Hark, the Lords of Harvard Dare to Fight the Ogre Trump

By

David Gottfried

I have seen a lot of verbiage on here praising Harvard for its allegedly knightly and valiant performance against Trump.

I don’t like Trump one bit. However, enemies like Harvard are sure to increase Trump’s support. Back in 1965, William Buckley — a sarcastic, supercilious son of a bitch conservative critic — got a lot of applause when he said that he would sooner have the government run by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard.

I am all for intellectual rigor, in-depth analysis, and sterling research. However, academics very often allow quirks or political biases to mar their work.

For example, Defense Secretary Robert Mc Namara was a thinking man’s thinking man. He was a math whiz who had quantified everything in Vietnam that could be quantified. But he could not quantify, and failed to respect, the rivers of wrath of the people at colonial degradation. And so he was all wrong about Vietnam, and he made America lose itself in that shithole.

When Lyndon Johnson told Sam Rayburn about all of the brilliant people in the Kennedy cabinet, Sam Rayburn, according to Doris Kearns Goodwin, said, “I just wish one of those geniuses had gotten elected dog catcher.”

Very often, political or idiosyncratic prejudices mar one’s work, and don’t think that academic attainment inoculates against the propensity to lie about one’s research results to buttress one’s prejudiced point.

For example, John Money of John Hopkins always said that gender identity was solely a function of socialization; one’s body had nothing to do with it.

John Money finally got the chance to prove his point when a stupid doctor messed-up a circumcision and destroyed almost the entirety of an 8-day old’s penis. Money and his cabal of castrating-happy specialists – who had to have been wonderful people because they worked in renowned John Hopkins -- decided to chop off the remainder of the prick, remove the testes, construct an ersatz vaginal canal and pump the baby up with female hormones. They also assigned the baby to a female shrink to get the kiddie interested in make-up and barbie dolls and the usual accoutrements of a lobotomized girlhood.

John Money published reports, for the next 15 years, which breezily said that the subject was turning into a lovely lady.

In fact, the mutilated man became a man on a mission to raise holy hell, and he belted out masculine vehemence from the moment he started kindergarten, announced that when he grew up he was gonna be a “big strong garbage man,” and proceeded to beat up every boy and girl in the class. Read about his story in his moving and alerting autobiography, “As Nature Made Me.”

Also, some academics are terrible at getting anything concrete done because they never read Wittgenstein.

Some academics can never decide on any one path to take because they are forever deliberating the choices before them. They are continually looking for more evidence to help them decide, but they are so attentive to every subtle wrinkle in a case that they cannot made a decision.

Wittgenstein gave us a solution to this problem: The “As If” principal. While it might be true that it might take a thousand years to thoroughly research an issue, nobody save G-d has that kind of time. Hence, we must act as if certain things are true to save us from lives of interminable paralysis and fear.

Finally, I think one of the best criticisms of academia came from a brilliant philosopher many academics purport to love: Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche said that his goal, in written composition, was to say in 10 sentences what other people fail to say in a book. Academia serves us such a thin gruel of provocative ideas that “scholars” feel constrained to compensate for their ideational constipation by writing with the thesaurus, always at the ready to help them shit rivers of synonyms. I had a friend, who edited articles written for law journals, and he told me that he wanted to bust the jaws of professors as their articles were often outhouses of defecatory prose.