January 4, 2024

Thursday, January 4, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

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Joe is always busy.

January 6th is Saturday.

Jan 3 (Reuters) - President Joe Biden will mark the third anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S Capitol with a political speech the day before to make the case that Republican Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy, Biden's re-election campaign said on Wednesday.

Biden's campaign said he will speak near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington established headquarters during the Revolutionary War. The speech site, Montgomery County Community College, is about 15 miles away.

Biden will follow the Friday visit with a campaign stop on Monday at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist in 2015 killed nine parishioners at the historic Black church.

Biden is applying the heat on Trump as a way to change his campaign's narrative away from his handling of the U.S. economy and his age, 81.

Trump is 77.

Biden had planned to deliver his Pennsylvania remarks on Saturday, the actual anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, but moved it to Friday to avoid a forecast winter storm.

In South Carolina, which Democrats moved to the front of the presidential primary calendar this election cycle after Black voters there helped Biden clinch the nomination in 2020, Biden will focus on what the campaign described as rising threats of political violence.

Taken together, the two visits will represent Biden's most direct public attacks so far in the 2024 race on top Republican rival Trump and the party he controls, and mark a shift in tone after Biden spent much of 2023 touting his signature legislation and the economy.

Iowa will hold the first Republican nominating contest on Jan. 15. New Hampshire will hold the nation's first primary on Jan. 23, although Biden will not be on the Democratic ballot there because the state defied a plan to have New Hampshire cede its first-in-the-nation primary. South Carolina's Democratic primary will be held on Feb. 3.

In the upcoming weeks, the Biden re-election campaign will ratchet up operations and events, including hiring key directors in all 50 states and hitting the airwaves with new ads.

(Reuters).

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Kamala is always busy.

Yesterday.

Continuation from the Reuters article in “Joe is always busy” above.

“Vice President Kamala Harris is also expected to speak in South Carolina on Saturday and again on Martin Luther King Jr. Day later this month, and is also expected to take a message about threats to democracy to the state's largely Black Democratic electorate”

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Bill Ackman thinks he should be President of Harvard, and, I guess, the United States-and the world.

Why? He is a businessman. Remember Hoover and Trump? How did that work out?

For all who are searching to recall who Ackman is, he is a hedge-fund guy who led the charge against Claudine Gay for antisemitism, but now he has decided Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion were the problem. It wasn’t antisemitism after all.

Ackman is what the financial industry calls an “activist investor.” I call him a bully. His strategy is always the same - to force whoever thwarts him - companies or his co-op (*) or his college - to bend to his will by any means necessary.

As the New York Times said about his battle against Claudine Gay, “long-held personal grudges play a part, too.”

(*) here is a link to a story about Ackman’s battle with his Co-op neighbors. Bill Ackman Wants to Build a Glass Penthouse on the UWS.

Here is what Ackerman posted yesterday as a follow-up to Claudine Gay’s resignation.

On the day after Gay’s resignation, Ackman threatened Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s Jewish President.

Ackman’s 4,000 word ramblings, 👇 that DEI caused antisemitism, was posted on X.

From Ackman.

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about Harvard (https://x.com/Harvard) when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”

Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.

As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.

In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.

After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.

The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.

The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.

These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.

When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.

The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.

I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.

America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.

Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.

An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.

The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.

I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on X that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.

When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.

I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.

I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.

In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.

Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.

While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.

I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.

All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.

This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.

The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.

The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?

One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.

Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.

The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.

Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.

The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.

The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?

In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.

The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.

The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.

And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.

It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.

The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.

According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.

Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.

In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.

So what should happen?

The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.

The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.

The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.

The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.

Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?

Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.

Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.

These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.

A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.

A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.

Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.

We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.

One more thing. Or two.

A Harvard Professor speaks up in the Boston Globe.

When the mob came for the university.

The resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay represents a dangerous intrusion of partisan politics into higher education. Such intrusions are a harbinger of larger problems for democracy.

Claudine Gay, who resigned as president of Harvard University Tuesday, was brought down by a virtual mob, its pitchforks updated to the blogs, tweets, and hate-filled emails that now perform the role of an actual mob. You don’t have to care about Harvard as an institution or about the nuances of academic norms of citation to be concerned about this. It represents a dangerous intrusion of partisan politics into higher education. Such intrusions are a harbinger of larger problems for democracy.

Gay was accused of many misdeeds: her initial public response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, her legalistic responses to grandstanding questions by politicians during the Dec. 7 congressional hearings, and accusations of plagiarism in her academic work. Each one of these incidents raises deep issues of the limits of freedom of speech and the protection of students and intellectual property.

Divergent opinions on each of them can be heard in conversations around Harvard’s campus. Some, including me, have criticized her for bowing to the pressure of rich alumni and politicians on issues of free speech and institutional neutrality. Others have been critical because they believe her messaging and responses to Congress characterize a double standard in the treatment of minority populations and views. Everyone at Harvard agrees that plagiarism is a serious academic offense. As with any accusation of wrongdoing, the offense must be carefully considered and the evidence properly examined before judgment is passed. This is what happens, for example, when students are accused of misconduct at Harvard, and it is what has happened when prominent scholars at Harvard have been accused of plagiarism.

But none of this carefully considered judgment or debate around the merits of issues happened in the case of Gay. She was relentlessly targeted by politicians, rich alumni, and partisan media using her as a sacrifice in a larger political struggle and attacking her at every opportunity so that it became impossible for her to lead effectively. She was gone a mere six months into her presidency.

A mob is characterized by a lack of deliberation — instead a public outcry acts as judge, jury, and, sometimes, executioner. From the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, rarely does history look back kindly on the actions of a mob. Mob leaders gain their power because they manipulate genuine and often legitimate attitudes held by the public. We now look back at Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on universities and other American institutions as a disgraceful episode in American history, where a demagogue ruined the lives of innocent people because of their unpopular ideas or associations. But it is important to remember that McCarthy didn’t invent the ideas that he used to shamelessly attack professors — he harnessed a widespread panic about communism that was based in the very real conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Similarly, opportunistic politicians like Representative Elise Stefanik of New York and loud billionaires with large social media followings are harnessing genuine worries about antisemitism to attack universities for political or personal gain.

To a student of history, such mob-like attacks shouldn’t come as a surprise. The founders of the American constitutional system, looking back at past examples of mob rule, thought of them as almost inevitable, and anticipated that such problems could reach into even our most esteemed institutions. James Madison, in Federalist 55, said that “passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob…” Madison and others tried to design a government that guarded against these passions.

Harvard, as a symbol of detached elitism, is an easy target for these passions. Indeed, Harvard is often worthy of disdain. And, frankly, it is hard to defend Harvard from an angry public in this case because genuine plagiarism should be punished and because almost nobody will be satisfied with a nuanced institutional response to an issue like war in the Middle East, where people have deep attachments and legitimate worries. So why should anyone be concerned when the mob comes for the president of Harvard?

First, because the mob can silence legitimate debate and criticism. The United States is intimately involved in a war in which more than 23,000 people have been killed. Americans should be debating this war. At places like Harvard, where leaders are trained and influential people are found, all voices should be heard.

Second, attacks on universities are a symptom of the larger problem of global democratic decline. From Hungary and Poland to India, Turkey, Mexico, and Venezuela, autocratic leaders from both the left and right have been attacking universities, seeking to bring to heel what they view as sources of opposition. The attacks begin with populist diatribes against universities as elitist and teachers of dangerous ideologies, followed by threats, bullying, and, eventually, assaults on university independence: the replacement of universities’ leadership, the removal of “dangerous” professors, and new regulations on what may and may not be taught on campus. Prominent universities in India, Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere have been bullied into silence.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable to believe that Stefanik, who has allied herself with Donald Trump, an apologist for Nazis, has suddenly become concerned with antisemitism. Rather, for Stefanik, concerns about antisemitism are a way to harness resentment against elite institutions to advance a political agenda.

Harvard is an easy target for battles in the culture war that defines much of American politics because of its overwhelmingly liberal makeup. In fact, I agree with critics who have said Harvard is largely hostile to conservative political thought. But the danger of such attacks goes beyond Harvard.

One only need look at historical and recent examples of democratic decline to see that attacks on universities often precede the erasure of democratic liberties.

Regardless of where one stands politically, at a time when the value of American universities is under attack, we should recognize them as among our greatest national assets: emulated across the globe; responsible for our great advancements in science, medicine, arts; and tied to our national defense and the general education of our citizens living in a functioning democracy.

When politicians cynically exploit fears in order to harness a mob — especially easy in our modern times of social media and cable news outrage — and when these fears are used to attack universities, places where reason and slow debate are supposed to be the norm, we should all pause and try to resist these forces. The stakes are much greater than a single university president.

Ryan D. Enos is a professor of government and director of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University.

Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me.

Take heed to what President Gay says.

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.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This 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, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.

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. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.

Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. 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.

I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.

Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.

Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.

Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.

It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.

I still believe that. As I return to teaching and scholarship, I will continue to champion access and opportunity, and I will bring to my work the virtue I discussed in the speech I delivered at my presidential inauguration: courage. Because it is courage that has buoyed me throughout my career and it is courage that is needed to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.

Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.

College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them. (New York Times guest opinion piece).

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Trump is not the only insurrectionist.

Lawsuit Filed To Disqualify Rep. Scott Perry From The Ballot In Pennsylvania.

The lawsuit, which was filed on January 2 by Harrisburg-area activist and former congressional candidate Gene Stilp, calls for Pennsylvania’s Secretary of State Al Schmidt to remove Perry from the ballot ahead of the spring’s 10th Congressional District primary.

….

The lawsuit alleges Perry helped push conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen and advanced efforts to replace the Attorney General with a Trump loyalist.

“Scott Perry was a leading proponent of using the January 6, 2021 Congressional presidential election certification process to disrupt the transfer of presidential administration from Trump to Biden,” says the lawsuit, sighting the FBI’s seizure of Perry’s cellphone records and other accusations made against Perry following the January 6 attack.

WHO IS REP. SCOTT PERRY?

Rep. Scott Perry is a Republican member of the US House of Representatives who represents Pennsylvania’s 10th District. Perry has been a member of the House since 2013 and is currently the chair of the House Freedom Caucus.

REP. SCOTT PERRY IS THE ONE MEMBER OF CONGRESS WHO HAS BEEN LINKED TO THE COUP PLOT

As I wrote about Rep. Perry in PoliticusUSA’s newsletter, The Daily. “Rep. Perry is the one member of Congress who has been directly linked to the coup plot through activities that could not be covered up with the Speech and Debate Clause. Perry was actively working to get Jeffrey Clark named Attorney General by Trump so that Clark could use the Justice Department to overturn the 2020 election.”

Once the news broke that Jack Smith had Perry’s texts and Trump was disqualified from the ballot in Colorado, it was inevitable that voters in Pennsylvania would attempt to disqualify Rep. Perry. There is ample evidence that unlike other Republican members of Congress, Perry was openly working with the Trump White House to overturn the 2020 election.

It is unknown whether the lawsuit will be successful, but the legal action makes it clear that voters aren’t going to be allowed to forget about 1/6 and those who participated in Trump’s coup. (Jason Easley, PoliticusUSA)

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Let’s keep this Congressional seat in Michigan.

Democrats land 'top recruit' for one of their toughest House races.

State Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet declared Wednesday that she was running to succeed her fellow Michigan Democrat, Rep. Dan Kildee, in the swingy 8th Congressional District. This constituency, which is based in the Flint and Tri-Cities areas, favored Joe Biden by a small 50-48 spread in 2020.

The Detroit News writes that party strategists see McDonald Rivet "as a top recruit" they'd hoped to land in the wake of Kildee's surprise retirement in November. Last year, Democratic consultant Adrian Hemond described her to the Daily Beast as the type of "solidly center-left Democrat" who can "play nice" with the district's large Catholic electorate, adding, "In terms of people who have a track record of winning tough elections in this area, Kristen McDonald Rivet is probably top of the list."

McDonald Rivet, who worked in both state government and as a nonprofit leader before joining the Bay City Commission in 2019, did indeed survive a tough election in 2022, when she ran for an open seat in the state Senate.

According to Dave's Redistricting App, the 35th Senate District favored Biden 51-48, which is similar to the president's margin in Kildee's district. McDonald Rivet ultimately beat Republican state Rep. Annette Glenn 53-47, a win that helped give Democrats full control of state government for the first time since the mid-1980s. Her state Senate constituency also covers a little more than a third of the 8th Congressional District.

McDonald Rivet joins an Aug. 6 primary field that includes State Board of Education President Pamela Pugh and Dan Moilanen, the executive director of the Michigan Association of Conservation Districts. Other candidates may also get in ahead of the April 23 filing deadline, though former Flint Mayor Karen Weaver recently announced she would stay out of the Democratic contest.

The GOP primary remains a duel between two candidates who unsuccessfully ran for office in 2022: former Trump immigration official Paul Junge, who lost to Kildee 53-43, and Martin Blank, a Saginaw police officer who took fourth place against Glenn in the state Senate primary. (Daily Kos).

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Great way to start 2024.

Two large offshore wind sites are sending power to the U.S. grid for the first time.

For the first time in the United States, turbines are sending electricity to the grid from the sites of two large offshore wind farms.

The joint owners of the Vineyard Wind project, Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, announced Wednesday the first electricity from one turbine at what will be a 62-turbine wind farm 15 miles (24 kilometers) off the coast of Massachusetts.

Five turbines are installed there. One turbine delivered about 5 megawatts of power to the Massachusetts grid just before midnight Wednesday. The other four are undergoing testing and should be operating early this year.

Danish wind energy developer Ørsted and the utility Eversource announced last month that their first turbine was sending electricity from what will be a 12-turbine wind farm, South Fork Wind, 35 miles (56 kilometers) east of Montauk Point, New York. Now, a total of five turbines have been installed there too.

Hub peek embed (apf-technology) – Compressed layout (automatic embed)

Avangrid CEO Pedro Azagra said 2023 was a historic year for offshore wind with “steel in the water and people at work, and today, we begin a new chapter and welcome 2024 by delivering the first clean offshore wind power to the grid in Massachusetts.” Avangrid is an energy company headquartered in Orange, Connecticut. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is a large fund manager and global leader in renewable energy investments.

“We’ve arrived at a watershed moment for climate action in the U.S., and a dawn for the American offshore wind industry,” Azagra said in a statement Wednesday.

Nearly 200 countries agreed last month at COP28 to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels — the first time they’ve made that crucial pledge in decades of U.N. climate talks. The deal calls for tripling the use of renewable energy, and offshore wind will be crucial to meeting that target.

But the industry has had hard times recently. Developers have canceled several projects along the East Coast, saying they were no longer financially feasible.

On Wednesday, Equinor and BP announced a “reset” for Empire Wind 2, a 1,260-megawatt offshore wind project off the coast of New York, citing changed economic circumstances on an industry-wide scale. The project isn’t canceled, but it will take longer to continue the development and participate in a future offshore wind solicitation. They did not change the first phase of the project to develop an 800-megawatt wind farm in the same lease area, Empire Wind 1.

Large offshore wind farms have been making electricity for three decades in Europe, and more recently in Asia. Vineyard Wind was conceived as a way to launch offshore wind in the United States, and prove that the industry wasn’t dead in the United States at at time when many people thought it was.

The first U.S. offshore wind farm was supposed to be a project off the coast of Massachusetts known as Cape Wind. The application was submitted to the federal government in 2001. It failed after years of local opposition and litigation. Turbines began spinning off Rhode Island’s Block Island in 2016. But with just five of them, it’s not a commercial-scale wind farm.

Vineyard Wind submitted state and federal project plans to build an offshore wind farm in 2017. Massachusetts had committed to offshore wind by requiring its utilities to solicit proposals for up to 1,600 megawatts of offshore wind power by 2027.

Vineyard Wind would be significantly farther offshore than Cape Wind and the first utility-scale wind power development in federal waters.

In what might have been a fatal blow, federal regulators delayed Vineyard Wind by holding off on issuing a key environmental impact statement in 2019. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. William Keating said at the time the Trump administration was trying to stymie the renewable energy project just as it was coming to fruition.

The Biden administration signed off on it in 2021. Construction began onshore in Barnstable, Massachusetts. This spring, massive tower sections from Portugalarrived at the Port of New Bedford to be assembled out on the water.

New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell said Wednesday’s announcement is a “great way to kick off 2024.”

The 800-megawatt wind farm will power more than 400,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey said this is clean, affordable energy made possible by the many advocates, public servants, union workers and business leaders who worked for decades to accomplish this achievement. (Associated Press).

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