The super-rich get more pleasure out of firing people than having sex.

 JEFFREY ST CLAIR

I shed no tears for Harvard, an institution that has inflicted untold misery and bloodshed on the world. For all I care, it could become the target of a hostile takeover by financial pirates trained in its own classrooms, access to which they gained through legacy admissions. This is, of course, pretty much what happened, at least in the mind of one of the homegrown Visigoths who breached its ivy-tangled walls in search of the university president’s head. 

I’m talking about Bill Ackman, the billionaire son of a multi-millionaire son (and Harvard grad) of a millionaire. Using Christopher Rufo’s playbook, Ackman leveraged his clout as a Harvard donor and former big man on campus to assail Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first black president, accusing her of turning Harvard Yard into a Hamas-training camp, and, for good measure, being a naughty plagiarist. Ackman recruited some strange allies for his regime change crusade, from the NYT to the vicious congressional grandstander Elise Stefanik. 

For her part, Gay proved an easy target, with her stumbling testimony before Congress and confused response to student anti-war protests on campus, which she should simply have defended on free speech grounds, something the Right claims, speciously in most cases, to support. 

Still, the forced eviction of Gay wasn’t about anti-semitism (how could it be with the bigoted Stefanik leading the charge?) or plagiarism, but the right-wing assault on academic freedom and the bi-partisan enforcement of pro-Israeli doctrine on campus. And they aren’t going to stop by claiming the heads of Penn and Harvard. Indeed, they’re not going to stop until they are stopped. The ouster of Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill has merely whetted their bloodlust. Rufo and Stefanik have already set their McCarthyite sights on decapitating the president of MIT (Sally Kornbluth) and Ackman has called for the resignation of the entire Harvard board for the crime of implementing diversity and inclusion policies that he deems racist. Ackman is also miffed that Gay retained her faculty position, writing on Twitter: “This makes no sense. How can she continue as a member of the faculty?” The super-rich get more pleasure out of firing people than having sex.