I do have to say it is hilarious to me how many bold, iconoclastic, "free thinking" would be lefties go full Margaret Dumont if you call Harvard a whore house. Or the other ivies or may-as-well-be-ivies, though not as much as when you note it's a lot more of a 37 billion dollar establishment knocking shop than a good to humanity. Today Charles Pierce notes that in addition to canning probably the fourth least criminal candidates of that Kennedy School fellowship program while keeping the real thugs at the Kennedy School, Harvard's administration has the distinction of rejecting the recommendation of not one but two doctoral programs that they admit Michelle Jones as a PhD candidate because she is also a just released ex-convict, having served twenty years for murdering her 4 year old son while still a teenager. Among those who support her academic career is the woman who successfully prosecuted her for that crime and who argued for the harshest sentence for her. Diane Marger Moore said:
“Look, as a mother, I thought it was just an awful crime... But what Harvard did is highly inappropriate: I’m the prosecutor, not them. Michelle Jones served her time, and she served a long time, exactly what she deserved. A sentence is a sentence.”
While she was in prison, Michelle Jones made a vow to her son and herself that she would redeem her life and she did it by first educating herself in an inadequate prison library and then through earning a degree and making herself into what is, apparently, a fine historian whose work is valued by other historians, even, obviously, some of those at Harvard. But, on finding out that she was on the verge of being accepted into either the History or American Studies PhD program, a couple of the profs there got the fantods and wrote to the friggin Dean and President of Whorevard and sandbagged her acceptance. One of the excuses was they suspected she wouldn't be able to take the pressure at dear old Harvard, where she'd be subjected to those who believe they are, and these are their words, not mine, "the elite of the elite". I've known a lot of Harvard products over the years, believe me, lots of them don't live up to that self-regarding phrase. As I mentioned, one of them was the "Dumbest fucking guy" Douglas Feith. George W. Bush is another. So is Jared Kushner.
I mean, if the Great Gray Drab of the New York Times can see this as the disgusting cowardice that it is - one of the reasons they sandbagged Ms. Jones is because they were afraid of the right-wing media mocking them - it's really bad. They deserve as much heat as they can get for all of these things. If I ran the place, I'd get rid of the goddamned Kennedy School, altogether. It's pretty vile.
I wish Ms. Jones all the luck in the world in her PhD program at New York University, I hope she produces valuable and widely read and influential history for decades to come, always telling the truth and always digging for deeper meanings behind them. Congratulations to her department at New York University on getting such a promising candidate, I hope she does you proud. For some reason this reminds me of how a few weeks back, after looking at a university anthology of then current poets, my guess was that Gwendolyn Brooks was probably read more than the much more lauded poets in it. I mean, other than Ars Poetica as found in such anthologies, does anyone in the world read Archibald Macleish (Yale-Harvard) today? I'm sure she (Wilson Junior College) will be for a long, long time.
you seem to have serious issues with institutions that don't meet your pedestrian expectations. Why do you give a shit who Harvard excludes? Yo paraphrase Groucho Marx, should she want to be part of a society that rejects her? Does that make her work any less noteworthy, or is it douchebags like you that give places like Harvard too much influence to begin with? If her work is excellent, then it will transcend any influence a shot nose school like Harvard would add. Talent is talent. Fuck Harvard.
ReplyDeleteYou just called Charles Pierce a douchebag as he wrote the piece that slammed Harvard on this that I read. He also linked to the piece in the New York Times that, if you'd read it, would have shown you that SHE obviously cared enough to apply to Harvard.
DeleteYou also don't seem to realize that you agreed with what I said, which is a Similsian level of unawareness.
I do, though, reject your assertion that equality, justice and acknowledgement of obvious redemption such as Ms. Jones asserted was her goal are "pedestrian" they are all too rare and too in need of acknowledgement and implementation in society. Harvard and the academic class, in general, or at least those who control its institution talk a good game but their putting their resources where their mouths are is in an inverse relationship to their endowments and the income size of their customer base.