Harvard’s "Resounding Rebuke" of Trump’s Extortion Efforts Represents a Turning Point

Harvard University’s most recent decision to stand up against Trump’s criminal bullying serves as a crucial turning point in the fight against American fascism in this decade.  

By upholding the institutional integrity of America’s oldest and most prestigious center of learning, Harvard stands as a fortress of intellectual and moral freedom against the dark forces of hate, ignorance, and criminality that provide the rotted foundation of  MAGA’s home office in Washington.

As you join the growing resistance this coming Saturday in the ongoing war to save democracy in the United States, 

Be Harvard, not Columbia!

Harvard Re-Kindles Its Eugenics Past with Embrace of KIPP's Richard Barth

In the 1920s Harvard was a beehive of activity aimed at segregation and sterilization of those deemed mentally and socially defective, based principally on classist and racist assumptions about the poor and the those of different ethnic backgrounds.   One of the Eugenics Movement rock stars, Charles Davenport, was a graduate of Harvard and instrumental in assuring the forced castration of a number of Massachusetts boys during that era.

Today the castrations of boys and involuntary sterilization for girls is a thing of the past.  Instead, we have a new method now energetically embraced by the progressive and conservative elites from Harvard, UPenn, Yale, Stanford, and other former bastions of eugenics college instruction.  This new method is based on cultural and psychological sterilization of the children of the urban poor, whose defective character traits and anti-oppressor behaviors are being effectively neutralized in the total compliance segregated corporate reform schools that carry the label No Excuses.  The poster school chain for this neo-eugenics model is KIPP, and every stripe of billionaire and vulture philanthropist has given to this most recent solution to what was referred to as the "Negro problem" during the late 19th Century.

It is only fitting, then, that KIPP CEO and Harvard alum, Richard Barth, will be the Chief Marshall of the Harvard commencement exercises on May 29.

Here is an article from the Harvard Crimson from 2002 on Harvard's role in the social engineering debacle of eugenics.  How long will it take for highly educated folks to realize that KIPP represents Eugenics, the Sequel:

A recent article revealing that Massachusetts sterilized more than two dozen teenage boys in the 1920s has brought renewed attention to the role Harvard faculty played in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century.

It’s never been a secret that Harvard affiliates supported sterilization and restricted immigration during the ’20s as a way to help future generations achieve genetic perfection.

But the article in Boston Magazine showed for the first time that sterilization took place in Massachusetts, where state officials castrated teenage boys as part of a study in Shutesbury seeking to “promote sterilization, segregation, selective breeding and immigration restrictions.”

Sterilization laws existed in more than 30 states in the early 20th century, but not Massachusetts.

That’s why the Shutesbury study—evidence that Massachusetts was a “beehive of activity”—is significant, said Welling Savo, the author of the article, who spent over six months researching the topic.

According to her article, about 26 patients—many of them 14- and 15-year-old boys—were selected for sterilization because they were epileptic, socially “defective” or showed signs of regular masturbation or “solitary behavior.”

The article emphasized that Harvard was a major center for eugenic thought at the time. The head of the University’s anthropology department, Ernest Hooton, was a member of the American Eugenics Society, which remained active until the 1970s. The society’s advisory board included nine other Harvard faculty members and its vice president, Charles Davenport, was a Harvard-trained biologist.

The Harvard connections are significant because they indicate the legitimacy of the eugenic movement in the intellectual community, Savo said.

“Davenport was the leader and figurehead of the eugenics movement in the United States,” Savo said. “It was taught as part of over 300 science courses around the country.”

Hooton believed that all social problems had biological roots and that humans should be bred “for a better stock.” He called for “a sit-down reproductive strike of the busy breeders among the morons, criminals, and social ineffectuals of our population.”

Two of Davenport’s Harvard colleagues started the Immigration Restriction League with fellow eugenicists. The League persuaded Congress to impose literacy tests and other restrictions on immigration to weed out people they believed to be inferior.

Everett I. Mendelsohn, professor of the history of science, said members of the Harvard community were not exceptional in their interest in eugenics in the 1920s, although the movement began fading soon after.

“The interest in eugenics was widespread at the time but the practice was less widespread,” he said. “Most biologists, and even those benignly interested, consciously moved away from it when it was taken up by the Nazis.”

Mendelsohn, who published an article in Harvard Magazine in 2000 titled “The Eugenic Temptation,” said that scientists need to learn from the past before moving too fast in modern genetic technology.

“While the current work in human genetic engineering is not malign, there is little doubt that there is an interest in using genetics to correct behavior,” he said. “We need a deep social discussion of how to use genetic techniques.”

Christie Hogs Spotlight at a Very Friendly Harvard GSE

The same day that the Globe was telling the story of 50 Harvard doctoral students protesting the takeover of the Graduate School of Education by technocrats, economists, and other corporate water carriers for the Oligarchs, the School warmly welcomed the nation's most morbidly obese bully governor to belch his rapacious poison against his own teachers, who until now, have helped New Jersey attain top five status in terms of NAEP results.  But all that matters not a whit, as New Jersey's militantly-ignorant governor has made clear through his first fumbling Secretary of Education, Mr. Schundler, who said publicly that NAEP scores were irrelevant.

Since that utterance, we have come to understand the profound honesty of those fool remarks, for NAEP results or nothing else matters in the continuing assault by the corporate Borg, of which Christie is a supersized chunk, an assault on collective bargaining and on the teaching profession.  Christie is the doublewide poster boy for the utter bankruptcy of the low achievement excuse that has been used for the corporate takeover of schools in the past.

Urban America is in the cross-hairs of the Oligarchs, and a hostile corporate occupation is underway in the takeover of schools and the subjugation and containment of urban children in total compliance apartheid KIPP-notizing camps. This is the new eugenics, wherein reproductive sterilization has been replaced by a more nuanced psychological sterilization that leaves children as compliant as Seligman's dogs under the spell of his learned helplessness experiments.

The Mammoth One (photo by Erik Jacobs, NYTimes) did make news yesterday, although it was not news to anyone who knows of the Oligarchs' hostility to publicly-elected school boards (see Arne Duncan).

He [Christie] broke some new ground in saying that he planned to change New Jersey’s system of elected local school boards, though he did not say how. . . .

“They’ll be the next step,” he said. “Even for me there’s just so much you can swallow at one time.”

Hard to believe, indeed.  But we all have confidence in your appetite, Sir--if nothing else.

Harvard's Ed Doctoral Students Protest Dumping of Social Justice Scholar

When Gary Orfield moved the Civil Rights Project from Harvard to UCLA, that move acknowledged a major shift that had been going on for a long time at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.  Simply put, Harvard's GSE is more aligned today with William Bennett than Harvard alum, William James. 

I congratulate the brave doctoral students who have begun an increasingly vocal protest to call for a return to research on social concerns at Harvard, rather than a laser focus on economic ones.  Doctoral students are also calling for a return to human research using qualitative methods rather than the abstracted empiricism used to dote on the dumbest of data, test scores.  But even more troubling to future scholars at Harvard is the dumping of scholars committed to social justice research agendas.  The latest denial of tenure to Mark Warren was the final straw for doctoral students.

Below is my letter to the Globe reporter, Tracy Jan:

Tracy,

As someone who almost never reads the Globe because it represents the print media version of Harvard's anti-people, anti-public, pro-corporate grad school of education, I have to offer a big thanks to you for your piece today on the doctoral student protests at Harvard regarding the recent refusal of tenure by a noted social justice scholar.  When a friend sent me just the link to the story, I clicked on it thinking that I would see another tribute to education as decided by Oligarchs like Gates and Broad and the Waltons. 

Your piece, however, begins to lay bear some of the dangerous and damaging threats to our democratic aspirations that have reached into the highest levels of organized education--Harvard.  This transition from equity to aggrandizement has been underway for some time, with a number of high-profile professors always at the ready to put the Harvard rubber stamp on the U. S. Chamber of Horror's plans for K-12 education.  We can go all the way back to ideologue, Paul Peterson, whose voucher research (cooked, as it turned out) was used in earlier days to push for school vouchers.  And it still shows up on some reading lists, even though it was properly discredited by real scholars.

The systemic nature of the education takeover by economists and other forms of efficiency zealotry is well underway at Harvard and elsewhere, and this quote from your story says it all--an economist in charge of studying inequality:

In the Graduate School of Education, only about 20 percent of faculty receive tenure, a figure the school is trying to improve through better mentoring, said Bridget Terry Long, a Harvard economist who studies inequality in college access.

Now if you really want to move to a related story, check out the DESE plan to judge the quality of our K-12 teachers on test scores.  You will find all sorts of Harvard connections, from the GSE to the Business School and back again.  . . . . . Try to find something in the Globe about it.  Other than stories that read like press releases from the Boston Foundation, you won't find much.

Thanks again and keep up the good work.

Calling Out Harvard's Graduate School of Education

Below is an open letter from three classroom teachers to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which has justly earned its current reputation as institutionally allied with the anti-democratic, corporate deformation of public schools and the continued undermining of public education in general. (ht to Monty Neill)

AN OPEN LETTER
TO THE ADMINISTRATION & FACULTY
OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
- JANUARY 4, 2010 -
THREE CLASSROOM TEACHERS ASK YOU TO SPEAK OUT

The Harvard Graduate School of Education pursues the goal of training leaders in the field, and will soon offer a new degree in educational leadership. The school's website mission statement reads as follows:

Mission
To prepare leaders in education and to generate knowledge to improve student opportunity, achievement, and success.

Overview
Education touches every aspect of human activity. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), we believe studying and improving the enterprise of education are central to the health and future of society.

Since its founding in 1920, the Ed School has been training leaders to transform education in the United States and around the globe. Today, our faculty, students, and alumni are studying and solving the most critical challenges facing education: student assessment, the achievement gap, urban education, and teacher shortages, to name just a few. Our work is shaping how people teach, learn, and lead in schools and colleges as well as in after-school programs, high-tech companies, and international organizations. The HGSE community is pushing the frontiers of education, and the effects of our entrepreneurship are improving the world.

As veteran public school teachers, we are disappointed that the HGSE has not shown the leadership it professes by speaking out against the unprecedented attack on public education. To be sure, there have been courageous voices on your faculty who have defended public schools and the endangered idea of educating the whole child. We know that a thoughtful faculty does not think with one mind, and that there will always be differences about what constitutes the most effective pedagogies or curricula. But we have not heard the HGSE as an institution speak out on issues fundamental to the educational well-being of children and their schools.

These issues include:

• The over-testing of students, beginning as early as 3rd grade, and the misuse of single, imperfect high- stakes standardized assessment instruments like MCAS;

• The expansion of charters through funding formulas that divert resources from those urban and rural public schools charged with educating our most challenged children;

• The stripping away of art, music, critical thinking, creativity, experiential learning, trips, and play periods-of joy itself-from schools so that they might become more effective test preparation centers;

• The use of state curriculum frameworks-and soon, possibly, national standards -to narrow and standardize our schools, an effort that only encourages increasing numbers of affluent middle class parents to seek out for their children the same private schools that so many "reformers" have already chosen for theirs;

• The cynical insistence that all schools be equal in a society whose social and economic policies make us increasingly unequal;

• Merit pay proposals that deny and undermine the essentially collaborative nature of teaching;

• And finally, the sustained media vilification of hard-working, dedicated public school teachers.

These depressing developments have intensified over the past fifteen years. They violate the first principles of humane and progressive education, as we understand them.

We are proud to have served as teachers in the commonwealth where public education began a century before the country itself was founded and where Horace Mann reinvented it a century and a half ago. We have many wonderful public schools in Massachusetts that can serve as models for all schools. No child in our state deserves any less. Certainly all deserve more than a parched vision of standardization and incessant testing. A global economy demands more than multiple-choice thinking. Most importantly, human beings require more.

HGSE administration and faculty, we need you to speak out in defense of our public system of education and against abuses that have been allowed to pass silently as reforms. We need you to remind our leaders, administrators, parents and students-all of us-what it means to be educated.

As young teachers, we were inspired by the words of John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Joseph Featherstone, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Friere. Later, we would read the works of Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Ted Sizer, and Jonathan Kozol. These were powerful voices to encounter. Now we need to hear your voice.

The time for Veritas is now.

Thank you.

Larry Aaronson, Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, 37 years (retired)
Teacher of the Year (Class of 2007)
Recipient, Key to the City of Cambridge for "Outstanding Service" (Mayor)
Recipient, Special Cambridge City Council Citation
Mentor, Student teachers from the HGSE, 1985-2005

Ann O'Halloran, Boston & Newton Public Schools, 30 years (retired)
Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2007 (DOE)
Finalist, National History Teacher of Year, 2007
Honorable Mention, Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2006 (DOE)
Friend of Education, 2009 (Newton Teachers Association)


Bill Schechter, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, 35 years (retired)
METCO Recognition Awards, 2001-2005 (L-S METCO Program
"Outstanding Educator" Award, 2002 (Cornell University)
Faculty Recognition Award (Class of 1992)
Finalist, Lucretia Mott Award, 1986 (DOE)
Horace Mann Grant, 1984 (DOE)

larindge@aol.com

ohalloran.ann@verizon.net

schech@rcn.com