Harvard No Longer Is “Proud” of Its Antisemitism Response, New Court Filing Says
Plus, Harvard denounces the Supreme Court; Biden should have a Parkinson’s smell test; Ivanka Trump interview
Alexander “Shabbos” Kestenbaum and the other students suing Harvard for failing to remedy what they say is an “antisemitic hostile educational environment” have filed new court documents pointing out that the university has dropped from its own motions a claim that it was “proud” of its effort to combat antisemitism.
“What Harvard is doing shows no sign of working; its antisemitic hostile environment has only worsened,” says the new court filing before Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. “After Harvard argued on its first motion to dismiss, as it does now, that this case should be dismissed because it should be trusted to deal with its antisemitism problem, Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard were met with an even greater onslaught. Harvard has all but admitted this. On its first motion, Harvard said it was ‘proud’ of its efforts in a sentence it now has wisely but tellingly dropped.”
“Since October 7, students and faculty at Harvard have been rallying to support Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose charter and spokesmen call for the destruction of Israel, the sole Jewish country in the world, and the murder of Jews everywhere,” the Kestenbaum memorandum says. “Nor is so-called ‘academic freedom’ an excuse—as plaintiffs also allege, when it comes to discrimination (or even ‘microaggressions’) against other groups, Harvard does not give a fig for academic freedom.”
The memorandum says, “Harvard faculty regularly espouse antisemitism, e.g., including, for example, a course an SAA [Students Against Antisemitism] member attended in which the professor taught that, among other things, Jewish history is a ‘mythology,’ Jewish ethnic identity is ‘invented,’ and Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel. A speaker at a Harvard-sponsored event stated that ‘American Jewish immigrants have always been a foundational building block for the white supremacist infrastructure.’”
It also quotes Harvard’s former president, Larry Summers, saying publicly that he had “lost confidence” in Harvard as a “place where Jews and Israelis can flourish.”
The eight lawyers Harvard is paying to defend the case had previously argued in court that Harvard’s Jews were being unreasonably fearful. They have argued that the case is not ripe for hearing by the court, that the issues at Harvard don’t meet the legal standards for a violation set by civil rights law, and that the remedies the Jewish students are asking for would interfere with academic freedom.
A hearing on Harvard’s motion to dismiss and strike the complaint is set for July 24 at 10 a.m. in Boston before Judge Stearns. The case is Kestenbaum v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Failed responses to campus antisemitism and unrest have been a national political issue and have contributed to toppling the presidents of Harvard and of the University of Pennsylvania.
Harvard denounces the Supreme Court: Harvard’s central administration publishes an official university newspaper called the Harvard Gazette. It sends a daily email with articles to a large audience of Harvard-related people. Yesterday’s The Editors mentioned a Gazette profile of a Harvard economist who Harvard says is “addressing several major social and economic problems, including economic inequality, rising incarceration rates, and, of course, climate change,” with a recommendation that news reporting focus on “generating…public support” or “telling us how to act.”
Today’s Gazette email had the subject line “SCOTUS” and linked to a piece headlined “Evaluating the Supreme Court: Harvard Law faculty weigh in on 2023-2024 SCOTUS term.” There are seven “faculty” represented in the article. They are:
Kenneth Mack
Martha Minow
Richard Lazarus
Sharon Block
Laurence Tribe
Nancy Gertner
Noah Feldman
There are conservative faculty at Harvard law school—Stephen Sachs is faculty sponsor of the Federalist Society chapter, former dean and current interim provost John Manning clerked for Judge Bork, Adrian Vermeule is hard to pigeonhole but certainly isn’t “progressive,” Jack Goldsmith is vehemently anti-Trump but served in the George W. Bush administration and has managed to write about the court without demonizing it. Strangely, the conservative faculty weren’t included in the Gazette article, but Tribe, who is retired, and Gertner and Block, who aren’t ladder faculty, were.
The level of hyperbole that the included faculty do bring to assessing the Supreme Court term is astonishing.
Mack: “a very conservative Court….reinforces the perception among many in the American public that, more than in any other period of modern American history, law — whether it be the law of statutory interpretation, administrative law, or constitutional law — as reflected in the Court, is simply politics by other means.”
Minow: “Accountability, impartiality, clarity, and durability, key attributes of the rule of law, have taken big hits.”
Lazarus, who helped with the Biden transition: “a convulsive shock to the legal system…it’s going to affect the federal government’s ability to protect public health, the environment, all kinds of issues.”
Block, a professor of the practice: “a project to destabilize public agencies’ ability to carry out the mission given to them by Congress where that mission involves protecting the public from corporate harm.”
Tribe: “the Court left no doubt that it intends to continue restricting personal freedom as well as voting rights without paying serious attention to its own precedent.”
Gertner, a senior lecturer who was a Clinton-appointed judge: “An unpopular, ethically challenged Supreme Court …It is Dred Scott, or Plessy, or any other decision that is manifestly inconsistent with a constitutional democracy.”
Feldman: “an outcome that would have astonished the nation’s founders.”
Anyway, Harvard can talk all it wants about “institutional neutrality” and how it’s going to stop sending official emails from the president of the university or the deans responding to news events. But when the university central-administration-published organ is emailing the community telling the students and faculty and alumni that the Roberts Court is Dred Scott and Plessy all in one, and it’s basically a seven-person consensus with not a single countervailing voice to be found, reasonable people can start to wonder about the sincerity of the supposed effort to allow for “productive argument among divergent points of view.” Where are the “divergent points of view”? Nowhere to be found, alas, in this Harvard Gazette roundup of left-leaning law faculty.
Biden should have a Parkinson’s smell test, and a full medical workup: President Biden’s poor performance in the recent presidential debate has spurred speculation that he might have Parkinson’s Disease.
The New York Times reported:
Kevin C. O’Connor, the White House physician, said as recently as February that despite minor ailments like sleep apnea and peripheral neuropathy in his feet, the president was “fit for duty.” He said tests had turned up “no findings which would be consistent with” Parkinson’s disease. The White House has declined to make Dr. O’Connor available for questions and did not respond to detailed health questions from The New York Times earlier this year.
Responding to questions from The New York Times, Mr. Bates, the White House spokesman, said Tuesday that Dr. O’Connor had found no reason to re-evaluate Mr. Biden for Parkinson’s disease and that he showed no signs of Parkinson’s and had never taken Levodopa or other drugs for that condition.
O’Connor is a doctor of osteopathy. Biden might want to get checked out by a neurologist. The Times magazine had a piece last month about smell tests for early detection of Parkinson’s, which might have some application to this case.
If you read up online about Parkinson’s, some of the language might apply to Biden’s situation. Johns Hopkins advises, about travel, “if you will cross time zones, think about adding a day or two onto the beginning and end of your trip to allow yourself more time to adjust.” As for working, “If you want to continue working, you absolutely can. However, there are caveats about how much and how long you can maintain your career, depending on your profession and how far your Parkinson’s disease has progressed. The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease are both internal (fatigue, sleepiness, difficulty concentrating or multitasking) and external (rigidity, slowness, tremor). Not every person will have every symptom, but it’s smart to develop a plan for how you’ll handle relevant job tasks that may be affected by your symptoms. Discuss these plans with your boss or human resources department.”
Some of his symptoms and attributes—soft speech, or hypophonia; retaining the ability to bicycle, expressionless face and slow body movements—are consistent with Parkinson’s.
I could be wrong; I wish him good health. Most people who aren’t president of the United States deserve privacy from speculation about their possible medical conditions. But at this point, if Biden and his inner circle genuinely think all that’s wrong with him is some back stiffness and his lifetime stutter, and there’s no new more systemic or degenerative medical issue, the right political move is to get him before an all-star, arms-length panel of independent expert doctors and give him a full, transparent workup with all the available diagnostic tests. Anything short of that fuels suspicions that he’s hiding something until after the convention or the election or the inauguration. A clean bill of health could give him a significant political bounce. And a more concerning medical report could give him, his party, and the voters some information relevant to important decisions.
Ivanka Trump’s Donald Trump anecdote: Ivanka Trump has an interview with Lex Fridman in which she offers up this anecdote about her father and the real estate project of redeveloping the old post office building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.:
remember with the old post office building, there was this massive glass-topped atrium, so heating and cooling the structure was a Herculean lift. We had the mechanical engineers provide their thoughts on how we could do it efficiently, and so that the temperature never varied, and it was enormously expensive as an undertaking. I remember one of his first times on the site, because he had really empowered me with this project, and he trusted me to execute and to also rope him in when I needed it.
But one of the first times he visits, we’re walking the hallway and we’re talking about how expensive this cooling system would be and heating system would be. And he starts stopping and he’s asking duct workers as we walk what they think of the system that the mechanical engineers designed. First few, fine, not great answers. The third guy goes, “Sir, if you want me to be honest with you, it’s obscenely over-designed. In the circumstance of a 1000-year storm, you will have the exact perfect temperature, if there’s a massive blizzard or if it’s unbearably hot, but 99.9% of the time you’ll never need it. And so I think it’s just an enormous waste of money.” And so he kept asking that guy questions, and we ended up overhauling the design pretty well into the process of the whole system, saving a lot of money, creating a great system that’s super functional…
That one really sticks out in my head because I’m like, “Oh my gosh, we’re redesigning the whole system.” We were actively under construction. But I would see him do that on a lot of different issues. He would ask people on the work level what their thoughts were. Ideas, concepts, designs. And there was almost like a Socratic first principles type of way he questioned people, trying to get down to trying to reduce complex things to something really fundamental and simple.
I like this story, not because it glorifies Donald Trump, but because it illuminates some essential truths about capitalism and the way the world works. The first is, knowledge is dispersed. Take it out of the realm of Trump and remember President Kennedy. His aide Ted Sorensen recalled in his book Kennedy, “he talked at the White House or by telephone to lower-level officers and experts with firsthand knowledge or responsibility. (At least one State Department subordinate was embarrassed by the profanely skeptical reply he gave when the voice at the other end of the line announced itself as the President’s.)” In a later interview, Sorensen said that Kennedy “was accustomed to calling desk officers three levels down to find out about a particular programme, activity or problem.”
The second is, it helps to persist and be curious and ask not just the first two workers but the third one. A lot of people might quit after the first or second question, figuring they’d already done more due diligence than most people.
And third, capitalism reinforces the virtue of thrift. It’s one thing to waste government money; it’s another thing to waste your own family business’s money. In a government project, someone might be okay with overengineering the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system, because their risk is getting hauled before a Congressional committee if the thing fails in extreme weather. In a private project, it’s worth the hassle of changing the plans mid-project to save money, because it’s your own money.
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