We are not the first, nor likely the last, nation to be burned by revolution. The French, of course, went after their aristocrats--even their scientists. Lavoisier, the man who discovered oxygen, among other important things, went to the guillotine because he was an aristocrat and people just then didn't care much about oxygen, but they knew they resented aristocrats. The Chinese had their cultural revolution under Mao, which targeted the intellectuals, college professors, and dragged intellectuals before rural peasants to be denigrated, if not beheaded.
Eventually, both countries realized they needed somebody who knew how to build factories, and a navy, fashion munitions, and lead armies.
Now, we have President Trump pulling every lever he can pull to defund Harvard, cutting it off from students from abroad, a source of income, but also a source of ideas and cross pollination, in a world which depends on the free flow of information, ideas and innovation.
American scientists will be in the same position Hitler's nuclear scientists found themselves--cut off from rapidly advancing technology. Hitler dismissed the idea that America might be working on a nuclear bomb as absurd, the product of "Jewish science," which it was, in part, but it was science that worked, and which produced the atomic bomb, which, had Hitler not died in April, would have been dropped on Germany by August.
And then we have RFK JR saying measles vaccine is more dangerous than and does as much harm as the disease itself, saying that Europe has more measles than we do and they vaccinate, which is of course an end run around the truth: Which Europe is he talking about?
Yes, Kazakhstan has 3,000 cases a year, but then again, they are not vaccinating their kids.
As Paul Offit has noted, not only does RFK JR prevaricate about measles, he says polio vaccine did more harm than good. And yet, one has to ask, whatever happened to polio?
The EU countries, like the US (once) vaccinate against measles, and as a result, measles has been unheard of in those places. In the US, the only places we saw measles were among cults which refused vaccinations. Until now--now we've got the gullible and the willful and the uneducated and those distrustful of authority hearing from an unimpeachable source, RFK JR, and Trump, that vaccines really are dangerous and don't trust those elites who are trying to inject you with nefarious stuff.
Paul Krugman notes that he, even Paul Krugman, a Noble prize winner, harbored some underlying resentment against Harvard because they rejected him at age 17 for undergraduate college--Harvard's loss, clearly. They missed a good one, and likely Harvard misses thousands of kids destined for glory every year as they try to process 50,000 applications from kids whose school grades from 14 to 17 years old are supposed to reveal talent and potential.
And even when they guess right, as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, those two guys arrived at Harvard and only stayed a year, concluding Harvard really had nothing to offer them worth staying for, and they had higher mountains to climb. Harvard often frames the rejection by these two successful people as evidence that, well, we know how to recognize genius, but the truth is, these geniuses chose Harvard, not the other way around.
They did the version of that Tony Fauci story--which he has never directly denied--that when Cornell medical school offered Dr. Fauci a faculty position, he said thanks but no thanks, stunning the faculty. How could he turn down such an honor? And he said, "Someday I'm going to be either very rich or very famous--but if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither." Which means, some people of great ambition look around at institutions like Harvard and Cornell and realize they would be constrained by those places, not enabled, and they say, "Keep your honor; I'll fashion my own fortune."
As Thoreau said, it is a man's opinion of himself which determines his fate, not the esteem of others.
But, all that said, Harvard is a major employer in Boston and in Massachusetts, and it's health care system is innovative and vast, and its accomplishments in wide swaths of medical research are too numerous for an accounting in a mere blog.
Harvard may be insufferably arrogant, but so what?
Kids from Harvard College talk about holding back from "dropping the H bomb" on prospective employers, dates, parents of friends and potential lovers, until the strategically right moment, when they expect it to have the maximum effect in establishing their superiority. The "H bomb," is, of course, that single sentence, "I went to Harvard."
So what? Let them cling to that. Some people cling to guns and religion. Others cling to Harvard.
Personally, I never wanted to go to Harvard. The kids from my high school who went to Harvard were such excruciating nerds I could hardly imagine how depressing it would be to have to spend four years with them.
Yale looked better--but I did not look good enough to Yale.
Do I want to burn down Yale? No. I did okay without Yale, and without Harvard. Let their alumni sit around their clubs and dinner tables congratulating themselves for being among the elect. Their good fortune didn't hurt me. Given my own limitations, I did okay for a mope.
Who wants to be a cheerleader for Harvard? It's the place we love to hate. It's the neighbor who can afford his Mercedes and parks it in his driveway just to let everyone see it. But if his restaurant employs fifty locals, and attracts people to the movie theater next door, well, I say, let him enjoy his Mercedes. Doesn't hurt me to have to look at it.
Actually, my Toyota has heated leather seats and having ridden in both cars, I actually prefer my own.
Truth be told, Harvard University as a whole, especially in healthcare, does much more good than harm.
Trump however, knows that attacking Harvard is good politics. His base loves it. And then he says he'll build trade schools with all the money the federal government once spent on Harvard; maybe he'll build trade schools right in Harvard yard. So that's the thumb in the eye. We'll tear down your school and build our own school in its place.
And, of course, we should be building more trade schools. We need more plumbers, HVAC, electricians. Just try getting any of those skilled workers to your house any time soon--and those jobs cannot be outsourced to India, the way a radiologist's job can be.
Fact is, we can do all that, and still keep Harvard.
So, killing the elite university feels good to Trumplings everywhere--they all cheer when the bloody head is held high from the guillotine.
The question is, are we better off with that severed head, or were we better off with it still attached?
So, now, we have the dream come true:
Headline: Trump Shoots Harvard In Broad Daylight on Fifth Avenue
Subheadline: Homeland Security Arrests Yale and Princeton as Co-conspirators. No charges pressed against Trump.
No comments:
Post a Comment