The Presidents of Harvard, MIT, Penn, Columbia should be forced to resign

Yes - yes - we get it…. Suck all the marrow out of that bone that landed in your lap… then gnaw on the bone until it’s dust.

This woman is more interested in her career than anything else.

“I ordered the New York strip medium rare and it came back rare. I told them to take it away and have them put it back on the fire for a few minutes. Speaking of fire - those Ivy League Presidents I questioned should be fired!! I asked them tough questions ! Then I proposed a bill! I did it - it was me?”

 

Apes vs Elite Universities

 

Neo-Nazis march on the grounds of the University of Virginia. Protected speech.

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Neo-Nazis marched in downtown Madison, by the Univesity of Wisconsin-Madison. "There will be blood". Protected speech.

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news...-on-saturday-heres-what-happened/71649722007/

https://www.wmtv15news.com/2023/11/19/uw-students-horrified-after-neo-nazis-march-through-madison/​

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University said hate speech is still protected speech. NOOOOOOO! that can't be.

 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/202...nt-failed.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us

How Bill Ackman’s Campaign to Oust Harvard’s President Failed
By Jen Wieczner, New York features writer who covers Wall Street, business, and crypto

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, declared defeat late Monday as it became clear that his weeklong campaign to force Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign had failed. Harvard’s governing board announced on Tuesday morning that it stood firmly behind its leader, though it added that her response to the Hamas terror attacks on Israel had fallen short.

It was the end, at least at Harvard, to a stunning saga that has rocked the academic world in recent days. Suddenly, several Ivy League institutions have found themselves on the receiving end of tactics developed and routinely used by Wall Street’s top activist investors — a hard-charging category of hedge-funders who acquire shares in a company and then typically try to change the management and corporate strategy through an unrelenting pressure campaign. Previously, those measures had been deployed only against large, publicly traded companies. Ackman, an activist investor and founder of the hedge fund Pershing Square, has a well-known playbook for pressure campaigns and attempting to oust CEOs, having built much of his reputation — and wealth — by using aggressive public messaging to increase the value of his big investments. A notable success in doing so was a long position in Wendy’s that resulted in a large profitwhen he browbeat the company into a spinoff of Tim Hortons. It doesn’t always work, of course: A big bet against Herbalife — he went to extraordinary lengths to argue that the supplements company was an illegal pyramid scheme — resulted in a loss for Ackman of an estimated $500 million.

And at the University of Pennsylvania, the campaign — in which Ackman was joined in his criticism by high-profile financiers and donors including Marc Rowan, CEO of the large private-equity group Apollo — worked as intended, resulting in the resignation this past weekend of the school’s president, Liz Magill.

But Harvard, of course, was a failure for Ackman and those same activist methods. His inability to oust Gay now looks like a lesson in the limitations of an activist campaign in the academic world, outside its usual confines in public markets. There, the tactic has a reasonably high rate of success in the hands of someone like Ackman, who is able to appeal to other stockholders on a purely financial basis: Vote with me, an investor says, and we will all get richer. But a university has no stock price. Instead of shareholders, it has an array of stakeholders, including alumni, students, and faculty. At least for an immensely wealthy institution like Harvard, their concerns for the university’s future are not primarily tied to a financial outcome but rather centered on how its actions reflect their personal values and feelings and affect the school’s overall reputation.

Harvard, then, had to weigh the risk that firing Gay — its first female Black president — wouldn’t be received well by those communities, especially when the person spearheading the firing campaign was an icon of the capitalist one percent. Some on Wall Street grasped this early. “Frankly, if Harvard fires Claudine Gay, it will look like Harvard is capitulating to Bill Ackman and other wealthy donors. I think the more public calls for her ouster from wealthy white men actually make it less likely that Harvard will fire her,” Whitney Tilson, a former hedge-fund manager who now runs Empire Financial Research and who attended Harvard undergrad with Ackman, told me before the university’s board meeting. Tilson was withholding judgment on whether or not Gay should keep her job. “The optics of that could not be worse,” he added.

Despite the furor on social media, there were reasons all along to think she might escape the same fate as her UPenn colleague Magill. Besides representing a shattering of barriers for Black women in leadership at Harvard, Gay had just begun her position in July. The perception was making even some versed in the unsentimental methods of Wall Street and business uncomfortable. “It sort of feels that the mob is at work right now, and my general knee-jerk reaction is I don’t like mobs,” Tilson told me. “There’s also something in the back of my mind that I want to be very, very, very, very careful about: Would the response and the mob and calling for her head be the same if she were one of the two Ivy League presidents who are a white man?”

...


Wiki:

The board's 11 fellows said that they "unanimously" supported Gay's leadership after "extensive deliberations", adding: "President Gay has apologized for how she handled her congressional testimony and has committed to redoubling the University’s fight against antisemitism."[42]

Plagiarism allegations
Soon after the hearing, conservative activist Christopher Rufo accused Gay of plagiarizing sections of her Ph.D. dissertation, claiming that multiple paragraphs were near-verbatim lifted from the work of other scholars.[43][44] Responding to the allegations, Gay said: "I stand by the integrity of my scholarship. Throughout my career, I have worked to ensure my scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards."[44] In its statement reaffirming Gay's leadership as university president, the Harvard Corporation said that an independent review had discovered "a few instances of inadequate citation" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct." The Corporation also said that Gay would request corrections to add citations and quotation marks to two of her articles.[42]

 

If there were students participating in that rally, they should be named and shamed plus be looked at by some school disciplinary body....for consistency.

Not protecting a demographic of a school population when other minorities are consistently protected, given safe spaces, and sometimes even demonstrating de facto veto power over public speakers is an inconsistent break from current leftist norms.

A glib pullback into "liberal speech rights" with a consequence of marginalizing concerns of Jewish students yet again is not the way to convince people colleges have stuck their heads far up their asses.

I'm more for introspection over the punitive measures ackMan or magats are gleefully pursuing. Defending it just seems like letting college admins off the hook among those that won't pause and reassess the course they're headed towards speech rights they practice over the original ideals they historically had pursued...i.e. Equity over Equality.

 

Consistency is good, and it seems that many posters here aren't in favor of it.

The 'free market' of 'named and shamed' isn't controlled by anyone, but it does raise the thorny issue of when 'named and shamed' cross over into intimidation — a clash between free speech and the culture of canceling. This 'free market' also isn't as free as it may seem. Social media platforms and their codes of conduct could play a significant role in this dynamic.

The inconsistency you mentioned appears to be more a result of the 'free market' than the universities themselves. What we're witnessing is a growing trend where the mob-like behavior of the free market impacts decisions at these universities (and others).

I find that perspective a bit overblown. The hate you see on social media is often very magnified compared to reality. The 'leftish' norms haven't necessarily changed, but a portion of that norm has always shown its hypocrisy. I've observed the same within the 'rightish' norms, where a part of that norm showcases its hypocrisy clearly as well.

From a legal point of view, I don't see any problem with the answer given; it was legal, as they were under oath. The issue is kickstarted and generated by savvy politicians for outrage and political gain. There's little room for honest discourse in this situation, unfortunately.
Tweets after tweets become extremely boring.

 

I agree that schools and administrators are hypocrites for allowing things like safe spaces and hecklers vetos regarding speech that is seen as misogynistic and homophobic while not doing the same for Jewish students.

At the same time it’s hypocritical to be saying that schools shouldn’t have safe spaces and that universities where in the interests
Of free speech students will be exposed to speech they find very offensive and even threatening.

we have a lot of people who’ve been criticizing schools for years that they aren’t valuing free speech yet are now condemning University presidents for not shutting down free speech.

 

People should provide concrete examples to back up these claims. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but they should be more specific.

AFAIK, none of these three universities have "safe spaces" (spaces where controversial debate is disallowed). As for hecklers vetoes, I'm not sure which universities, but I do remember cancelling controversial speakers on the grounds of inability to handle disruption or violence (university claims it's not suppression of free speech, but of course, many do view it as an attack on free speech).

There are also different policies toward visitors, guest speakers, university professors, faculty members and the student body. We shouldn't be putting them all in the same bowl. Universities explicitly prohibit hate speech by professors and faculty members, for example.

 

I don’t know specifically about Harvard, Penn, and MIT but I do know that several
Schools have allowed for “safe spaces” and not sanctioned students for shouting down students even during class time. I just cited in another thread a post I made regarding UC Hastings students shouting down a conservative student.

I am also aware of Penn attempting to fire professor Amy Wax for making disparaging comments about Asian and other minority students. If they are getting rid of her because she says things that students and other find offensive that would go against free speech. If they are going after her because they feel
It hurts donations and enrollment that is a different matter but in the same vein donors now are free to not donate or send their kids to the universities if they find anti Israel antisemitic speech on campus offensive. They

 

Way too much to catch up on here. Just wanted to grunch this thread to share that FIRE foundation has Harvard ranked last in all universities when it comes to protecting free speech; however, they are opposed to firing Gay because they believe she has made legitimate steps forward since those hearings and that a replacement could reverse course towards censoring free speech.

 

Yes, some schools do have "safe spaces" (but not these three, afaik). As I mentioned before, during 2018-2019, many states enacted legislation to outlaw those "safe spaces".

I don't believe disparaging comments reach that threshold, but the prohibition of hate by faculty and professors is distinct from principles of free speech or academic freedom, in my view. Both universities and private companies have reputations to safeguard, necessitating that their employees adhere to their established standards.

 

The Fall of Penn’s President Brings Campus Free Speech to a Crossroads
Before the Israel-Hamas war, universities were already engulfed in debates over what kinds of speech are acceptable.