Is Harvard an Embarrassment? Part II: Kyle Kashuv and David Hogg

By RICHARD K. VEDDER

Let me get this right. Kyle Kashuv was second in his class at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School with a 1550 SAT score and acceptance at Harvard—fairly typical credentials for students at America’s oldest university. David Hogg, attending the same high school and a classmate of Kashuv, was a dramatically weaker student grade-wise, with, according to news reports, a much less impressive 1270 SAT score, over one standard deviation below the average SAT score of those accepted at Harvard.

While a good, well above average high school student, Hogg’s academic credentials strike me as typical of a Floridian who might attend Florida State University or the flagship University of Florida—but definitely not Harvard.

Hogg also is a progressive student who demanded gun control in the aftermath of the Douglas high school shooting tragedy and became a liberal media darling, while Kashuv is a conservative who after the Parkland shooting advocated for school safety measures (subsequently adopted by Congress), but said banning guns was not the answer.

What is the bottom line? Hogg will be going to Harvard this fall, but Kashuv will not, his admission rescinded. It seems like having the correct (politically left) political views helps get into Harvard while having conservative views clearly is detrimental.

To be sure, there is a respectable argument that Kashuv’s acceptance should have been rescinded, because as a 16-year-old high school student, he revealed appalling immaturity (not an uncommon teenage trait) and lack of judgment in writing private derogatory racist comments that were sent by others years later to the media. He used the N word a dozen times. He also used some anti-semitic expressions, perplexing since Kashuv himself is Jewish.

But to me, based on news accounts, he seemed to show genuine remorse and even anguish over this shameful behavior and says, and I am inclined to believe him, that he is not a racist and certainly not anti-semitic (as he often attends his synagogue). I think David Brooks of the New York Times got it right when he said: “sin is an opportunity for redemption.”

Bright teenagers are capable of quickly learning from immature behavior arising out of adolescence. I have seen bratty immature kids go into the Army and return, a couple of years later, as mature, disciplined adults. Similarly, out of the trauma of the Parkland shootings, both Hogg and Kashuv reinvented themselves, turning typical teenage kids into public media attractions, quickly maturing to speak up on issues of the day, albeit from different political perspectives. Kashuv became active in a conservative group for young people, Turning Point USA, while Hogg spoke up frequently and rather effectively for his cause, gun control. Both these 18-19-year-old men, David Hogg and Kyle Kashuv, are vastly more mature individuals than they were only 2-3 years earlier.

Nonetheless, I have the impression that Harvard transmits the vibe that the people of Harvard are not only intellectually but also morally superior to others today, and also unfortunate Americans from the past who lived during bigotry and oppression. Harvard seems to say, we are politically correct academic aristocratic leaders—we love racial minorities, hate guns, despise Harvey Weinstein and even sanction faculty wanting to provide him legal representation, etc.

This unrelenting sense that Harvard promotes the goodness of the most virtuous philosopher kings as opposed to the crassness of the “little people” is profoundly anti-democratic and grating to ordinary Americans, those living in that vast wasteland between Harvard and Stanford, the ones who elected Donald Trump president of the United States. It is partly why public support for higher education is declining at a time it is most needed.

Two other thoughts. We are becoming much less respectful of free speech, even abhorrent free speech, in our country, to our long term detriment.

Second, in light of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and this latest brouhaha, I think Cal Tech is right—admit students almost entirely on their academic qualifications. End “holistic” admissions based on some individual’s assessment of a person’s worth, an assessment working to the detriment of conservatives like Kashuv and brainy Asian Americans who allegedly lack “leadership” qualities as perceived by the minions working for William Fitzsimmons, the gatekeeper deciding who enters the gated academic community in Cambridge known as Harvard University.

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Tussle Over Charter Schools Puts These NAACP Branches on Side of Betsy DeVos

The NAACP’s support for a moratorium on new charter schools across America has put the nation’s oldest civil rights group at odds with three of its local branches—and in California, of all places.

Not only that, but the local NAACP chapters appear to agree with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that charter schools offer valuable opportunities to black students.

DeVos, a longtime school choice advocate who some on the left paint as anti-minority, says the NAACP’s adoption of a charter school moratorium three years ago doesn’t reflect the views of black parents and students she has spoken with.

“There’s a disconnect between the leadership of the national [NAACP] organization and some of the local chapters … and parents and students,” DeVos said in a recent interview with LA School Report. “I think there is a clear disconnect.”

The San Diego, Southwest Riverside, and San Bernardino NAACP branches of the California Hawaii NAACP cover territory that holds California’s largest population of black students.

All three branches submitted resolutions to the state NAACP’s board opposing the national organization’s 2016 ratification of a resolution calling for a moratorium on charter school expansion.

The NAACP’s Position. The NAACP resolution called for a moratorium on charter school expansion until:

—Charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools.
—Public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system.

—Charter schools cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate.

—Charter schools cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.

Some local NAACP branches, however, offered their own resolutions to end the moratorium on opening new charter schools.

“We’re hopeful that it can be adopted in California, and then the national board will do their research and investigate the facts in order to look at this again from the perspective of what is really going on with the African American students locally, statewide, and nationally,” said Christina Laster, education chairwoman for the NAACP’s Southwest Riverside branch.

Under NAACP rules, a local branch can submit a resolution when it disagrees with the national board. The national board will review the resolution before the group’s annual convention, but all branches ultimately must abide by policies set from the top.

‘Breaking Ranks’

“It sounds like NAACP branches are breaking ranks with the California state NAACP and national board,” Myrna Castrejón, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, told LA School Report.

“Everybody knows black students are the lowest-performing subgroup, other than students with special needs, and the system has done nothing to provide targeted support,” Castrejón said.

According to the San Diego NAACP branch’s resolution, African American student groups have a “severe and persistent” achievement gap throughout the state in math and English language arts.

The resolution also notes how well African American students are performing in charter schools compared to traditional public schools. Only 10 public schools in California with a majority African American student enrollment fall in the top half of student performance statewide in English and math, according to the resolution, but eight of the 10 are public charter schools.

“I think they’re totally mistaken,” DeVos said about supporters of a charter school moratorium in California in the LA School Report interview, “and they’re not really acting or speaking in the best interests of those they profess to represent.”

The secretary of education said that one need only talk to a student who has benefited from school choice to understand her point of view.

The California Hawaii NAACP has called for the three local branches to “rescind their position because it conflicts with the state branch position” as led by its education chairman, Julian Vasquez Heilig.

“I don’t think anybody would characterize Betsy DeVos as a civil rights leader,” Vasquez Heilig said in a phone interview Monday with The Daily Signal. “I just don’t think she really has any standing in this conversation.”

Vasquez Heilig has been at the forefront of the national NAACP board’s push for charter school restrictions in California as a professor of educational leadership at California State University, Sacramento. In early June, he was named dean of the University of Kentucky College of Education and was expected to take that post this month. 

Vasquez Heilig told The Daily Signal that charter schools in California lack accountability and transparency.

“We haven’t made any modifications to the California charter school law in decades,” he said.

But Brittany Chord Parmley, a spokeswoman for the California Charter School Association, sharply criticized the national NAACP’s education chairman.

“Julian Vasquez Heilig hacked the NAACP to serve his own anti-charter political agenda,” Parmley told The Daily Signal in an email. “Shame on him for exploiting a trusted civil rights organization to trap black kids in failing schools and deny black parents the right to choose where their children go to school.”

“Everybody knows black kids are being massively failed by the public school system,” she added. “It’s ironic that Dr. Heilig would try and shut down those within the NAACP who support public charter schools from using the same resolution process he used himself to call for a moratorium. Sure doesn’t sound very democratic.”

Vasquez Heilig brushed off such criticism, saying:

I think everybody is very aware that while the California Charter School Association will tell anybody who will listen to them that they’re in favor of transparency and accountability for charter schools, behind the scenes, they’re spending tens of millions of dollars and working hard to make sure that does not happen.

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Australia: Self-loathing activists have created a parallel university

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the noun “university” is derived from the Latin expression universitas magistrorum et scholarium, which roughly translated is a “community of teachers and scholars”. I am curious as to what is Latin for “a community of taxpayer-subsidised, freeloading, self-loathing activists bent on universities succumbing to primitivism,” as that would best describe where today’s tertiary institutions are headed.

Admittedly, the once great humanities departments have long been lost to academic charlatans, but this malaise has spread to the STEM faculties — you know, the ones that still impart information that is actually useful. Last week The Australian reported that science lecturers at the University of New South Wales have been told it was inappropriate to assert that indigenous people have been in Australia for 40,000 years.

The reason for this, lecturers were informed, is that assigning a date, irrespectively of how scholarly that estimation would be, “tends to lend support to migration theories and anthropological assumptions’’. Well yes. Much like the balcony railing on a high-rise building tends to lend support to the theory of gravity and metallurgical assumptions, I suppose.

Some indigenous people, the guidelines further specified, “see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate”. It would be cynical of course to suggest it more likely than not that indigenous people on the whole could not care less about this practice, and that the document was compiled by various well-remunerated diversity consultants whose primary aim was to justify their existence.

Sadly, this idiocy is not confined to the HR department. The UNSW science faculty research centre declared last year that indigenous people “arrived soon after 50,000 years ago, effectively forever, given that modern human populations only moved out of Africa 50,000 to 55,000 years ago”. Note to the person who wrote this: the planet is over 4.5 billion years old, and it is laughable to suggest that 50,000 years equates to “effectively forever”. To put things in perspective and based on the calendar of the earth being only one year old, Homo Sapiens emerged around 11.36pm on December 31.

As ludicrous as the UNSW mentality is, it provides fantastic opportunity for the budding entrepreneur. Imagine, for example, tendering for a university catering contract to feed, say, 5000 students for a year. You secure it by significantly undercutting your competitors. When the time comes to feed the mass of students, simply produce five loaves and two fish while you invoke Matthew 14:13-21 and declare yourself a doctrinaire Christian. How dare others deny the well-documented miracle and suggest this is insufficient to feed the multitude? This is blasphemy!

It gets even better. UNSW encourages lecturers to promote a court in “ethnoscience” and the “science of indigenous knowledge”, involving “traditional indigenous knowledge about the natural world, including astronomy, weather, medicine, geography and mathematics,” together with “ways in which indigenous knowledge can inform and benefit Western science”.

These are extraordinary claims, but this revisionism is part of a wider movement that claims many Western achievements should in fact be attributed to indigenous Australians. “Aborigines invented democracy”, wrote author and indigenous woman Melissa Lucashenko for Meanjin in 2015. “As a result, the many First Nations here were able to enjoy millennia of what Bunurong writer Bruce Pascoe has called ‘the Great Australian Peace’.”

That wasn’t quite the phrase that observers of the First Fleet used when they documented the appalling, widespread and brutal treatment of indigenous women by their menfolk. But to speak of that now is to invite criticism, even if you are an eminent Australian historian. Professor Geoffrey Blainey, wrote University of Newcastle professor John Maynard in 2015, “has been unable to let go of his fixation with the supposed violence of Aboriginal life”.

Students of indigenous history, at least those wishing to gain approval of their tutors, would be well-advised to ignore Blainey and instead quote from Pascoe’s best-selling book Dark Emu. Among Pascoe’s claims are that indigenous people cultivated crops, constructed villages, and designed complex dams. “Many academic experts also believe Dark Emu romanticises pre-contact indigenous society as an Eden of harmony and pacifism,” wrote Richard Guilliatt in The Weekend Australian in May, “when in fact it was often a brutally tough survivalist way of life. It’s a criticism most are reluctant to air publicly, given the sensitivity of contradicting a popular indigenous historian”.

In UNSW’s indigenous studies course outline, students are advised they will “learn about the history of colonial ‘scientific’ practices that disempowered indigenous people and led to environmental damage and unsustainable practices”. Presumably lecturers will avoid mentioning that more than 85 per cent of Australia’s mega fauna became extinct after the ancestors of indigenous people arrived in Australia. As Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt noted when SBS reported those findings, the broadcaster conveniently omitted any references to the noun “Aboriginal” in that article, instead using terms such as “early Australians” and “early humans”.

In fairness to these institutions, they are following a worldwide trend. A few years ago I holidayed in Canada, a beautiful country with lovely people, aside from its insufferable prime minister, Justin Trudeau, whom I can only surmise entered politics because he was too flamboyant to continue working as a drama teacher.

While visiting a museum in Vancouver, I was bemused by the excessive curatorial tiptoeing in reference to Canadian native tribes, otherwise known as ‘First Nations’ peoples. A young museum guide of that demographic solemnly informed us that he possessed esoteric and magical skills that far science could never explain. Perhaps anticipating my question, he added he could not elaborate on or disclose this knowledge as it would be “dangerous” in the hands of an outsider. My fellow palefaces lapped it all up.

In November, the chair of Universities Australia and vice-chancellor of Monash University, professor Margaret Gardener, reacted indignantly to the federal government’s review into freedom of speech on campus. “Australian universities have been on the public record through the ages affirming our longstanding commitment to informed evidence-based discussion and vigorous debate,” she stated. Through the ages, maybe. Not the present. It was once heresy to dispute the church’s teachings that planets and stars orbited the earth. Now universities promote the philosophy that victimhood and primitivism are at the centre of our universe.

So what subjects can future students expect? My prediction is Gaslighting 101, which begins with unlearning the indoctrination of whiteness. Students will be taught to despise themselves and everything associated with Western Civilisation. By the end of this course students will be able to provide informed discourse on themes such as hegemony, imperialism, racism, disenfranchisement, and genocide. Pretty straightforward really. Recognise your unconscious bias, check your privilege and defer to those in the intersectionality hierarchy.

Then there’s Virtual Orchidectomy 203, which will explain why it is insufficient for male students to renounce their “toxic masculinity”, given there is no other kind. Students will explore theories such as whether ‘Sir’ Isaac Newton was in fact a trans-woman lesbian, and they will be subjected to bouts of abuse by guest lecturer Clementine Ford as she explains why feminism is a kinder and gentler philosophy. Required pre-course reading: ‘Tony Abbott’s women in white a symbol of what’s to come,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 2015, by Deakin University research fellow Dr Michelle Smith.

In Technocracy 203 students will learn why government by experts, particularly scientists, academics and human rights officials, is the leadership our society requires. Required pre-course listening: ABC Radio National podcast ‘The Minefield’, 2019 — otherwise known as Grandiloquence Central — where hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens ask ‘Is democracy an impediment to addressing climate change?’

Religion of Peace 401 will take students through the many misunderstandings about Islam. As part of this students will be regularly bussed to Gosford Anglican Church to gaze at billboard messages as they recite Father Rod Bower’s platitudinous homilies concerning the burqa.

As for what universities choose to teach about indigenous history, perhaps they will take inspiration from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, released in 2017, which among other things called for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of truth-telling about Australia’s history and colonisation. Regrettably, I suspect this “truth-telling” will be more of a narrative reinforcement.

But if universities still have a problem acknowledging unpalatable facts about indigenous history or keeping the pseudo out of science, government should give them a simple message when their vice-chancellors demand taxpayer funding. Tell ‘em they’re Dreaming.

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