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A Harvard Education

Who dares to say that Harvard in
The present situation
No longer is a purveyor of
A top-notch education?

Why even its own President
Just now was taught to deem
Free speech of great importance when
Jew hatred is the theme.

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Russel Winick recently started writing poetry after ending a long legal career. He resides in Naperville, Illinois.

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33 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    When Margaret Coats was at Harvard, it must have been still near the apex of educational institutions. These days all such institutions have lost their quest for truth and objectivity. Education is no longer education, but brainwashing. As one who has taught at the university level, I am greatly saddened by the degradation of education.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Thanks, Roy. There were tremendous benefits for students who worked for them–which is always part of a satisfactory arrangement. For an atmospheric poem of the time, check out Seamus Heaney’s Villanelle for an Anniversary. It’s one of the best.

      Reply
    • C.B. Anderson

      Indeed, Roy. Nowadays persons of our once-elite institutions don’t seem to understand the distinction between education and inculcation.

      Reply
  2. Brian A. Yapko

    This poem is terrific, Russel — the subject is infuriating and you handle it perfect sardonic tone and undiluted message. Thank you for writing this.

    It’s not just Harvard. It’s MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and others. So now, here in the American Reich, antisemitism it is perfectly allowable on Ivy League campuses “depending on the context” (according to the President of Penn.) Since her dismayingly legalistic testimony before Congress a few days ago (along with Harvard’s and MIT’s presidents) two images have been floating around the internet. One is a picture of a 1920s book entitled “Mein Context” by Adolf Hitler. The other is a picture of the gate in front of Auschwitz which eliminates the Arbeit Macht Frei wording and, instead, says “Depends on the Context.”

    Reply
    • Russel Winick

      Thanks Brian. I picked Harvard as representative for the poem, given its traditional reputation as a top school. I’m glad you liked it.

      Reply
  3. Phil S. Rogers

    These college presidents must realize that many of the graduates of Ivy League schools are Jewish, extremely successful, and huge donors? Obviously they don’t care. Your poem is right on target.

    Reply
  4. Joshua C. Frank

    Well said, Russel. I just saw a meme that quoted Sen. Tom Cotton in saying, “Use the wrong pronoun? Harvard will come after you with everything it has. Join a mob and call for genocide against the Jews? Harvard’s president said she ‘embraces that’ as free expression. What a disgrace.”

    The only silver lining is that when leftists call us racist, we can just laugh and shove their own actions in their faces.

    The left’s appalling reaction to the October 7 attacks has taught me that if someone doesn’t have the utmost contempt for the left, he isn’t worth giving the time of day.

    Reply
  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    I’ve been employed in academia for over half a century. It was once a place of learning, discussion, research, and top-notch scholarship. I have watched it degenerate, under left-liberal influence and manipulation, into a hotbed of anti-Western, anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual and anti-semitic bigotry. The festering, cancerous core of what is wrong with the modern world lies in academia — its tenured fanatics, its timeserving administrators, its bloated bureaucracy of advisory committees and inquisitional DEI, CRT, and Human Resources personnel.

    What those three university presidents said is pure college Newspeak. They said what they had to say to remain safe from enraged faculty, violence-prone students, and an entire subculture of intellectual arrogance comprised of entrenched leftism, gender feminism, affirmative action nonentities, and trendy political correctness. If they had openly and forcefully repudiated the anti-semitism on their campuses, they would never hear the end of recriminations from faculty committees and student organizations. But since they waffled with their weaselly “context” remarks, they are now getting hit by their trustee boards and their big donors.

    It’s fun to watch them caught between a rock and a hard place. Let’s hope the three bitches get totally screwed.

    Reply
  7. Cynthia Erlandson

    I admire your ability to make important points so clearly and succinctly!

    Reply
  8. Margaret Coats

    Russel, I think they need you at the Harvard Lampoon. No issue since May, as far as I can see. You write the short, incisive pieces they need, and your versifying skill makes them more attractive than the usual loose bur effective satiric essay.

    There’s always somebody in these disastrous situations who is doing his job, but remains unnoticed. Maybe this time it’s the humorists.

    I was in high school during the bad old days of student riots for filthy speech and relevant education. At Harvard, a mob threatened the university library. Why? Books were too old for relevance. They should be destroyed, and nothing studied but recently mimeographed material.

    I decided not to apply to Harvard or any other big university. Instead, I went to a college not in a city. There my best professor had four Harvard degrees. During those riots, he had gone to the library and studied. He found good professors to guide him. Two of them stood on the main library steps to defy the mob and protect books. They became my professors, too, when I went to Harvard as a graduate student. Never were there two less likely fellows to withstand riotous youngsters. But they did it, and continued teaching into better days. Honor and power to them and to present-day colleagues.

    Reply
  9. Lannie David Brockstein

    The speaker in Russel Winick’s “A Harvard Education” is a proponent of hate speech not being censored, but that speaker failed to mention how dangerous it is for there to be too much hate speech.

    Regarding the anti-Zionist rallies of the past two months, where the unrestrained hate speech of its organizers and speakers has incited for the posters of Israeli hostages to be torn off of walls and no differently than when the antisemitic Nazis burned Jewish books, along with Jewish businesses having been vandalized and whereby it is not safe anymore for Jewish university students to wear Jewish symbols on campus lest they be the target of physical violence by Muslim supremacists and their Woke enablers, we have witnessed what happens when hate speech, which is a part of free speech but whose slippery slope leads to hell, is not confronted and restricted by those who we have entrusted to safeguard our democracy.

    Democracy requires for there to be freedom of speech, which includes the hate speech of pathogenic cultures because every lie contains a bit of truth and to do away with all lies is to do away with those bits of truth. But unless that hate speech is confronted and restricted, and therefore put in its place because it hardly contains any truth, it will tyrannically monopolize and thus dominate the conversation, much like any pathogenic microorganism that has infected and overpopulated a person’s microbiome whereby it is no longer properly populated with health-promoting probiotic microorganisms, causing disease as a result.

    For example, it is a Muslim supremacist and Woke lie that Israel is an apartheid state, whereas the truth is that Israel is not an apartheid state because everybody there is equal before the law, like in every other Western style democracy. Furthermore, Gaza is governed as an apartheid state because all women there are like second-class citizens and all non-Muslims there are like third class citizens. As a result, there are hardly any non-Muslims in Gaza. There is little to no diversity in Gaza, and the same can be said about the areas in Judea and Samaria that are governed by the Palestinian Authority.

    It wasn’t the Israeli people who overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, which is a Muslim supremacist terrorist organization, to govern the Palestinian people. It was the Palestinian people who did, as the German people had overwhelmingly voted for the Nazi Party that was a White supremacist terrorist organization.

    To put it politely, hate speech is like a spice that in the slightest bit of excess can easily ruin the recipe, and when in moderation is what can help to make the recipe. That is not to excuse antisemitism because any recipe that is too spicy can cause the shits. That is to say it can be intellectually invigorating for academics to put the anti-Jewish demon worshippers in their place before those bad apples have spoiled the whole bunch. But that is not easily able to happen or possible to do when the president of their university is herself an antisemite who has no interest in prohibiting the procatarctic propagators of antisemitic hate speech from making a mockery of that university’s good name with their incitement of hate crimes. If any student has said something stupid during a debate then that has afforded another student the opportunity to say something smart in reply. But the propagators of hate speech who use free speech to try and censor the free speech of others, should never be permitted by the powers that be to rule the roost.

    Hate speech must always be confronted and restricted before it has the opportunity to monopolize and dominate the conversation, which is a form of censorship, the same way that the Modernists having filled major public art galleries with piles of garbage in an effort to reduce the number of genuine art works that can be displayed there, is a form of censorship. That is why intellectuals such as Douglas Murray refuse to debate the relentless disseminators of hate speech such as Norman Finkelstein, as to give that intellectually dishonest person an inch is for him to take a mile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8KNhzD1xDE

    That is also why it has begun to happen that the Muslim supremacist and Woke university students who are guilty of having torn down the posters of Israeli hostages and other acts of antisemitism have begun to be suspended, along with the process also having begun for their fellow antisemitic university students who are not citizens to be deported to their country of origin.

    Reply
    • Joshua C. Frank

      I think freedom of speech is inherently paradoxical, and possibly unsustainable, for the reasons you describe. Any solution will ultimately lead to the end of free speech.

      If we restrict hate speech, then someone has to define hate speech, and by doing so, he puts an end to free speech. After all, a lot of people would consider my pro-life and anti-feminist poems to be hate speech against women (in reality, women like these a lot more than men do, and my most devoted readers are women because of these poems).

      If we don’t restrict hate speech, then we put the Gospels and Hitler’s speeches on equal moral footing, and the most hateful and vocal groups have room to take over, as leftists already have.

      What Russel’s speaker is saying is that freedom of speech is being selectively applied. If you say a man doesn’t become a woman by calling himself one, you’re a Nazi and need to be silenced, but if you use actual Nazi speech against Jews, you’re exercising your constitutional right and need to be protected. This selective application is itself extremely anti-Semitic.

      Reply
      • Russel Winick

        You are correct, Josh, in interpreting the message of my poem. Thanks!

    • Russel Winick

      The poem takes no position on the extent to which hate speech should or shouldn’t be banned from college campuses. It highlights the hypocrisy of Harvard’s president (and others) in suddenly discovering the virtues of free speech when antisemitism is the subject.

      Reply
      • Lannie David Brockstein

        Nonetheless, the speaker in “A Harvard Education” does seem to imply that hate speech in general should be permitted by university students as part of their rallies, no matter what kind of rally. Is that not what the speaker is implying?

        But if so, since when is the use of hate speech, which by its nature does incite violence against a living person or group, not illegal in Massachusetts where Harvard is located? Since when is hate speech not illegal in that state, unless said by the fictional speaker in a work of art whereby that hate speech is specifically against a fictional individual or group?

        As mentioned in my previous comment that I posted in this thread on December 10th, 2023, due to the illegal use of hate speech it is no longer safe for Jewish university students at Harvard to wear Jewish symbols on campus, lest they be the target of violence by Muslim supremacists and their Woke enablers. Does the speaker in “A Harvard Education” have no issue with that?

        The Washington Free Beacon (October 21st, 2023) – “Israeli Harvard Business School Student Accosted and Harassed Amid Gaza ‘Die-In’ on Campus”: https://freebeacon.com/campus/israeli-harvard-business-school-student-accosted-and-harassed-amid-gaza-die-in-on-campus/

        Here in Canada, the hate speech by the organizers and speakers of anti-Zionist rallies did incite for hate crimes to be committed against the Jewish community, whereby two Jewish schools were shot at, along with a bomb threat having been made against another Jewish school, and two synagogues having been firebombed. But the hate speech that incited those hate crimes should be permitted to continue because freedom of speech?

  10. Joseph S. Salemi

    “Hate speech for me, but not for thee.” That is the left-liberal rule in these matters. And Josh is quite right — a great deal of conservative, Christian, and non-liberal discourse of any variety is being arbitrarily re-defined as “hate speech.” It’s a way for the left to impose censorship while not thinking of itself as a censor. And if you try to argue against what is happening, that too is defined as “hate speech.”

    Reply
  11. Drilon Bajrami

    I had to resort to Google to find out what this poem was about (apolitical Brit here).

    How is it so that the presidents of the some of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. and the world, cannot condemn a genocide of a group of peoples? Silence in the face of evil is never acceptable. Genocide is evil.

    Sometimes, people need to forget about politics and just answer a question, truthfully, how they really think and feel. These ladies fucked around playing a political pantomime and they should face the consequences of that via resignation. If they had been asked to comment about a Palestinian genocide, they almost certainly would have given a very different answer. Why should any group of peoples be forced to undergo genocide?

    Public opinion will ALWAYS favour Palestine because they are the weak underdogs against a power they cannot win against. I doubt circumstances or opinion will change very soon.

    I understand the plights of the Palestinians as a Kosovar Albanian who lived under foreign occupation*; however, our resistance force, the KLA, never targeted civlians, only corrupt police forces (who heavily abused their powers to commit atrocities against powerless civilians) and enemy soliders in military bases.

    *(I also understand that the Arabs started the Arab-Israeli war and everything happening now is their fault, ultimately. Israel had a right to defend itself.)

    The U.S. government even eventually supported the KLA, training up its commanders and supplying them with weapons etc., after the CIA initially labelled them a terroist organisation, because they saw it was a rebel organisation who desired the freedom of its people and it wasn’t using cowardly tactics like kidnapping innocent cilivians. What Hamas did was COWARDLY and should be heavily condemned. I don’t see how any person with morals can support that.

    Beautiful poem, Russel. Short and sweet.

    Reply
  12. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Harvard hypocrisy laid bare in succinct and biting satirical poetry that says is like it is, and in doing so gets right to the core of today’s chaos! Russel, thank you!

    Reply
  14. Joseph S. Salemi

    As it turns out, the incompetent affirmative-action-hire President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, is also a blatant plagiarist of large chunks of her dissertation, and her published articles.

    Harvard, of course, has decided to ignore the evidence, and not even upbraid her in any manner at all. And yet any student at Harvard caught plagiarizing is immediately expelled.

    That’s identity politics for you.

    Reply
    • Margaret Coats

      Carol Swain, one distinguished black political scientist whose work was stolen, says she will not give up on this matter. Just yesterday, I heard her explain the extent of the harm done (not fully understood by those outside academia), and the great value (personal and professional) of giving honest recognition to work by others. Swain’s big problem is that the others whom Gay plagiarized do not stand up for this value, but excuse the theft.

      Reply

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