I remember how it was -- JR
Harvard stands by board chair Penny Pritzker despite growing calls from alums for her resignation
Harvard Corporation’s senior fellow Penny Pritzker will stay put for now as calls for her ouster grow following the immediate resignation of Claudine Gay as Harvard president Tuesday.
Pritzker, who has led the Ivy League school’s corporation since February 2022, will remain in her position, a Harvard spokesperson told the student-run Crimson Wednesday, despite backlash to the controversy that has besieged the elite school and its leaders since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
The corporation, which is similar to a board of trustees at other colleges, stood by Gay during the weeks of contention that included immense criticism of her statement to Congress addressing antisemitism last month and questions about the integrity of her academic record.
Following Gay’s resignation, the ire quickly turned to the Harvard Corporation and Pritzker, who also served as commerce secretary under President Obama.
Pritzker, whose brother is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, was the chair of the search committee that picked Gay to take over for Lawrence Bacow when he left the job last June.
She is expected to be part of the search for a new permanent president, the Crimson reported.
Billionaire and Harvard alum Bill Ackman, who led the charge to dump Gay, called on Pritzker and the rest of the board to step down early Wednesday morning in a 4,000-word essay posted on X that also went into universities’ DEI mission.
“The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done,” Ackman said.
“These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done,” he also said.
Peter Malkin, a Harvard donor and the namesake of the Malkin Athletic Center, wants members of the corporation involved with hiring Gay to step down.
“I do think that the relatively hasty action by the Corporation in the search process indicated to me that not a full review was made of qualified candidates who are out there,” Malkin told the Crimson.
Another big donor, Kenneth Lipper, urged the university to reflect on what went wrong during Gay’s tenure as president.
“When we suffer a great loss,” Lipper said, “we must analyze the whys, repair what we can, and accelerate into a fresh performance phase reflective of our 300-year history of scholarly achievement and national leadership.”
Frank Laukien, a visiting chemistry scholar at Harvard, singled out Pritzker as the problem, and told the New York Times she should “share accountability and resign immediately.”
Laukien added in an email to the paper: “We need multiple new independent members of the Harvard Corporation that are not tainted by recent events and failures, and who are not part of the long-standing cronyism at the top of Harvard.”
Pritzker, a 1981 Harvard grad, has been a fellow on the board since 2018 before she rose to its senior fellow. She donated $100 million to the university toward a new economics building months before the appointment, the Boston Globe reported.
Pritzker’s net worth is estimated to be more than $3 billion with much of the family fortune coming from the Hyatt hotel chain, according to Forbes.
The business outlet named her one of the most powerful women in the world in 2009.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/03/news/harvard-stands-by-penny-pritzker-as-calls-for-resignations-grow/
*******************************************Harvard -- Out the Frying Pan Into the Fire
Harvard may assume the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay, has finally ended its month-long scandal over her tenure.
Gay stepped down, remember, amid serious allegations of serial plagiarism --without refuting the charges. She proved either unable or unwilling to discipline those on her campus who were defiantly antisemitic in speech and action.
But Gay's removal is not the end of Harvard's dilemma. Rather, it is the beginning.
In the respective press releases from both Gay and the Harvard Corporation, racial animus was cited as a reason for her removal.
Gay did not even refer to her failure to stop antisemitism on her campus or her own record of blatant plagiarism.
Yet, playing the race card reflects poorly on both and for a variety of reasons.
One, Gay's meager publication record -- a mere eleven articles without a single published book of her own -- had somehow earned her a prior Harvard full professorship and presidency. Such a thin resume leading to academic stardom is unprecedented.
Two, the University of Pennsylvania forced the resignation of its president, Liz Magill. She sat next to Gay during that now-infamous congressional hearing in which they both claimed they were unable to discipline blatant antisemitism on their campuses.
Instead, both pleaded "free speech" and "context" considerations.
Such excuses were blatantly amoral and untrue. In truth, ivy-league campuses routinely sanction, punish, or remove staff, faculty, or students deemed culpable for speech or behavior deemed hurtful to protected minorities --except apparently white males and Jews.
Yet Magill was immediately forced to resign, and Gay was not. Also noteworthy was Magill's far more impressive and extensive administrative experience, along with a more prestigious scholarship that was free of even a suggestion of plagiarism.
Academia's immediate firing of a white woman while trying desperately to save the career of a less qualified and ethically challenged Black woman will be seen not as a case of racial bias but more likely of racial preference.
Indeed, to keep Gay's job and to defend her from plagiarism charges, both Harvard and Gay herself were willing to say things that were simply absurd, if not patently untrue.
Harvard invented a new phrase, "duplicative language," to euphemize the reality of Gay's intellectual theft.
Even after Gay resigned, Harvard jumped the shark by further downplaying her plagiarism by dubbing it as mere "missteps."
Harvard and its supporters further embarrassed themselves by alleging that if the victims of Gay's plagiarism didn't object, then why did her expropriation matter that much?
Are we then to assume that plagiarism is not a serious violation of the entire ethos of scholarship, quite in addition to the aggrieved plagiarized party?
The university descended even further by suggesting that they were somehow less serious if anonymous scholars lodged the complaints.
Has Harvard ever heard of the reasons why whistleblowers are often protected from retribution by grants of anonymity?
Liberal Harvard, through its lawyers, even threatened the New York Post with legal action if it aired charges of Gay's plagiarism.
Yet only days later, the university was swamped by further proof of Gay's scholarly misconduct, involving improper use of data and more plagiarism extending back even to her dissertation.
Harvard, remember, claimed that it had conducted a thorough investigation that had cleared her of actionable plagiarism -- even as more charges arose of her prior culpability.
But more importantly, what happens to ex-president Gay now?
Does resigning from the Harvard presidency and returning to a full professorship mean that charges of plagiarism disappear?
Would any other Harvard professors continue to be employed without addressing over two dozen separate charges of plagiarism lodged against them?
Do Gay, the Harvard Corporation, and the more than 700 Harvard professors who closed ranks and wrote a letter supporting Gay now argue that plagiarism is no longer a serious offense at the nation's supposedly most preeminent university?
Will students who emulate Gay's habit of copy-and-paste, failure-to-footnote, and misuse of data now be exempt from dismissal or suspension?
After Gay's embarrassing December 5 congressional testimony and her resignation, what now is the Harvard policy toward antisemitism?
If next week, anti-Israel students once again call for the destruction of the Jewish people in Israel all the way "from the river to the sea," or if they again storm Harvard's Widener library, screaming support for the October 7 massacre and intimidating Jewish students, what will the new -- or old --Harvard do?
Again nothing?
Finally, Harvard insinuated that Gay was fired by racist outside pressure --despite the fact that many of her critics were large donors furious about the diminution of the reputation of their alma mater.
Is Harvard suggesting that its own mega-donors are racists?
What then might come next? The resignation of the entire board of the Harvard Corporation?
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California School District Forces Children to Watch Films on Transgenderism and Puberty Blockers
A school district in the heart of wokeland, California created extensive lesson plans and resource lists aimed at pushing gender theory and normalizing child transgenderism with its LGBTQ agenda.
According to documents reviewed by the Daily Wire, Hayward Unified School District made the district's 19,000 students watch disturbing films and documentaries to promote transgenderism and highlight how treatments such as puberty blockers work.
One of the films is a 12-minute short called "I'm Just Anneke," which is recommended for grades 5 to 12.
"Anneke is 12. She loves ice hockey and is a hardcore tomboy. Everybody who meets her assumes she's a boy, but she's not sure if she wants to be a girl, a boy, or something in-between when she grows up," the description read.
A synopsis of the film says that to give Anneke more time to decide if he wants to be a girl, doctors put her on a medication that will suppress hormones that are causing his body to change before he is ready.
Other films include "Gender Matters: Transgender Youth," recommended for grades 6 to 12 and described as "short films about transgender and gender non-conforming young adults."
In addition, children in grades 8 to 12 are being directed to watch a film on how "gender messages shape young people's daily decisions."
The school district also plans to hold a "Pride Flag Ceremony," with one speaker reading "aloud with LGBTQ identities represented" about a "local, impactful historical figure who is LGBTQ and their contributions to the community." Young students will receive ribbons, stickers, flags, posters, and "Protect trans kids shirts."
Teachers and staff have also been given documents on "LGBTQIA+, Gender, & Pride in HUSD," which contain over 90 different pro-LGBT resources, ranging from "Lesson Plans to Create Gender Expansive Classrooms" to "Trans-positive picture books" for children in kindergarten and up.
The Daily Wire revealed that the same school district had previously drafted a lesson plan that presented the Black Panthers as a misunderstood civil rights group despite the Marxist organization openly calling for the use of guerilla warfare tactics against the United States.
They also reportedly spent $57,000 to collaborate with an organization called "Woke Kindergarten," which taught Critical Race Theory that aimed to "disrupt whiteness." Another $23,000 went to a group with Quetzal Education Services, an organization that taught "anti-racist math pedagogy."
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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