Morning Show where she spoke to between 9 and 10 million people weekly, offering her perspective on the day’s most pressing social and political issues.
    Ms. Robinson is a nationally recognized expert on issues relating to social policy, women, race, family, and electoral politics.”

    Did she have any input into her husband’s decision to defend Weinstein?
    The movie titan was certainly in the same social circles as Kennedy, and probably known to him at least indirectly (see below; if two-steps-away is good enough for FISA surveillance, it’s good enough for blog comments).

    Surely she had to realize, given her own career history, that female students at Harvard would be up in arms even more about her betrayal than her husband’s.
    What was she thinking???

    https://freebeacon.com/culture/mpaa-chair-chris-dodd-a-harvey-weinstein-friend-still-silent-on-sexual-abuse/
    BY: Brent Scher
    November 7, 2017 10:00 am

    Dodd, who took the reins of MPAA in 2011 after a 30-year stint in the U.S. Senate, has made no public comment on the rape and sexual assault allegations against Weinstein that have piled up after numerous women told their stories to the New York Times and The New Yorker a month ago. The MPAA, which works with major film studios including The Weinstein Company, has not put out a press release on sexual assault by Weinstein or others in the entertainment industry.

    Dodd had an existing relationship with Weinstein before he joined MPAA. Weinstein gave more money to Dodd during his political career than he gave to any of the other Democrats he supported. Dodd admitted in 2012 that their friendship affected the way the MPAA worked with Weinstein.

    “I’ve known Harvey for 25, 30 years, and we’ve been friends,” Dodd said when explaining why MPAA hosted a screening for a Weinstein film. “He was very helpful to me as a candidate for Congress and as a senator over the years.”

    Dodd also figures into stories involving aggressive sexual behavior on the part of now-deceased Democratic senator Ted Kennedy.

    Tucked into an extensive GQ profile of Kennedy are many anecdotes involving Dodd, including one where a waitress named Carla Gaviglio ended up “bruised, shaken, and angry,” and claiming she was sexually assaulted at a Washington, D.C., restaurant.

    Gaviglio, according to the story, was thrown by Kennedy onto a table and then onto Dodd while the two senators were drinking in a private dining room.

    (Journalist Michael) Kelly characterizes Kennedy and Dodd as “two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world” and notes “they’d always get their girls very, very drunk.”

    The incident, labeled a “waitress sandwich,” was also mentioned in New York magazine.

    The Democrat tandem’s behavior was corroborated by late Hollywood actress Carrie Fisher, who said Kennedy once asked her during a dinner with the senators whether she would have sex with Dodd.

    Many Democratic senators who received money from Weinstein decided to donate the contributions to charity. The Clinton Foundation rejected calls for it to donate any of the $250,000 it received, saying the money has already been spent.

  13. Typo fixes: missed another blockquote for the Harvard quote; and it’s Winthrop House, not Windsor (well, they were accused of autocratic behavior…)

    Let’s look at the Winthrop-Kennedy connection a bit further, although most of the references at Wikipedia are to JFK rather than Teddie.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winthrop_House

    Stein Club is a themed event featuring beer and snacks for Winthrop Residents every other Thursday evening. It is usually held in Winthrop’s Junior Common Room. Winthrop House sells beer steins annually with the house crest on them to be used at the stein clubs, though having one is not required to partake. Recent Stein Club themes include “Kung Fu,” “Comedy Night,” “Oktoberfest,” “Regatta,” and others. Stein Club is one of the most well attended events held in the house. Although many believe that Edward Kennedy began Winthrop’s Stein Club tradition, this is not true. The origin of this apocryphal story is a humorous article that appeared in the Harvard Independent.

    Interesting that the students knew enough about Teddie’s habits to make the apocryphal story believable.

    A couple of posts back at the beginning of the Weinstein furor also make a Kennedy connection, but only by analogy, because it was so obvious.
    Does anyone know if Weinstein had a direct connection with Kennedy, the way he did with the Clintons?

    Surely, at some point while Robinson was Ted’s Chief Counsel, she introduced him to her husband.
    Was Sullivan just doing a favor for a friend of an old friend?

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/kennedy-clinton-and-weinstein-sexual-assaults-accountability-conveniently-timed/

    Considering the ongoing reverence for the Kennedy family in so many powerful circles in this country, Chappaquiddick is a brave film. But it would have been much braver — perhaps impossible to make — a decade ago.

    If the spring brings a reevaluation of Ted Kennedy, it will probably come on the heels of a sudden and dramatic reevaluation of Bill Clinton as a consequence of the explosion of sexual-harassment and assault allegations in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

    After the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke, Lee Smith, writing in The Weekly Standard, asked a difficult question that few Democrats will really want to confront. Would the enormously consequential New York Times article detailing the accusations about the Hollywood producer have been published if the 2016 election had ended differently and Weinstein had the president of the United States on speed-dial?

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/harvey-weinstein-harassment-liberals.html

    …But Weinstein is older now and not as influential as in his heyday. The whole “forgive me, I’m a liberal” thing won’t protect him now, but it was part of his carapace for decades, during which time everyone who mattered clamored for his friendship and fund-raising prowess despite all the stories there to hear.

    Maybe his overdue exposure shows that the world has changed, and progressive industries are finally feminist enough to put their old goats out to pasture.

    But it might just show that a certain kind of powerful liberal creep only gets his comeuppance when he’s weakened or old or in the grave. The awfulness of Ted Kennedy, at Chappaquiddick and after hours in D.C., can be acknowledged only now that he’s no longer a liberal lion in the Senate. The possibility that Bill Clinton might be not just an adulterer but a rapist can be entertained now that he’s no longer protecting abortion from the White House. The sins of Woody Allen … well, I’m sure Hollywood will start ostracizing him any day now.

    (Julie: my 2-line comment has now lasted 2 hours, in case you are counting)

  14. Indeed “What were they thinking!!!!!!!”

    Upholding the principle of due process, the right of a defendant to a defense attorney, and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”.

    WHAT THE F*&#^@! H*#& WERE THEY THINKING!!!!

    And these guys are university professors at America’s MOST PRESTIGIOUS university!!??….

  15. Neo links to Conor Friedendorf’s article at The Atlantic without quoting from it.
    I read it to find out what the View from the Left looked like, because it was odd to see both left and right wing publications supporting Sullivan rather than the aggrieved protestors, and ostensibly for the same reasons.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/harvard-ronald-sullivan-weinstein/589300/

    Here are a couple more articles, via Conor’s links, that have the same response (the first also by Conor).

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/defense-harvey-weinsteins-lawyer-ronald-sullivan/583717/

    https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/unpopular-speech-in-a-cold-climate

    Same song, different verse:
    https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-nipsey-hussle-chris-darden-20190510-story.html

    I used the word “ostensibly” because the arguments look the same on the surface, but the virtue-signaling spin that the writers apply, almost reflexively, reveals how far detached they are from reality.

    So many posts to fisk, so little time….

    Suffice it to say, the pundits on the left, including the Slate author, really believe that they exemplify the liberal values they profess, without ever noticing that they only apply those values when it’s convenient, and even then only to people on their side of the ideological divide; and can’t see that the protestors they complain about in this case are only doing what they themselves support, incite, and perpetrate when it’s aimed at the Right.

    I won’t excerpt the examples justifying that particular conclusion, because you can spot them pretty easily if you want to go look; you’ll recognize them, even if their authors don’t. I want to concentrate just on the topic at issue: can good leftists defend bad people?

    The bottom line is that all the writers stress that they themselves, or other “liberal” lawyers, have always defended “unpopular” defendants before, without anyone calling them out; “Why is defending Weinstein any different?” they cry, confused and upset. They present their cases.

    (Slate) she defends young black men in college rape cases…well, she does get hate tweets from feminists, but any sane leftists, as well as most conservatives, totally agree with her work;

    (New Yorker) “In the years that followed (9/11), accused terrorists were the defendants who inspired the fiercest public scorn. Their lawyers were denounced as enemies of national security. Yet lawyers’ work in those cases forged sane legal doctrine on due process and executive power, doctrine that protects our civil rights today.”…that’s what they believe. (Read this article while thinking about Brett Kavanaugh and theTrump Dossier, for starters, and you’ll see what I mean about not having the time or energy to fisk the whole thing.)

    (LA Times) “After centuries of a history of black men hung from trees without trial, or after the thousands of cases of black men tried, convicted and executed without counsel … I cannot understand why in 2019 some people would deny a black man his 6th Amendment right to counsel of his choice,” Darden said, speaking of the man accused of killing “a celebrated rapper and community activist”…which is why I say, by extension: they really don’t understand the opposition to defending Weinstein; “Darden told The Times outside the courtroom that he has been defending accused criminals, including gang members, for two decades….He went on to add: “I defend poor people — that’s all I do. And he’s definitely poor.”

    (Atlantic, both articles) “Ronald Sullivan, an African American law professor and faculty dean with a long history of freeing marginalized innocents from prison” … none of whom, I suspect, are going to be on any leftist’s “no way” list;

    “Defense attorneys for Communists made many feel angry and unsafe.” … and no communist was unpopular on the left, even if some people didn’t say so out loud;

    “Defense attorneys for al-Qaeda terrorists made many feel angry and unsafe.”…but were very popular people on the left;

    This one needs more context —
    “In 2016, during the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump attacked his rival as unfit to lead because she once acted as the defense attorney for a man accused of raping a 12-year-old. (She thought he was guilty.) Defense attorneys for child predators make many feel angry and unsafe. ” … BTW, Republicans were incensed, not because she was his lawyer, but because she mocked the victim and laughed about defending a man she believed was guilty;

    “Now Sullivan is defending a man who makes many at Harvard feel angry and unsafe.”

    You all saw what he did there, I assume.
    Conor just called the Harvard students McCartheyite warmongering Islamophobic… somethings; that will really swing the protestors over to his side, you betcha!

    They really don’t know the answer.

    So I’ll tell them.

    Your prior defendants might be “unpopular” with the mythical Right that you are always speaking Truth to (despite the fact that it has no Power to stop you doing anything you jolly well please, and even then you have to impute to all conservatives opinions many of them don’t hold), but Weinstein is unpopular with the Left.

    And that is the bottom line.

  16. Barry: I love the smell of good snark in the morning.

    To summarize the argument:
    They may be professors at America’s most prestigious university, but they were not smart enough to look at what might ensue from defending Weinstein and turn down the job.

    Regardless of their motivation for joining Weinstein’s legal team (and I do think both of them must have agreed Sullivan would do it), they probably did think that they were doing something that is a matter of course in a world where classical liberal values (or at least some of them) still hold, and which is — or was — the norm for lawyers.
    They were not thinking in tune with these times, when college kids can torpedo any professor, any time, for any reason, and no quarter given for former commendable behavior.

    Maybe they thought that their leftist credentials would protect them, in the same way Bill Clinton’s protected him, and Ted Kennedy and others; however, they should have known that time was past — the writers at NR did.

    But maybe they didn’t even think about it at all, in the same way that so many other professors have gotten on the wrong side of a student protest because they haven’t really internalized how little it takes to melt a snowflake or trigger an activist looking to cause trouble.
    The faculty who were first to be taken down by the mobs had no real fore-warning that they were wandering into a mine-field; these two ought to have known better.

    The New Yorker writer is smarter, and had a good excuse to boot.

    “(I was also approached by Weinstein to join his criminal-defense team, which I disclose here with his permission. Primarily because The New Yorker had, famously, investigated and published various allegations against Weinstein that led to his being charged, and, because I am a contributing writer to The New Yorker, I declined to represent him, wishing to avoid any possible appearance of a legal conflict of interest.)”

  17. Neo – apologies for all those links in the Google search copy-paste.
    What was I thinking???

  18. https://hotair.com/archives/2019/05/16/sat-will-now-assign-adversity-score-student/

    “I’m torn over this. On the one hand, I think schools should be making some effort to recognize students who overcome personal adversity to achieve high scores. If there are two students with the same good grades and very similar scores and one kid clearly worked a lot harder to get there, rewarding that extra effort makes sense.

    However, the way this is set up seems designed to punish students for “privilege.” If a student has great grades and test scores but comes from a wealthy family that lives in a wealthy neighborhood, he’s still a great student with great test scores. He should get into a good school and shouldn’t be penalized because his parents also did well and went to great schools and got good jobs. That would be punishing the student for someone else’s extra effort.

    I guess my worry is that schools seem likely to get carried away with this in a way that penalizes success. I don’t think that’s a good idea or a good message.

    The message is “you didn’t build that.”

  19. The dragons’ teeth have been meticulously sown

    The gates of intimidation have been thrown open.

    And the Red Guards—those passionate guardians of virtue—have been let loose across the land.

    (Which is absolutely fine as long as they can confine their virtuous enthusiasms to the right people…and groups. IF….)

  20. Being from the same neck of the woods, as Rajesh Khurana, I can assume this was a lynching. If you do not believe it, just attend any of our soirées and overhear the racism against “kaloos”. Would be automatic admission into the al-right, only the brown-ness getting in the way.

  21. On the one hand, I think schools should be making some effort to recognize students who overcome personal adversity to achieve high scores. If there are two students with the same good grades and very similar scores and one kid clearly worked a lot harder to get there, rewarding that extra effort makes sense.

    That is what personal statements and essays are supposed to do, plus, of course, interviews. The imitation of objectivity is important to race hustlers.

  22. The PC-Klan, another virtual lynching, trying to destroy a person’s position.

    Fed research funding should be removed from Harvard, no students should be getting Fed supported loans.

    Universities need to have some quota, like 20%, of conservative pro-life professors. This is not a popular proposal, and is unlikely to get implemented, yet it would help save the universities.

    It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

    “Adjusting” the SATs by the test givers is terrible — any such adjustment should be done by the colleges. It’s very racist; yet the Democrats are good at finding some plausible excuse to be racist & tribalist.

    Creating and supporting tribes is what the Dem “identity politics” is all about. Throughout history, tribal warfare has been the norm. The prior American Dream included a “melting pot” to make all US citizens American, German- or English-American, Black or White or Brown or Yellow-American, but “American” first. If some other tribe comes before American in priority, America gets into trouble.

    Voluntary black segregation at elite colleges, supported by the racist administrators, is a clear expression against melting pot integration. Instead of judging people by their character, these official organizations will judge people based on some other tribal identity. It’s so sad.

  23. Tom Grey on May 17, 2019 at 1:41 pm at 1:41 pm said:
    …This is not a popular proposal, and is unlikely to get implemented, yet it would help save the universities.
    * * *
    Cue Sir Roger Scruton, another victim of leftists over in Blimey-land.

    https://humanevents.com/2019/05/13/roger-scruton-get-rid-of-universities-altogether/

    LOL, Urban Dictionary says “Actually, “Cor Blimey!” is derrived [sic] from the middle-aged [siccer] expression “God, Blind Me!”, used when someone saw something they shouldnt have,” which seems very appropriate for the condition of Great Britain today.
    Wiktionary concurs, with slightly better grammar.

  24. Its just self-evident that not everyone is college material, or will succeed in and be happy in an academically oriented career.

    As has been pointed out, you would have to be omniscient and have perfect knowledge of everyone’s entire life and circumstances to make the Solomonic judgement as to who should get how many “adversity points.”

    Who makes this call anyway, who will be assigning these adversity points, and what are their qualifications for making these decisions?

    To take just one example, what about the kid who comes from a wealthy family and neighborhood, but whose parents are neglectful and abusive alcoholics, who belittle him and beat him up, and are no help at all, but a hindrance to his ability to learn and do well in school?

    Should this student be given fewer points just because of outward circumstance, of his parent’s income and where he lives, of his “privilege”?

    What about the kid from the wrong side of the tracks, whose low income parents are loving and supportive and, as a result, he is an excellent student.

    Should his score be boosted even higher just because of his parent’s low income and the neighborhood he happens to live in, of his outward lack of “privilege”?

    What about kids from a school which has a generally bad track record, antiquated textbooks, and limited equipment–computers, say–but which also has a couple of outstanding teachers, who regularly turn out very well educated students, who are far above average.

    Does each individual student from this school get more or less points?

    Apparently, listening to the head of the College Board and architect of this cockamamie social engineering scheme, everyone from the same sub-standard school would get the same number of points.

    Moreover, does anyone really think it is a good idea to set up students–if they are not well prepared, may not have innate talent, and who are not highly motivated–for failure, by inflating/augmenting their SAT scores so that they can gain admission to very competitive schools that they would not otherwise be able to gain admission to, and where they will likely fail?

    And why make these adversity point augmentations secret, and only visible to the schools themselves, and not to the students or their parents?

    Is this scheme really the best thing for these students?

    What a bad idea.

    Moreover, what a way to sabotage each one of these students, our country, economy, and society, by making it harder for the truly talented–regardless of their background, race, income level, or home address–to succeed–to rise to the top–on their own merit and moreover, at the same time, to likely sabotage the less motivated and talented by increasing their chances of failure in college, and by saddling them with the suspicion that, as recipients of such an “adversity score” augmentation, they are not really able to cut it.

    It would seem far more beneficial to all potential college students if–as used to often happen in the bad “old days”–a very candid assessment were made of their levels of knowledge, skill, and ability, and, based on their results, they were to be directed down a path that they would likely succeed in, be happy with and, not coincidentally, make a good living at, whether it was college, or some other form of education, say, a trade, a technical school, or on the job training.

    Not everyone has to go to college.

    There are a lot of supposedly “less glamorous” and “dirty” but often high paying jobs that keep this country running, and jobs in these fields are reportedly just begging for people to fill them.

  25. Snow on Pine on May 18, 2019 at 10:13 am at 10:13 am said:
    Its just self-evident that not everyone is college material, or will succeed in and be happy in an academically oriented career.

    As has been pointed out, you would have to be omniscient and have perfect knowledge of everyone’s entire life and circumstances to make the Solomonic judgement as to who should get how many “adversity points.”
    * * *
    Matt. 7
    1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.
    2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

    John 7
    24 Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.

    Romans 14
    13 Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his brother’s way.

  26. Snow on Pine on May 18, 2019 at 10:13 am at 10:13 am said:
    …Not everyone has to go to college.
    * * *
    They do if the Academic Empires are to continue to rake in their ill-gotten gains.

  27. Snow on Pine on May 18, 2019 at 10:13 am at 10:13 am said:

    Moreover, what a way to sabotage each one of these students, our country, economy, and society, by making it harder for the truly talented–regardless of their background, race, income level, or home address–to succeed–to rise to the top–on their own merit and moreover, at the same time, to likely sabotage the less motivated and talented by increasing their chances of failure in college, and by saddling them with the suspicion that, as recipients of such an “adversity score” augmentation, they are not really able to cut it.
    * * *
    Everything you said is true in your excellent summary of the cons of the new SAT scoring (there are no pros).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SICa0tWHzJQ&feature=youtu.be
    “The year was 2081, and finally everyone was equal….”

  28. Pingback:The Man Who Saw Through Time: Pfc. Richard Edward Marks, USMC — May 31, 1946 (New York) – February 14, 1966 (Vietnam) – Excursions in Jewish Military History and Jewish Genealogy

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