DAVID MARCUS: Transportation Secretary Duffy is right; Harvard just ain’t what it used to be
It was Woody Allen, in his 1977 gem of a movie "Annie Hall," who quipped, "Everything our parents said was good is bad, sunlight, red meat … college." And in the case of the once world-class Harvard University, truer words have rarely been uttered.
The transformation, in our lifetimes, of Harvard from a tower of intellectual excellence to a barnyard of progressive slop is why Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is right to urge his daughter away from this bastion of absurd wokeness.
Let’s face it, 30 years ago, when you heard the term "Harvard degree," you thought, "Oh, this must be a very smart person who has done all the reading." Today, sadly, when we hear Harvard degree, most of us think, "Oh, this is likely a wealthy, snot-nosed Marxist who can’t even be bothered to read Marx."
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And it isn’t just Harvard. The entire Ivy League has become synonymous with liberal lunacy. For example, is Columbia a university or a staging ground for jihadi sympathizers, or have the lackluster leaders there decided those are the same thing?
Meanwhile, back at Harvard, which settled an antisemitism lawsuit last year, The New York Times reported on students not doing work but graduating anyway due to grade inflation.
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From the article: "Once they get in, many of its students skip class and fail to do the reading. … When they do show up for class, they are focused on their devices and are reluctant to speak out. Sometimes it is because they are afraid of sharing ideas that others will disagree with. But often, they have not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution."
Reading the classics? Not so much. But Jew-hating? Absolutely!
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This is supposed to be the learning ground of presidents and statesmen, and now the students are refusing to read? They should change the motto from "Veritas" to "No Regrets."
Much of this crisis in our top schools has been caused by diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as rich kids of color are sneaked in through the side door to maintain the appearance of a Benetton ad.
Everyone’s new favorite pencil-mustached communist, Gustavo Gordillo, is a great example of this. Prior to his parents buying him a $1.5 million home in Brooklyn, Gustavo got a sculpture degree from Yale, but after that, somehow he couldn’t even make his way through a union electrician apprenticeship.
Mind you, this hasn’t stopped him from calling himself a union electrician. Maybe I’ll just tell people I play second base for the Phillies.
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Is it any wonder that Duffy and his wife don’t want to send their daughter to this commie summer camp we call Harvard, where she can hang out with gaggles of America-hating Gustavos?
The Ivies just don’t carry the weight they once did because they threw it away in the name of progressivism. Today, in the real world, nobody actually expects that a Harvard grad is smarter or more able than an alum of West Virginia University or Penn State, and they are probably much more annoying.
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It really is a problem for our society that our top institutions of higher education have all but turned their backs on educating, preferring to pump out activists instead of scholars.
Conservative complaints over the Ivy League are nothing new, after all. It was his book, "God and Man at Yale," which made William F. Buckley Jr. a founding father of the conservative movement, but as much as he disagreed with his liberal professors and fellow students, he didn’t doubt their ability or willingness to read books.
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It seems unlikely that the Ivies will stage a comeback. Already schools like Hillsdale College are running circles around them, and Gov. Ron DeSantis’ programs to overhaul the Florida state college system are yielding solid results.
The people we should feel bad for here are the honest, hard-working students who still fought hard to get into Harvard only to find that their skin color or religion is more important than their intellectual abilities.
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Ultimately, this is why so many parents, even those of us who are not in the Cabinet, would make the same decision as Duffy. We want to send our kids to colleges that will educate, not indoctrinate them.
This may all be for the best. We really don’t need a handful of elite colleges to produce all of our leaders. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has degrees from the University of Florida and the University of Miami, but nobody thinks this makes him an intellectual lightweight, because it doesn’t.
Wherever Secretary Duffy’s daughter goes, I hope it is somewhere that will make her read and think, that will not teach her to hate Jews, and maybe — not to get too crazy — will instill a bit of patriotism.
That is not too much to ask for Ms. Duffy or for any of our kids.