Tag: Harvard University
The Return of the Big Lie: Anti-Semitism Is Winning
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By now, December’s congressional hearing about anti-Semitism at universities, during which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT all claimed that calls for the genocide of Jews would violate their university’s policies only “depending on the context,” is already a well-worn meme. Surely there is nothing left to say about this higher-education train wreck, after the fallout brought
The Moral Decline of Elite Universities
In the spring of 1994, the top executives of the seven largest tobacco companies testified under oath before Congress that nicotine is not addictive. Nearly 30 years later, Americans remember their laughable claims, their callous indifference, their lawyerly inability to speak plainly, and the general sense that they did not regard themselves as part of a shared American community. Those pampered executives, behaving with such Olympian detachment, put the pejorative big in Big Tobacco.
Last week, something similar happened. Thirty
The Anguished Fallout from a Pro-Palestinian Letter at Harvard
Early on Saturday, October 7th, as Harvard’s campus awoke to news of the Hamas attack on Israel, a Palestinian American student whom I’ll call Yasmeen rushed to her friend’s apartment, still in pajamas, to compose “an emergency statement” on behalf of Palestinian allies on campus. Yasmeen and her friend, who asked to be called Nadia, opened a blank Google document and shared the link in an existing group chat with leaders from about a dozen student organizations. Together, the group
The End of Legacy Admissions Could Transform College Access
In 2016, Georgetown University announced a first-of-its-kind change to its admissions policy. In addition to the long-standing legacy preferences afforded to applicants “with an enduring relationship” to the school, including children of alumni, it vowed to “give that same consideration” to the descendants of hundreds of enslaved people. From its founding, in 1789, the school had been funded by Jesuit-owned plantations in Maryland that were operated with slave labor. By 1838, the plantations had become less profitable, and Georgetown’s leaders
Democrats Go Trolling After Legacy Admissions
Democrats go after legacy admissions for bad reasons with dubious law, but the case for eliminating them is solid.
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Education Department Opens Civil Rights Investigation into Harvard’s Legacy Admissions
A growing list of schools are voluntarily dropping the practice by which children of alumni and staff are given a preference.
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How Long Does Omicron Take to Make You Sick?
It certainly might not seem like it given the pandemic mayhem we’ve had, but the original form of SARS-CoV-2 was a bit of a slowpoke. After infiltrating our bodies, the virus would typically brew for about five or six days before symptoms kicked in. In the many months since that now-defunct version of the virus emerged, new variants have arrived to speed the timeline up. Estimates for this exposure-to-symptom gap, called the incubation period, clocked in at about five days