I begin this with apologies to Ed and Nancy Bruce and to Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, of course.
I will also spare readers a long rehash of the antisemitism controversy that has blown up in the faces of Harvard and several other universities that somehow remain prestigious. Most of you are well aware, and I dare not try to do better than what
among others has just written.But I will point out the free speech granted antisemites at Harvard does not apply to, say, those opposing the wokeness that harbors antisemitism. One study has free speech at Harvard at rock bottom. I am not exaggerating. Harvard got an actual ZERO on free speech. Free speech for woke antisemites, but not for normal people at Harvard.
But how normal is the Harvard student body? I will point out another glaring fault of Harvard that is getting even less attention — the student body is far more irreligious, agnostic and atheistic than the general population. Ryan Burge of
has pointed out that it is downright “weird.”Harvard’s incoming Freshman class is 47% atheists and agnostics and only 6% Protestant. “Weird” is a polite way of putting it.
Now I certainly do not think atheists and agnostics should be excluded or marked down in admissions (although Oxford excluded such for most of its history, and you were required to subscribe to the 39 Articles to be an Oxford student as late as 1854.) But I do not think Protestants and other Christians should be excluded or marked down either.
And I cannot believe numbers like Harvard’s can come about only through self-selection. Christians and likely others of a traditional Western mindset are being excluded from Harvard. Harvard has already been caught discriminating against Asians by the Supreme Court no less in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. That and Burge’s numbers beg the question of who else are they discriminating against?
But even if you could get in, why would you? Why go to Harvard when it is rife with bigotry against Jews and Christians? The same question could be asked of other Ivy League universities and no telling how many other U. S. universities even if Harvard is a stand out.
As for academic freedom, openly oppose Critical Theory on many campuses and find out that academic freedom is dead on many of them. One can hardly have academic freedom without free speech.
The state of American colleges and universities is why I have repeatedly asserted the need to reinvent education. New College Florida under the guidance of Christopher Rufo is showing the way.
Reinventing Education: New College Florida Update
Last month, in the previous post in my Reinventing Education series,… I mentioned anti-woke reforms at New College Florida. Yesterday, Christopher F. Rufo posted an update on how the reforms are going. And the news is good! The new New College is attracting students with the incoming class the largest in its history. There is also addition by subtraction as 36 mostly ver…
And one should not fear being a small institution or going to a small institution. The new St. Andrews College Almanor is showing the way . . .
Reinventing Education - The Necessity of Christian Classical Schools
I am prompted to revive my Reinventing Education series by a bittersweet post by Rod Dreher. (Is there anything Dreher writes that isn’t bittersweet?) In “The Wonder and the Dusk of the West,” he uses Mont-Saint-Michel as a metaphor for needed redoubts of Western civilization in the midst of civilizational suicide.
And there are other microcolleges springing up across the country.
But universities of woke bigotry like Harvard are not to be sought after by either parents or students.
They should be boycotted and defunded.
No. Not you. Someone else on here. It must of popped up in wrong spot 👍
I honestly hate reading your blog, not because it is badly written, but because the topics, especially the state of higher education, are so disheartening. Regardless, thank you.