While Harvard may once have been the crown jewel in American academia, it is no longer. Shocking stories of modern grave robbery, alleged data manipulation, and rampant antisemitism have been flooding the airways. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund Harvard until it cleans up its act.
The Puritans founded Harvard College in 1636 with a very specific purpose in mind: It was intended to train clergy to establish a “church in the wilderness.” Its early motto was “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae” (“Truth for Christ and the Church.”).
Imagined image of Harvard College in the 17th century, by Samuel Eliot Morison (1920). Public domain.
Its current motto, dating back to the mid-18th century, when it had ceased to be an institution directed primarily at educating clergymen, retains one word from the original: “Veritas” (“Truth”). Truth, however, seems to have little currency at Harvard.
In the past few days, a couple of shocking stories have emerged. First, there’s the modern grave robbing report:
A former Harvard Medical School morgue manager recently entered a plea in relation to an alleged scheme to steal and sell donated body parts.
Cedric Lodge, 57, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, pleaded guilty to interstate transport of stolen human remains on Wednesday before Chief U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
[snip]
A former Harvard Medical School morgue manager recently entered a plea in relation to an alleged scheme to steal and sell donated body parts.
Cedric Lodge, 57, of Goffstown, New Hampshire, pleaded guilty to interstate transport of stolen human remains on Wednesday before Chief U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
Second, there’s the fraud allegedly perpetrated by a professor whose specialty was honesty (a charge she denies):
A renowned Harvard University professor was stripped of her tenure and fired after an investigation found she fabricated data on multiple studies focused on dishonesty.
Francesca Gino, a celebrated behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School, was let go after the school’s top governing board determined she tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted her hypotheses, GBH News reported.
Harvard administrators notified business faculty that Gino was out of a job in a closed-door meeting this past week, the outlet reported.
If the allegations are true, this bespeaks a very unhealthy academic culture.
But those are two individuals. Can we extrapolate conclusions about the entire institution based on those two?
Probably not. What we can do, however, is look at the rampant antisemitism that’s been openly displayed at Harvard since thousands of men from Gaza crossed into Israel on October 7, 2023, and sadistically slaughtered over 1,200 people (equivalent to slaughtering _____ of Americans) and kidnapped over 200 more. Since then, both faculty and students at Harvard have been on a rampage of antisemitism, claiming that Israel, a pluralist society that occupies a tiny dot on the map of the Muslim world and that withdrew from Gaza in 2005, is a genocidal Hitler-esque nation.
Every one of the “genocide” charges has been rebutted, so much so that Ireland is begging to redefine the word “genocide” to make it fit. The reality is that the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank had a huge population boom under Israel’s aegis, that Israel has done more than any nation in the history of the war to protect an enemy civilian population (including advance warning of military strikes and feeding the enemy), and that Israel asks only one thing from the enemy as a condition of laying down its arms: Give us back our hostages and stop killing us.
That’s the truth.
Nevertheless, at Harvard today, this is what a departmental graduation looks like:
Unless the degree Kestenbaum was getting was in Palestinian Worship Studies, in which case what happened might just barely have been excusable, this was grotesquely out of place, openly antisemitic, and a blatant violation of Jewish students’ civil rights under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Donald Trump is correct to attack Harvard in every way possible. The institution that was founded on Truth has become a cesspool of lies. American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay a penny toward its continued upkeep.