The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Harvard Law Is Decadent and Depraved

Posted on | April 4, 2016 | 51 Comments

 

Have you ever heard of Isaac Royall Jr.? Me, neither, until I started reading about “Reclaim Harvard Law,” an anti-white protest group at Harvard University Law School. Earlier this year, Harvard’s administration surrendered to an unruly mob of student grievance-mongers who had demanded that the official seal of the Law School be changed to remove a symbolic reference to Royall, a wealthy Massachusetts man who died in 1781 and left a bequest in his will that endowed the first professorship at Harvard Law. Why did these students target Royall’s legacy? Because they learned that Royall owned slaves and therefore his wealth, part of which he gave to Harvard Law, was tainted, and therefore Harvard Law’s seal — showing three sheaves of wheat, a symbol derived from the Royall family crest — was a legacy of slavery.

Does that make sense? No, of course not. But these young hooligans have convinced themselves they are Victims of Oppression, which means that their arguments don’t have to make sense. This is how it goes in elite education nowadays: “I am oppressed, therefore, yield to my demands.”

Predictably, the craven fools who run Harvard Law (annual tuition $58,242) granted the ridiculous demands of the mob. Good-bye, three sheaves of wheat! Good-bye, symbolic legacy of Mr. Royall, who made his fortune the way a lot of Yankees made their fortunes before Yankees became convinced that slavery was an intolerable wrong.

This kind of weaponization of history by race-hustlers is a phenomenon that Thomas Sowell addresses in The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Instead of worrying about any practical problem of their individual lives in the 21st century, these Harvard Law students have gone rooting around in history to locate something they can construe as a collective wrong, employed as a grievance in an identity-politics drama. Here is some dead white guy who owned black slaves, and therefore black Harvard Law students have a reason to be angry, despite the fact that (a) Royall has been dead for 235 years, (b) these black students are in fact indirect beneficiaries of the wealth Royall left behind to Harvard Law, and (c) it is absurd to expect intelligent people to believe that any student at Harvard Law is actually oppressed.

Dear God in heaven! You whining brats have been fortunate enough to be admitted to one of the most prestigious schools on the planet!

Wake up and smell your privilege!

Has any student at Harvard Law — black, white or whatever his or her ethnic background might be — ever read The Quest for Cosmic Justice? Or have they read what I consider Sowell’s most brilliant book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy? Highly unlikely, I’d say. Neither do I expect any of them have read Sowell’s Conquests and Cultures: An International History, nor even Basic Economics. Instead of reading anything by arguably the greatest black intellectual of our era, these idiot students at Harvard Law are sitting around complaining about how oppressed they are because a white guy who died in 1781 owned slaves. And the gutless fools in charge at Harvard University — President Drew Faust and Dean Martha Minow — actually gave into these claims!

“We cannot choose our history but we can choose that for which we stand,” Minow wrote to the campus community. “Above all, we rededicate ourselves to the hard work of eradicating not just symbols of injustice but injustice itself.”

Well, good luck with that plan, Dean Minow. You can give Hitler the Sudetenland and call it “peace for our time,” but when the Wehrmacht unleashes its blitzkrieg and the Stukas are dive-bombing Warsaw, don’t pretend nobody tried to warn you that appeasement would fail.

Harvard Crimson, March 9:

Three weeks into their occupation of the lounge in the Law School’s Caspersen Student Center, student activists said they will remain in the hall, despite the concerns of other students and administrators.
Members of the student group Reclaim Harvard Law have occupied the lounge . . . . since Feb. 15 in order to create a space they say minorities on campus lack.
The occupation is part of an ongoing movement that began in November and has focused on calling for improvement in diversity at the Law School. While the school has addressed some of these demands—including convening a committee that recently recommended to change the school’s contentious seal—activists remain unsatisfied.
Over the past few weeks, occupiers have been sleeping, eating, and hosting daily events relating to critical race theory in the hall.

“Critical race theory”!

This arrant nonsense is akin to feminist theory, in that both are obsolete remnants of Marxist dialectical materialism, which ought to have been entirely discredited by the collapse of the Soviet Empire. However, because the anti-Americanism of the 1960s New Left had subverted elite academia (see, e.g., Roger Kimball’s 1990 classic Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education), the losers of the Cold War have spent the past 25 years teaching evil ideas borrowed from Marx and Lenin in our nation’s most prestigious schools.

The Ivy League Is Decadent and Depraved, and no parent who is a Christian or a patriot would pay a dime to send their children to Harvard or Yale or any other such institution of intellectual and moral perversity. Marxism is not merely wrong, it is wicked. Historians estimate that as many as 100 million people were killed under Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century, and yet this deadly lie — deceptively masquerading in costumes of social justice — has become the intellectual basis of 21st-century “progressive” politics.

Suppose you were an extraordinarily clever young fellow, with an excellent academic record and the kind of standardized test scores that might qualify you for admission to Harvard Law. Furthermore, suppose that your Daddy was rich enough that you could afford to attend that overpriced bastion of moral depravity and intellectual decadence. Well, if you look at the latest headlines (“Harvard Law activist group: ‘Countless other white spaces’ on campus for free speech”) certainly you must think to yourself, “Do I really want to go to Harvard Law?”

Well, suppose I told you that the University of Alabama Law School is rated in the Top 30 nationwide, and that even for out-of-state students, the tuition at UA Law is only $37,664 a year. You are an extraordinarily clever young fellow, aren’t you? Do you want to spend your three years of law school shivering through those New England winters while surrounded by a bunch of crypto-Marxist goons telling you how oppressed they are? Or would you rather be in sunny Tuscaloosa, surrounded by smiling Southern belles? Why, an Alabama coed might actually be flattered if a wealthy young law school student invited her to dine on delicious barbecue at Dreamland.

Picture yourself, young man, in beautiful Alabama! By choosing UA Law instead of Harvard, you’ve not only avoided the cold climate in Cambridge and tedious lectures about “critical race theory,” but you have also shrewdly saved your Daddy about $20,000 a year. For that kind of extraordinarily clever decision, your Daddy might reward with you with a bit of an extra allowance.

A nice car, a sharp wardrobe, an off-campus apartment, a little bit of walking-around money in your pocket — boy, they’re gonna love you in Tuscaloosa! Picture yourself on some splendid Saturday afternoon in October at Bryant-Denny Stadium, screaming “Roll, Tide!” at the top of your lungs. You’ll be cheering for the National Champions, the finest football team in all God’s creation, and you know what?

You’ll be laughing at all those fools who went to Harvard.

Let ’em go directly to Hell. You get yourself down to Tuscaloosa, boy.




 


Category: Alabama, Education, Intellectuals, Racism

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51 Responses to “Harvard Law Is Decadent and Depraved”

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