The Rich Zeoli Show- Hour 2:

• Last week, Harvard University President Claudine Gay testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee. During one noteworthy exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Gay refused to say anti-Semitic speech was violative of the school’s code of conduct—arguing that Harvard is an ardent supporter of free speech. In 2020, Rep. Stefanik was appointed to a Senior Advisory position with the Harvard Institute of Politics—however, because she was a vocal supporter of Donald Trump during the 2020 election, the student body protested the appointment and Harvard ultimately fired her. So, the notion that Harvard is an ardent supporter of free speech is flawed—they seem to only support speech provided it gels with the popular progressive opinions of the moment. Caleb Howe of Mediaite writes that “the Harvard Corporation, one of the two boards governing the Ivy League school, will meet Monday” to determine whether Gay should retain her position as university president.” You can read more here: https://www.mediaite.com/news/harvard-boards-reportedly-weighing-claudine-gays-mishandling-against-letting-elise-stefanik-win/
• On this weekend’s episode of Real Time, host Bill Maher grilled university administrators for their selective support of freedom of speech. Has the creation of a revolving door between government and education impacted free thought and expression on college campuses? Has it generated a dangerous form of “group think” in which government officials leave the private sector, attain professorships, and push their agenda on the malleable minds of college students? For example, Penny Pritzker is the leader of the Harvard Corporation—she also served as the Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration.
• In his latest piece at The Free Press, Stanford University Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson writes, “In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—'The Treason of the Intellectuals’—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics. Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe. A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.” You can read the full article here: https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich