It is 60 years since William F. Buckley said that he would ‘rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University’. Yet even the godfather of American conservatism would be surprised at how much more attractive the folks in the phone directory appear today.
Harvard is currently having a major row with Donald Trump’s administration. It results from the way in which the university responded to the 7 October attacks in Israel. While the Hamas massacres were still on-going, more than 30 Harvard University student organisations signed a letter which claimed to hold the ‘Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence’.
You might wonder why students at Harvard have such an inflated sense of their own importance that they imagine any ‘regime’ or government would be waiting for their take on things. Stranger still was the students’ apparent belief that Harvard was somehow central to the Israeli war effort. ‘Harvard out of Occupied Palestine’ was one of their demands. You would be hard-pushed to find anyone in the Middle East who believes that their lands are occupied by Harvard University, whoever else they think culpable.
Since then, events on campus have become increasingly insane. Jewish students were subjected to assaults, insults and intimidation – all while the university authorities defended all this as a ‘speech’ issue. In a set of notorious hearings in front of a Congressional committee, the then president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, insisted that calls for ‘genocide’ against Jews would have to be judged based on their ‘context’.
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