“Fight Fiercely Harvard, Fight Fight Fight,
Demonstrate to them our Skill.
Albeit they possess the might
Nonetheless we have the will.”
Tom Lehrer, 1945
Lehrer wrote the song during his sophomore year at Harvard, mocking the (in his estimation), effete school’s pretensions to a football team. I saw him regularly in Harvard Square in the Sixties during my employment there, clerking at Schoenhof’s Foreign Books. They had dictionaries in 250 languages, and I had to have sufficient knowledge of the stock to direct the seekers after knowledge.
In the late Eighties, I moved from Manhattan to Cambridge. Part of the impetus was the appointment of the late Bob Brustein as head of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. Bob was an important theatre critic, theoretician, and director. He’d brought me to the Yale Rep in 1977 as a CBS Writing Fellow, and put on my feet my first pair of Bass Weejuns.
He left Yale for Harvard in 1979 to run their American Repertory Theatre, and sent to me that invitation longed for by any artist: “Come and do whatever you want.” I did. We staged the world premiers of many of my plays — Oleanna, Boston Marriage, The Cryptogram, and The Old Neighbourhood — at the school’s Hasty Pudding, and later moved them to New York.
We disagreed absolutely about aesthetic philosophy; and I am in his debt for many years of unconditional support on the order of that of the Chicago cops for their partners: “Fuck it, you’re right; and if you’re not right, fuck it anyway.” Bob was the quintessential Old-School Liberal, who’d “defend to the death my right to say it”.
We premiered my play Oleanna at the Pudding in 1992 with Rebecca Pidgeon and Billy Macy. At the dress rehearsal an audience member, a student from Brown, said, “Don’t you think this play is politically irresponsible?” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase.
I had an office in Harvard Square for 15 years, among the dour proto-elites. For, other than the perpetually soused jokesters of the Harvard Lampoon, no one seemed to be having any fun.
The Lampoon folks were the leaven in that self-satisfied atrophy. Doug Kenney and Michael O’Donoghue took the Lampoon commercial with the National Lampoon, and its inspiration of Saturday Night Live. May Harvard be remembered for them, and for Tom Lehrer; and for Bob Brustein, traditional liberals all. And may the school be disgraced in perpetuity for its anti-liberal, disgusting antisemitism.
When Harvard was ordered to revert from “Affirmative Action” to merit-based admissions in the Sixties, they magicked up a policy of “Geographical Representation”. The then-dean of admissions explained that too many of the successful merit-based applicants came from the “doughnuts” around American cities; a Jewish student replied, “They aren’t doughnuts, they’re bagels.”
Harvard, once laudable as the cradle of Abolition, persisted into the 21st century in sophistry: excluding Jews by alleging the probity of admissions’ policies of “personality”. Yes, they acknowledged race-based admissions were now illegal, but the school was free to exclude applicants whose “personalities” (read race) were deemed unsympathetic.
Now, though, they openly support Jew-hatred, abiding anti-Jewish riots. What are the students actually “protesting”? If it is Israeli national policy, why target and vilify fellow students?
Claudine Gay, disgraced ex-president of Harvard, explained that the call for murder of Jews was not hate speech, per-se, but must be considered in context.
Yeats wrote, “How can you compete, being honour-bred, with one who, were it known he lies, was neither shamed in his nor in his neighbour’s eyes?” Gay knew no shame, and, though deposed, her pitiable and despicable shamelessness remains the school’s policy. For, ordered to observe not only school policy, but US anti-discrimination laws, they first refuse then extrude a “task force,” and then sue the government which seeks to enforce compliance.
Harvard’s pathetic response to the violence has been the creation of a “task force.”
1) What “task force” has ever accomplished anything? 2) No “task force” is required, just enforcement of the school’s policies, and compliance with anti-discrimination laws.
The school’s response that they are defending the rioters’ free speech is one with the disgraced Gay’s “it depends on context”. “From the river to the sea,” and its like, are calls for the murder of Jews. Incitement to violence is not free speech. Harvard broke and continues to defy the law, pandering to radicals.
Why would Harvard do so in contravention of law, custom, decency, and their supposed mission of education?
For money.
They have had a bloated endowment, tax-exempt status, and income from the full-fare foreign students. Harvard, finding all at risk, turns on the government, and insists on its right to abandon Jewish students and retain exchange students whose criminal behaviour invalidates their visa status
Harvard is dead and stinking to high heaven, and will not consider apology, let alone reform. It should be stripped of support, both governmental and individual. Affronted students, Jew and non-Jew, should resign and look elsewhere. What could one possibly learn at such an institution, after having learned it does not believe in human dignity?
Historically, Ivy League schools flogged the prestige of their diplomas as a luxury marque, supposedly a fungible indication of status, independent of further utility (e.g. education).
Now, I, like many, view an elite degree in the “soft sciences” (read “froth”), as a mark against a job applicant. Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning (1914)), observed the universities’ degeneration into mere merchandising. His book was originally subtitled “An exercise in depravity.”
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: David Mamet
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
