Corporate Zionists at War Against Harvard Students

A war against freedom of opinion and conscience continues unabated by US corporations against university campuses whose academic freedoms are being trampled by financial whales. These wealthy donors to universities make their donations conditional on the universities adopting certain postures that favor the donors, in a serious violation of the academic freedom that is a pillar of a free society.

Bill Ackman and other business leaders who are donors to Harvard University are demanding that the university release the names of students whose organizations signed on to a letter blaming Israel for the deadly attacks by Hamas. They want to persecute those students whose opinions differ from their own, just as McCarthyism blacklisted actors and journalists on accusations of sympathy for Communism in the 1950s. Those signatories of the letter condemning Israel “should be made public so their views are publicly known” to ensure companies don’t “inadvertently hire” them. In other words, they want to destroy the lives of promising students for simply expressing their opinions. Naming the students who backed the statement could harm the students while also trashing differences of opinion on an academic campus.

Some disagreed with the onslaught on the students. “This is not a time where it is constructive to vilify individuals and I am sorry that is happening,” former Harvard President Larry Summers said.  Harvard professor and legal scholar Laurence Tribe told CNN Wednesday he decided not to join the push to publicize the students' names. I "think it would be an overreaction to penalize them permanently by publishing their names and implying that they actually endorsed what the terrorists did.”

The controversy comes in response to a joint statement released by a coalition of Harvard student groups following the attacks by Hamas on October 7.

“We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” the statement from the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups said. The statement said millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been “forced to live in an open-air prison” and called on Harvard to “take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.”

Meanwhile, the first African-American president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign from her post for not subscribing to the totalitarian thinking that has become prevalent in the US. For speaking with caution and not adopting wholesale statements siding with one side or another, she has been hounded, threatened, called the N word and harassed by right-wing fanatic associates of the Zionist movement. She was also accused of plagiarsim on very tenuous bases.

In an opinion in the New York Times, she said, 

"On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count."

The campaign against me... was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise.... But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility."

In effect, to further undermine Gay personally, the pro-Zionists have attacked her scholarship. "My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution....When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard."

The Harvard Corporation ordered an investigation that “revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” but found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.

Even though Gay ultimately stepped down, Ackman did not relent in his vitriolic criticism of an African-American woman who made it to the top of the top university in the land, as Harvard decided to keep her on the faculty. “There would be nothing wrong with her staying on the faculty if she didn’t have serious plagiarism issues.... Rewarding her with a highly paid faculty position sets a very bad precedent for academic integrity at Harvard,” he said, persisting in wanting to go beyond his attacks and destroy her life.

And now we learn from Business Insider that Ackman's own wife, Neri Oxman, “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation” and found “at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” The article presented examples of her dissertation side by side with passages from authors she allegedly failed to cite accurately.

Like Claudine Gay, Oxman apologized but explained herself out, saying, “In these four paragraphs, however, I did not place the subject language in quotation marks, which would be the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

Among the examples of Oxman's alleged plagiarism, as posted by Business Insider, one appeared to paraphrase an author without putting quotation marks around a citation, and another one in which she allegedly inaccurately attributed a passage from the Royal Society of London paper to two different sources.

In an obvious display of double standard, Ackman supported his wife after she was accused of the same level of plagiarism he himself made against Gay.

Welcome to the new America.