On almost every metric, Lori Lightfoot was an abysmal failure as mayor of Chicago from 2019 to 2023. In fact, Lightfoot did such a pitiful job leading the Windy City during her four-year term that she received only 16 percent of the vote in her unsuccessful bid for re-election earlier this year.
However, despite her horrible track record as mayor of Chicago, and her absolutely awful performance during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lightfoot has been rewarded with a job teaching health care policy at Harvard University.
Although it may sound too absurd to be true, Lightfoot “has been appointed as a Richard L. and Ronay A. Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow for the fall term at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health” where she will teach a class tentatively called “Health Policy and Leadership,” as reported by The Harvard Gazette.
According to the Gazette, “Lightfoot led a coordinated, citywide response across government, business, and community organizations to safeguard public health and minimize economic impact from the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other steps, she created a Racial Equity Rapid Response Team and the COVID-19 Recovery Task Force.”
As someone who lives just north of Chicago, I beg to differ with the Gazette’s account of Lightfoot’s pandemic performance.
In truth, Lightfoot’s handling of the pandemic was incompetent, uncoordinated, and downright dangerous for the millions of Chicagoans, especially children, who suffered through years of turmoil under Lightfoot’s watch.
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For starters, Lightfoot was fully on board with closing Chicago Public Schools for in-person learning due to incessant and unceasing pressure from the Chicago Teachers Union. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Chicago’s private schools, which were free from Lightfoot’s diktats, remained open for in-person schooling throughout the duration of the pandemic.
Lightfoot went out of her way to close public parks, public beaches, and even dismantled public basketball hoops for months, even though the data clearly showed that COVID-19 had little likelihood of being spread outdoors. Not to mention that exercise was a great way to reduce the effects of COVID-19.
Of course, Lightfoot also shutdown most of the city and mandated that small- and medium-sized businesses be closed for months, putting untold numbers of Chicagoans out of work. However, Lightfoot (like so many other leftist politicians) allowed big box retailers to remain open throughout the pandemic, thereby further squeezing out mom-and-pop businesses across the city.
And, it must not be forgotten that Lightfoot deprived any and all Chicagoans of their basic liberties while not applying the same rules to herself. Need I remind the readers that Lightfoot forbid people from getting basic services, like haircuts, during the early months of the pandemic while she was allowed to get her hair done because in Lightfoot’s own words, “I’m the public face of this city. I’m on national media and I’m out in the public eye.”
Let’s not forget that Lightfoot also mandated vaccines for much of Chicago’s public work force, even though the vaccines did not stop the spread of COVID-19. And, she mandated that children wear face masks in public schools, even as the data showed that this was a fruitless endeavor and produced an assortment of negative consequences for the innocent children who Lightfoot used as pawns throughout the pandemic.
What’s more, under Lightfoot, Chicago’s crime crisis became worse than ever. As did homelessness, drug use, and all sorts of other problems while Lightfoot stood atop City Hall.
In short, Lori Lightfoot will go down as one of the worst mayors in Chicago history. Her lack of leadership during her entire four-year term, in which she constantly pointed fingers and cast blame for her own misguided policies, is the reason she was a one-term mayor.
But, as is the case all too often in today’s upside-down world, Lightfoot will be rewarded quite handsomely for her atrocious tenure as mayor of Chicago. Even scarier, our future leaders will now be “taught” by Lightfoot at one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world.
If you needed another reason to question the wisdom of sending your children to the Ivy League, just be aware that Lori Lightfoot is now teaching health care policy and leadership at Harvard. If that doesn’t make you think twice about the state of decay in today’s so-called institutions of higher learning, just remember that the University of Pennsylvania still hosts the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, because Joe Biden is certainly a certified genius when it comes to foreign policy.
Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is editorial director at The Heartland Institute.
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