What is Harvard Teaching its Students?
Based on last week’s performance by the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players, I would say Harvard is teaching its students to be weak, compliant, illogical hypochondriacs.
During the production of The Pirates of Penzance, all actors and musicians performed while wearing masks. This muffling of singers’ voices was deemed necessary despite the fact that all students are vaccinated AND are subjected to 2 PCR nasal swabs each week. In addition, the entire audience had to show their vaccine cards.
The performance hall may have been the safest COVID safe space on earth during the show. Even without all these precautions, the performers would have been at extremely low risk of severe covid, based on their age.
Why do the students comply with the performance mask mandate? Maybe they’ve been conditioned since youth to accept the cult of safetyism where any risk is intolerable. After living a bubble-wrapped childhood, it’s only natural for them to enter adulthood thoughtlessly accepting perpetual face wraps. They grew up in a world where monkey bars and seesaws had been removed from playgrounds. All hard surfaces were covered with foam. They rarely played outside, and if they were allowed to venture one hundred feet from their homes, their parents were charged with child endangerment.
These Harvard students will one day become the leaders of our society–Presidents, Senators, Supreme Court Justices, Tech Magnates. It is a scary thought.
So students everywhere should just ignore any and all rules with which they disagree?
Is that the point?
Anyone attending that virtue signaling performance art, and submitting to showing “their papers” before being seated is a moron.
I’ve worked with three Harvard grads – two of could generally kick my ass on most exams, but were so stupid I would not have let either of them watch my dog overnight for fear of it somehow getting accidentally set on fire. Clearly nothing has changed, and our Chinese overlords will be very pleased with the cooperative nature of these budding “leaders.”
You forgot to mention that they will also be our military leaders, following in the footsteps of the generals and admirals who ran the Afganistan occupation for 20 years and assured us that the Taliban had been defeated in the first five.
It is the first signs of communism indoctrination. You do not question the party line iand prevailing thought. It was deemed part of the party line , the party that controls the universities and thus cannot be deviated no matter how ridiculous. Obviously animal farm and 1984 have been banned from required reading
As much as I love to thrash Harvey’s University, I’ve got to point out Bill Deresiewicz who inclined his attention towards Yale. He was a professor there from a middle class background.
One critic of Bill’s work Excellent Sheep is the habit of the upper-crusty universities to trawl the poorer classes (i.e. those who have to work to earn a living) so as to replenish the minds of the power structure. The legacy children are not famous for their brilliance or cleverness, so the machinery of control needs a continuous infusion of those with triple-digit IQ’s to keep the plantations running, in exchange for achieving a tarted-up superiority. Bill suggests that –
Right you are, critic. Raffling off a Lamborghini or two to the most cunning among the strivers is a small price to pay for keeping the Big Picture advancing. Plus, the poor bring in concepts such as viral epidemiology, which can be dumbed down to the color-by-numbers simplicity that the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players affirm enthusiastically in their sojourn of scholarship-by-association during their Legacy Days at Yale and Harvey’s.
An associate of mine who was Brown, went to Yale, with an interest in the literature of Fitzgerald. But the Brown Strivers are brought in to express Brown consciousness to the enthusiastically affirmative halls of ivy, and the gentle hint was repeated that she stick to matanzas and quincenterias and Cesar Chavez stuff. If she studied F. Scott Fitzgerald, then what would the purpose of her being their, anyway?
The ruling classes are as desperate for new ideas as are the poor for tales of the Kardashians and Wisconsin shooting trials. They don’t want to be seen as vapid and clueless as they really are. The Pirates of Penzance is just the ticket for mask consciousness-raising.
These are the people whom, ten years after their witty drama days, that turned their minds to the colonialism that they unleashed upon medical care in America, every bit as ignorant and heartless as Joseph Conrad wrote about the subjugation of Africa and Asia in the last few centuries by imperial powers. There is no more frontier any more, to the leaders turn their mind to more intangible colonialization, such as medicine. As in the colonies of old, they need to co-opt fellow travelers who will be loyal to Empire and spurn their own people.
Fortunately, medicine is chock-full of these sorts of lackeys, and they work diligently for a pittance – a few dozen million dollars. Hmph.
So mask up and read your lines.