It's time for America to end its love affair with Harvard University

 I live in Baton Rouge's College Town neighborhood, where every street is named after a prestigious university: Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and, of course, Harvard.

A Harvard Street can be found in cities across the United States--even in Los Angeles, which is 3,000 miles from Harvard Yard. 

Harvard is revered worldwide because it represents the zenith of academic prestige. As a recent  Associated Press news article put it: 

For students around the world, an acceptance letter to Harvard University has represented the pinnacle of achievement, offering a spot among the elite at a campus that produces Nobel Prize winners, captains of industry, and global leaders.

Like many others over four centuries, I came to Harvard believing a Harvard degree would dramatically change my life. I was a country boy from Oklahoma who was practicing law in Alaska. As a friend told me, a Harvard degree would erase Oklahoma from my resume. I would leave its hallowed campus, I naively assumed, with the credentials to speak at the national level on the public issues of the day.

I was disappointed. Harvard's Graduate School of Education, where I had obtained a berth, was not nearly as exclusive as I had imagined. HGSE's one-year master's program in education was a diploma mill, where students could obtain a Harvard credential merely by sitting through eight courses over nine months.  Some of those classes had enrollments of 200 students or more.

One of my classmates, an accomplished Connecticut attorney, researched the career prospects for HGSE graduates and shared her findings with me. The Education School's placement office data revealed that most doctoral graduates worked in the Northeast at modest salaries. My classmate concluded that a doctoral degree from HGSE was not worth the time or money. She left the program and went back to practising law.

Leaving the program was not an option for me. I had two small children enrolled in the Boston area schools. After disrupting my family and moving them across the North American continent, I felt I had to see it through.

After three-and-a-half years, I left Harvard with a master's degree and a doctorate and accepted a tenure-track job at a Southern university, making less than a third of what I had made as a practising lawyer.

My years at Harvard were the most miserable years of my life. I found the campus to be ugly, a jumble of dreary buildings in a multitude of discordant architectural styles and a far cry from the beautiful college campuses of the American South. To my surprise, Cambridge and Boston were shockingly provincial. The general population was surly, sullen, and cynical--as if they all lived in a Ben Affleck movie. 

As for the Harvard academic community, I found most (but not all) of the faculty arrogant, self-centered, and mediocre. As a white male student, I was a racial minority in a culture obsessed with race and gender. I was told not to bother applying to the Harvard Education Review: I was the wrong color

I hated the bleak and sunless Boston winters, which were oddly more depressing than the Alaska winters I had experienced. The subways were dirty, and the narrow, winding streets seemed designed to make it impossible to drive around a block.

When people compliment me on having a degree from Harvard, I tell them this: I was intelligent enough to get into Harvard but not smart enough to realize I shouldn't go.

Ain't we got fun!

Three Yale Professors Flee to Canada to Escape Trump. We'll miss 'em

 Three Yale Professors are leaving the United States to accept teaching jobs at the University of Toronto, ostensibly to escape Donald Trump. Professor Marcie Shore, one of the emigres, compared herself to the political refugees who fled Germany as the Nazis came to power. "The lesson of 1933 is that you get out sooner rather than later."

In fact, there are similarities between Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the contempory United States. Like Germany (Paul von Hindenburg), the U.S. was governed for a time by a senile octogenarian (Joe Biden). 

In the waning days of the Weimar Republic, Germany was racked by political violence formented by Nazis, Communists, and para-military groups. Our nation is likewise plagued by political violence perpetrated by a new generation of thugs: Antifa, criminal immigrants, and anti-Israel protesters.

Racism gripped the German universities as Hitler came to power, which later spread to the general German population. Today, American universities are harboring anti-Semitic racists. Fortunately, Jew hating in the U.S. has so far been confined to Academia.

Nevertheless, Professor Shore and her fellow fleeing colleagues have misinterpreted today's political climate. It is Trump's political enemies who are behaving like Nazis, not Trump. More than 1,500 January 6th protesters were imprisoned far too harshly, while the hoodlums who burned down Minneapolis got away with arson during the George Floyd riots.

Indeed, it is self-serving and inaccurate for the departing Yale professors to compare themselves to the refugees who fled Germany to escape the Nazis.

The people who escaped Germany lost everything because Hitler's goons confiscated their property and their bank accounts. 

My guess is that Professors Marcie Shore, Jason Stanley, and Timothy Snyder are retaining all their investments and wealth as they immigrate to Canada. They may even have vacation homes in the U.S. that they are free to visit on their holidays.

Shore, Snyder, and Stanley may even profit from their political stunt. There could be book deals in their future and paid speaking engagements.

In the South, we have a saying when someone leaves a situation in a huff, Don't let the screendoor hit you in the butt on your way out.

And please do the nation a favor and take some Harvard professors with you.

Yale professors fleeing to Canada

The Democrats Need a New Code Talker

 Last week, Tim Walz spoke before a forum at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he revealed Kamala Harris's reason for choosing him as her vice presidential running mate. 

“I could code talk to white guys watching football, fixing their truck,“ Walz explained. “I was the permission structure to say, ‘Look, you can do this and vote for this.’”

Apparently, the Harris campaign team realized Kamala had no credibility with working-class white dudes. Harris needed a middle-aged, midwestern, Caucasian male on the ticket who could talk like Clint Eastwood did in the barbershop scene in Gran Torino. 

Barber Martin: Perfect! A Polak and AND a Chink!

Walt Kowalski: How ya doing, Martin, you crazy Italian prick?

How did that work out? Not so well. Kamala lost ground in three critical demographic groups compared to Joe Biden's performance in the 2020 presidential race. A higher percentage of Hispanics, African Americans, and younger voters voted for Trump in 2024 than in 2020. Indeed, Trump won a majority of the popular vote among Hispanic men.

Even in New York, a reliably Blue state, Trump won new voters.  Trump carried 41 of the Empire State's 62 counties, including two counties on Long Island. Harris won New York by 11 percentage points, but Biden won by 23. 

If the Democrats want to win the presidency in 2028, they will need a better team on the ticket than Dumb and Dumber. No code talker will persuade a working-class guy from Flyover Country that America needs open borders. 

And no beer-drinking, football-watching dude in the Heartland will consent to have his high-school-aged daughter compete at a varsity track meet against a guy in the shot put event just because he's changed his name from Rufus to Linda.

Tim Walz: Code Talker

Did Pope Benecict XVI Go to Hell?

 I grew up in a small Oklahoma town where most people were Evangelical Protestants. These folks were grouped in several denominations, but they all held one central belief: The Bible is the word of God and must be interpreted literally.

For example, the Nazarenes, a little-known sect that began in North Texas, prohibited women from cutting their hair or wearing makeup based on church leaders' interpretation of a few obscure verses in the Old Testament. The Church of Christ, almost unheard of outside the South, allowed no musical instruments in their worship places because the Bible did not mention pianos.

All these sturdy groups shared one iron-clad belief: dancing and the consumption of alcohol were grave sins. Thus, Jesus did not change water into wine at the wedding in Cana; he transformed it into Welch's grape juice. And Jesus didn't dance.

In midlife, I converted to Catholicism, and I now believe that at least one verse from the Bible must be interpreted literally. This is the verse:

But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.

Matthew 18:6 (NCB)

Sexually abusing a child is a great sin, and all the experts agree that a child or youth never recovers psychologically from it. Surely, an adult who molests or rapes a child deserves to have a stone attached to his neck and be thrown in the ocean and drowned.

Tragically, the Catholic Church has been cursed for more than half a century by the sexual abuse of children by priests--hundreds of thousands of children across the globe.

Much of this abuse took place while Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger presided over the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican agency in charge of handling sexual abuse allegations.

In Jesus Wept, published this year by Alfred A. Knopf, Philip Shenon established conclusively that Ratzinger knew about the sexual abuse crisis and did virtually nothing about it. 

Shenon wrote:

Vatican documents made public in court records proved Ratzinger had always been involved personally in the handling of especially notorious child-abuse cases and that he regularly acted to delay the punishment of pedophile priests, even though that put more children at risk.

Shenon's book describes the sexual abuse calamity in detail, and Ratzinger was not the only person in the Vatican who fell short. Pope John Paul II probably knew almost as much as Ratzinger did. John Paul was surely aware that Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion of Christ, was a serial child abuser, but he continued to pal around with him.

This week, the cardinals will convene to choose a successor to Pope Francis. I hope they all will have read Shenon's book and will choose a new pope with the courage to tackle the sexual abuse crisis that continues to scandalize the world. 

Cardinal Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI upon the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005. He stepped down from the papacy in  2013 and died in 2022. It's too late to tie a millstone around his neck and cast him into the sea.

I don't believe in a literal hell, but Ratzinger might dwell there if it exists.  Catholics should pray for his soul and the souls of all the children who were ravaged by priests over the past several decades. 

May God have mercy on the abusers and the men who covered it up. And may the balm of God's compassion heal all the children and youth who were sexually abused by Catholic priests.

Pope Benedict XVI

America is now two countries: Which one do you want to live in?

 Not long ago, voters in 33 Illinois counties voted to leave Illinois and become part of Indiana. Twelve counties in eastern Oregon--perhaps America's wokest state-- voted to leave the Beaver State to become part of Idaho.  And in Texas, a robust secession movement has been active for many years.

What's going on? 

Clearly, Americans are dividing into two camps.  Blue State residents vote Democratic and are comfortable with the Democrats' woke agenda, which includes heavy government intervention in the national economy, transgender participation in girls' sports, and open borders.

Red State voters tend to hold traditional cultural values that emphasize patriotism, family, and Christianity. Red State voters are suspicious of federal regulations, and they're frightened by the Democrats' open border policies and the insertion of woke values in the public schools.

As a map of national voting patterns illustrates, Blue and Red states are geographically distinct. The Blue states are mostly clustered on the East and West Coasts, while the Republican-leaning Red states comprise the South, the Midwestern plains, and the Rocky Mountains west (except for Colorado and New Mexico).

As Abraham Lincoln observed in a 1858 speech, "a house divided cannot stand," and we are a divided nation. I thought the 2024 election results might usher in an era of political calm, but the election of Donald Trump for a second presidential term has been met by calls for resistance and a "civic uprising" by the coastal elites. Trump's enemies have filed well over 100 lawsuits to sabotage his political agenda.

What does the future hold? I think it is unlikely that conservative populations in woke states will be able to break away and join more conservative states.  The conservative counties in Illinois will never be able to escape to Indiana, nor will the eastern counties of Oregon ever become part of Greater Idaho.

Nevertheless, America's political and cultural divide is becoming sharper and more contentious by the day. I live off a gravel road in rural Mississippi, where cultural values are as different from Boston as Congo is different from Canada. America is now truly two separate countries.

America today is becoming more and more like the United States in 1860. As Bruce Catton, Erik Larson, and others have explained, by the eve of the Civil War, the radical abolitionists in New England and the rabid pro-slavery advocates in South Carolina despised each other and actually longed for war. 

And war is what they got. 

Unless academia, Democratic politicians, and the legacy media show more respect for the hard-working and decent people of Flyover Country, the nation will one day fall apart. If that occurs, my loyalties will be with Flyover Country--my doctoral degree from Harvard notwithstanding.

 

2024 Presidential Election Results by County

David Brooks Says that the Universities are the Crown Jewels of American Life. That’s Baloney

In a recent op-ed essay in the New York Times, David Brooks called for a “civic uprising” against the Trump administration. Brook envisions a revolt of the intellectual elites, including those who hang out in the universities, which he described as “the crown jewels of American life.”

The universities, Brooks extols, “are hubs of scientific and entrepreneurial innovation,” and “[i]n a million ways, the scholars at universities help us understand ourselves and our world.”

Brooks goes so far as to attest that the universities mold young students to become cultured, critical thinkers:

I have seen it over and over. A kid comes on campus as a freshman, inquisitive but unformed. By senior year, there is something impressive about her. She is awakened, cultured, [and] a critical thinker. The universities have performed their magic once again.

I’m sorry, David, but that’s pure, unadulterated bullshit. As the media shows us daily, the universities are not nurturing students to be cultured, critical thinkers. They’re producing anti-Semitic racists who rampage through college campuses spewing venomous hatred toward Jews.

If the universities were doing their jobs, they would be educating young people to think rationally and to have some understanding of Israel’s heroic struggle to maintain the only democratic society in the Middle East. Instead, anti-Israel student protesters voice their support for Hamas--a gang of rapists, torturers, kidnappers, body snatchers, arsonists, and-child killers.

Moreover, if the nation’s university leaders were compassionate champions of social justice, which they claim to be, they would not be hiking tuition year after year, forcing their students to take on ruinous levels of debt to obtain liberal arts and humanities degrees that are worthless.

To be fair, Brooks admits that American universities have flaws. “Many have allowed themselves to become shrouded in a stifling progressivism that tells half the country: ‘Your voices don’t matter.’”

Brooks fails to acknowledge that the “flaw” he describes as “stifling progressivism” is not a quaint and harmless eccentricity. It is an expression of the universities’ bigotry, provincialism, and base contempt for traditional American values.

In short, Brooks is wrong to say that American universities are advancing “the glories of our way of life.” On the contrary, the gasbags who run the colleges and teach in them are programming their students to be intolerant, racist, simplistic, and self-absorbed. And they’re charging a boatload of money for the privilege of destroying American culture. 

An anti-Israel encampment at Columbia: "the glories of our way of life"

To the Barricades! NY Times's David Brooks Calls for a "Civic Uprising" Against the Trump Administration

 David Brooks recently published an op-ed essay in the New York Times calling for a "civic uprising" against the Trump administration. A terrifying vision flashed through my mind of blood in the streets.

A civic uprising! In my mind's eye, I saw an enraged Times columnist Maureen Dowd shaving President Trump's head as the Parisians did to Nazi collaborators at the end of World II. I also saw Frank Bruni and Paul Krugman filling empty Perrier bottles with gasoline to make Molotov cocktails to throw at Teslas.

The more I contemplated Brooks's call to arms, the more frightened I became. In the Hamptons, I envisioned the Beautiful People mocking RFK Jr at an inquisition and forcing him to eat Spam sandwiches made with Wonder Bread. I saw Hedge Fund managers dragging Tulsi Gabbard by her hair through the streets of Martha's Vineyard and making her answer for the despicable crime of trying to get foreign rapists out of the country. 

However, after reading Brooks's essay a second time, my panic subsided. I realized the shock troops for his "civic uprising" were not so fearsome. Brooks called for "Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits, and the scientific community" to form "one coordinated mass movement" to stop Trump. That doesn't sound too scary.

After carefully rereading Brooks's manifesto, I also discerned that Brooks's "civic uprising" was not a call for guerrilla warfare. No, he was just pleading for more litigation. "Pile on the lawsuits," he urged.

I understood then that David Brooks's game plan for destroying Donald Trump was nothing more than the same, tired tactics the coastal elites have used unsuccessfully since the beginning of Trump's first administration. Litigation, hysterical references to Fascism, and mass rallies led by the grouchy old cranks in the Democratic party--that's David Brooks's big idea.

It never occurred to him to try to defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box by presenting Americans with sound ideas for improving their lives. That's because the op ed writers at the Times, the nation's pampered university leaders, and the Democratic Party hacks don't have any ideas. That's why they bray about "the end of democracy," spew profanity, and call  for a "civic uprising."

The New York Times editorial board is leading a" civic uprising" against Donald Trump.
Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, and David Brooks are pictured from left to right.