Anyone paying attention to that intellectual έρημος CANNOT be surprised that their BOT has now begun banning long stretches of Plato from classrooms because … uh… gender?
”What kind of university” does this, asks the miscreant who tried to teach a Dialogue or two.
The kind of university that tells the miscreant he either dumps transy P. pronto or he can teach Ethics and Engineering instead! UD is not making this up.
The local AAUP says
“A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust — and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”
Who da fuck ever regarded A&M as a serious anything? Have you read UD’s years of posts about that football-addled joke?
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Reminds UD of Benedictine College in Kansas, where
Sometimes, people here quietly admit, it goes too far. Like the students who loudly proclaim how often they go to Mass, or the young man who quit his classics course because he refused to read the works of ancient Greek pagans.
Bad boy Lawrence Krauss was forced, back in 2018, to retire from Arizona State; you’d think ASU would know by now that you take down bad girl Elisa New’s university page before announcing she’s been dumped too. But there she is, bright and shiny, eager to gentle you with poetry…
A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road… He had already shown himself capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars… Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds…
And there’s his BFF:
The year after meeting Epstein, [Alan] Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer.[LOL]… Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders.
For mercenary reasons, Harvard prof Elisa New waxed lyrical about child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — until the world of decent people came crashing down on her and she couldn’t do it anymore. What an inspiring guide to the delicate art of poetry.
According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.
Rapidly escalating outbreak. Stay the hell out of South Carolina.
Palm Beach has hit billionaire financier Nelson Peltz and his wife, Claudia, with a daily fine [of $250] because officials say the couple built a padel court on their expansive estate without the town’s approval.
Very common billionaire behavior, as this blog has noted. When a culture produces billionaires, it produces people for whom rules and regulations mean jackshit. They’re perfectly happy to pay $250 daily for the rest of their lives in order to protect their belligerence.
Shades of New York‘s ultraorthodox cults! In both the well-established, ongoing theft of tax dollars by ultraorthodox groups in NY, and the more recently uncovered theft of tax dollars by Somali groups in Minnesota, fear of racism/religious bigotry-based lawsuits, and fear that being called out as racist will destroy one’s political career, has stayed the hand of governments in the face of staggeringly obvious crime.
‘Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.’ True, true, so the thing to do is continue stealing in the country that rescued you from that. Stealing from one of our least corrupt states, Minnesota.
No one, certainly. And yet the rise to great public positions in our once great republic of Donald Trump, Lawrence Summers, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and other nasty pieces of work, forces the question of personal viciousness and the survival of liberal democracy. If Matt Ford is right that
At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.
then we need to return, at the very least, to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices and its meticulous anatomy of what’s worst in us, as we try to forge American civic life despite it.
[Summers] is so convinced of his own genius, and he is so convinced that he is smarter than anyone else, that he is very bad at listening to other people, people who might be able to stop him, prevent him from doing really stupid things. I’m sure that he had people telling him, don’t be emailing Jeffrey Epstein, that’s a bad idea. But he would just go ahead and do it anyway because he has that kind of hubris, right?
He did one of the world’s worst ever fixed income trades when he was president of Harvard, where he decided that he was going to build a massive new campus across the river. And he knew that this massive new campus was going to cost a lot of money. And he was also convinced that interest rates were very low and they wouldn’t go down any further. And in fact, they were going to go up further.
And so he reckoned that when Harvard in the future was going to borrow money to build the campus, he wanted Harvard to be able to borrow the money in the future at the interest rates today. So he entered into this incredibly complex sort of future forward swap thingy. And then, of course, interest rates went down rather than up. He had to unwind the swap because they never built the campus. And he cost the university about a billion dollars.
… is the provocative title of a New Republic essay which goes there. It goes to the place where you say that the fault lies with us. Not just them – the Trump voters. Us – the other side.
“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net,” [John] Adams once wrote to [a] friend. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral … people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
So far, Americans are failing that test—and the republic itself... It would be tempting to dismiss the Epstein scandals as a purely elite phenomenon. But this is the society for which the American people have voted. The 2016 election could once be dismissed as a constitutional fluke since most Americans voted for Trump’s opponent. The 2024 election is more definitional. This country had nearly a decade of experience with Trump in power—the corruption, the lies, the bigotry and misogyny and abuse and violence—and welcomed more of it.
This is, if you like, the importance of Larry Summers. That Harvard University, of all places, appointed a corrupt greedy licentious reprobate president is a chapter in a story. It is a story about millions and millions of Americans, including our corrupt elites, including even presidents of our greatest universities, failing the test and failing the republic. Don’t forget Stanford’s disgraced corrupt billionaire ex-president! Coast to coast, at our greatest schools, reprehensible self-serving cynics and liars are appointed president, just as Trump is elected and re-elected the country’s president.
As late as 2014, Harvard ignored this letter from an anti-trafficking organization: “[It is] unusual and disheartening . . . to read almost daily press releases distributed by a pedophile [who] feels entitled to identify himself as a ‘Harvard philanthropist.” Who was allowed to identify himself as a Harvard philanthropist.
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At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.
Summers abused those he considered his inferiors – women – and he got his thrill by proxy. We assume.
Everyone [outside the contemporary American elite is] part of an underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity—at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain—and where amorality is required to participate.
Summers’ appointment as Harvard’s president “worried some of those who knew [him]. The economist had earned a reputation as a bull in a china shop, rudely dismissive of the opinions of others, astoundingly arrogant even by Washington standards.”
It’s not just that Summers continued a friendship with a man who clearly had a pathological sexual interest in girls and had gone to jail for his sexual proclivities. It is also hard to imagine how Summers could have been so stupid as not to expect that emails with a convicted felon might one day go public.
As for the content of the emails… much of it is, in a word, gross. Certainly, we all write emails that, deprived of context, could embarrass us if they went public. But Summers’ emails went to a deeper, darker place; there is no context that absolves them.
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In July 2011, the former Harvard president was interviewed at the Aspen Institute by its head, author Walter Isaacson, in front of an admiring group. A friendly Isaacson asked about the veracity of a scene in the movie The Social Network in which Summers agrees to meet with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard undergraduates who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them. The “Winklevi,” as Summers referred to them, came from Greenwich, Conn., rowed crew, were tall, handsome and old school — they wore coats and ties to meet the Harvard president. Summers disliked them instinctively, and the film portrays him treating them with humiliating condescension. Was it true? Isaacson wanted to know.
“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities,” Summers answered. “One is that they are looking for a job and have an interview. The other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”
The remark — a former president of Harvard describing two of its students as assholes — prompted near-unanimous laughter from the audience, titillated by this trash-talking rule-breaker. Summers wore the chuffed look of a man who rarely tells a successful joke but is pleased to have done so now. The funny thing is that Summers was wrong on both counts: Zuckerberg wound up paying a $65 million settlement to the Winklevoss twins, and Larry Summers turned out to be the asshole.
As vile a compendium of moral squalors as his French economist twin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Summers has for decades evaded the reputational death he so richly deserves. Finally, this morning, his long, gushing intimacy with/admiration for Jeffrey Epstein has forced his hand a tiny bit – He’s going to keep teaching and also to hold on to many of his bigshot appointments in Democratic policy circles to be sure, but okay he’ll step back here and there somehow somewhere from ‘public life’ …
Like Prince Andrew, a degenerate protected for decades by the crown, Summers has for years depended on the kindness of powerful friends to misspend/ineptly manage public and private money, to hang with fellow degenerates, to turn Harvard University into a hedge fund, and to broadcast mentally retarded statements about women. The death of Elizabeth finally destroyed Andrew; the life of Epstein has perhaps done the deed on Summers. Perhaps! He’s not yet been banished to a cottage deep in the thousand acre Sandringham wood; the hapless Democrats are probably hapless enough to keep him front and center…
Seriously, read this rather long 2020 piece on the dude by Robert Kuttner and ask yourself why it took five more years plus domestic life with a convicted sex offender for fate to catch up with this guy, and the answer has everything to do with hated elites who make everyone else take a licking and who themselves just keep ticking. How in God’s name did Harvard prez Summers survive the Andrei Shleifer scandal? How did Shleifer survive it? Elites protect their own; elites aren’t like you and me. Greedy for money, hugely powerful, they have contempt for the little peoples’ silly rules of ethical conduct. Why shouldn’t they? Their intimate Alan Dershowitz is always there to bail them out.
Keep reading the Kuttner. I know it’s long, but it has to be, because it is touching on the serial sordid cavortings of Democratic Sage Larry Summers, who must have breathed a sigh of relief when Epstein died cuz Larry’s secrets died with him. But Epstein turned out to be another Rasputin, a man of many lives before and after the grave.
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Fun ‘degrees of separation’ fact: Summers buddy, protégé, and co-author Jason Furman bought his Cambridge house from UD‘s friend Peter. It’s a house UD knows well, but she’s certain Furman has totally redone the thing, so she probably wouldn’t recognize it. (I put that particular link over Furman’s name because a fawning 2008 NYT piece about Summers’ rehabilitation after the Harvard presidency fiasco ends with this wonderful quote: “Now, who talks about Harvard?” Mr. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, said. “It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.” In a few years, perhaps the same paper will roll out Furman to say “Now, who talks about Jeffrey Epstein? It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.”)
