Columbia has canceled its main graduation ceremony in light of campus mayhem. Harvard plans to go ahead with its traditional events, but in order to do so, it must first take a page out of the Gavin Newsom playbook.
Harvard periodically sends out messages to its 400,000 living alumni. Most notes are anodyne or pure leftist tripe (divesting from energy companies….). One came through today that caught my eye. The note was sent by the VP for Alumni Affairs, but it was written by the interim Harvard president, Dr. Alan Garber. I am including the salient part of his note below:
I write today with this simple message: The continuation of the encampment presents a significant risk to the educational environment of the University. Those who participate in or perpetuate its continuation will be referred for involuntary leave from their Schools. Among other implications, students placed on involuntary leave may not be able to sit for exams, may not continue to reside in Harvard housing, and must cease to be present on campus until reinstated.
Enforcement of these policies, which are essential to our educational mission, is an obligation we owe to our students and the Harvard community more broadly. It is not, as some have suggested, a rejection of discussion and debate about the urgent issues that concern the University, the nation, and the world. As an academic institution, we do not shy away from hard and important questions. There are many ways for our community to engage constructively in reasoned discussion of complex issues, but initiating these difficult and crucial conversations does not require, or justify, interfering with the educational environment and Harvard’s academic mission. Our disagreements are most effectively addressed through candid, constructive dialogue, building not on disruption, but on facts and reason. (Bold text in original).
The graduation festivities are centered in Harvard Yard, the present site of the tents and protests. Harvard cannot have its traditional graduation events of pomp and circumstance if unwashed agitators are mingling with the multimillionaire alumni. Harvard needs to have the Yard free and clear of pro-Hamas protesters, however much the university is intellectually aligned with their cause and ideas. So what can the university do with graduation just around the corner? It can pull a Gavin Newsom.
One will remember when a few months ago, the homeless encampments that have ravaged San Francisco suddenly disappeared. Tents, needles, feces, and vagrants vanished in the bat of an eye and their former tent cities were replaced with trees and new urban amenities. People were shocked by the transformation and even more shocked when the California governor made it clear that the effort to clean up the city was solely for impressing President Xi Jinping of China who was coming for a conference in the city. People wondered why the removal of the dangerous homeless encampments was not done sooner and why it was done for Xi but not for the heavily-taxed citizens who say in large numbers that they plan to abandon the city. And when Xi was well over the Pacific Ocean, the homeless were returned. San Francisco looks as awful and has as many empty storefronts now as it did before the Newsom theater performance.
So keeping the above paragraph in mind, go back and read President Garber’s tough-sounding note. “Involuntary removal” sounds a lot like vacuuming homeless off of San Francisco sidewalks. But there is redemption. The students can be returned to campus, namely after the last of the high-value alumni have made their way to Logan Airport after graduation ceremonies. What you see missing here is the same thing that was missing in California. The homeless should have been removed forever. They should have been dealt with for whatever issues they have—drugs, mental health problems, crime—and the good citizens should have been allowed to wake up every morning to a clean and inviting city. What is missing from the Garber letter is the explicit threat of expulsion. Nothing terrifies a college student more than expulsion, as he or she will have a hard time enrolling in a new school. Their future is Starbucks instead of Goldman Sachs. The letter simply allows the university to remove people from the Yard as needed and then allow them back on campus in good standing after the all-important graduation exercises are complete. “Reinstated” is the key word; apparently, it will come automatically and not with some act of contrition or payment for damage done. Harvard’s Veritas once meant truth; today it means administrative cowardice.
Because leaders are sympathetic to the pro-Hamas crowd, they are unwilling to lower the boom. They will have police remove them, they will temporarily suspend them, and then they will let them come back to cosplay as terrorists to their hearts’ content. But school officials do not have the strength to give the trouble-makers the boot and keep non-student organizers away from campus.
In my day, Harvard had a green solution that they sprayed on the Yard grass in the Spring. It had two benefits: it made the Yard look clean of brown splotches and it included growth material to get the grass to grow up quickly prior to graduation. Add one more neat trick to the Harvard quiver: make the antisemitic students disappear at the right time and then let them come back when the coast is clear.
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