Breitbart News Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak joined the newsmaker line on Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to share insights into the troubling state of his alma mater, Harvard University.
The veteran journalist and Harvard Law School graduate highlighted the rise of antisemitism on campus and traced the university’s decline, noting that it was former President Drew Faust who emphasized a thin record of slavery over Harvard’s significant contributions to the abolitionist cause and civil rights movement.
The 387-year-old institution’s rapid shift to prioritize social justice and the erosion of free speech, Pollak suggested, has indelibly marred Harvard’s reputation as a symbol of excellence.
TRANSCRIPT
Michael Patrick Leahy: And welcome back. 12:05 p.m; broadcasting live from our studios in downtown Nashville. In-studio, the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael; on our newsmaker line, my very good friend for many years, editor-at-large at Breitbart, Mr. Joel Pollak.
Joel, thanks so much for joining us today.
Joel Pollak: Great to be with you.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Joel, you and I have known each other for a long time.
I was writing at Breitbart way back in 2009. You were one of the early editors of Breitbart. It’s been, what, 15 years since you’ve been working at Breitbart?
Joel Pollak: It will be 14 years in March, I think. Now I’m thinking about it, 13 years.
Michael Patrick Leahy: 13 years. Well, a long time. And one of the most influential writers in the country on conservative issues.
You and I share an alma mater – Harvard College.
Joel Pollak: My – oh, no, no, no.
You went to Harvard. I went to a different school.
Well, I can’t remember where I went.
I think you went to Harvard, but you may have gone there.
But I went somewhere else.
I think I went to HarVARD. It’s a little bit different. I mean, you’re probably thinking about Harvard – that’s the one that’s ultra-woke and terrible.
I went to HarVARD.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Well done; well done, Joel. I just have to say my first years at Harvard were fantastic because it was so much fun. So many smart people there, but that was long ago. I was, you know, class of ’77 and you know, in the paleolithic era.
You are a more recent graduate of HarVARD, but, but there is terrible, terrible antisemitism on campus at Harvard. You’ve written about that.
Tell us where that stands right now. President Claudine Gay refused to condemn calls for genocide, and of course, she’s involved in some plagiarism charges as well.
What’s your take on all this?
Joel Pollak: Well, there’s always been that kind of antisemitism on campus, and it’s been focused on the Israel issue, but the number of students involved was so small, and the ideas they held were so marginal that they were completely ignored, and there was no reason to notice them.
When I was at law school there, there was a professor who claimed that Harvard was suppressing anti Israel views on campus. And it was a joke because whenever you wanted to debate his views, he would back away. He actually wanted to privilege the anti-Israel views. He didn’t want them to be judged like every other idea, which is based on the truth or falsity of that idea.
He wanted to privilege his false ideas, his made-up history, so that it couldn’t be challenged. So it was kind of a joke. That was as recently as about 15 years ago.
But there was a new sheriff in town with Drew Faust, who was not the previous president of Harvard, but two prior to this one, and she happened to be president during the Black Lives Matter era.
Now, Drew Faust is a Civil War historian, but instead of highlighting the positive contributions that Harvard – or HarVARD, if I can say that – instead of highlighting the positive contributions that had been made by the university to the Civil War, to the abolitionist cause to the civil rights movement and all that.
She decided to emphasize the very, very thin record of slavery at Harvard. Slavery was allowed in Massachusetts in the early days of the colony. It was then banned fairly early as well.
But if you look at that early period. There were a handful of slaves that worked in or around Harvard Yard and so forth, and she accepted the ridiculous premise of the Black Lives Matter movement that this, therefore, established the legacy of slavery at Harvard – that this had somehow defined the institution rather than the hundreds of Harvard students who had bled and died for the abolitionist cause. And that’s when the rot really began to set in because radical protesters became emboldened.
Over at Yale, the era of cry-bullies began around that same time, around 2015, when students violently protested – or rioted really – against some deans who allowed Native American Halloween costumes. I don’t know if you remember that, but there was a huge ruckus at Yale over culturally appropriating or culturally insensitive Halloween costumes.
And that occurred at the same time as Black Lives Matter. It also occurred when students at southern universities started toppling Confederate statues.
Then you had Trump, and with Trump, a lot of these students were actually encouraged by faculty members to become more radical, which they did. And there were more and more vociferous protests.
At the same time, you had Affirmative Action in place, which was aimed at diversifying the student body. Some of the beneficiaries of those policies included – I believe anyway – the first-generation children of Muslim and Arab immigrants to this country who began to grow in number at Harvard and other campuses and to make their presence known by advocating for the Palestinian cause, which throughout the Arab and Muslim diaspora has been a favored cause among first- and second-generation immigrants. It’s something that people identify with.
It’s a way of being in the West, but against the West to advocate for this cause. That is to say, nothing else you do in your life has anything to do with being Arab or Muslim. But this is the one way you identify.
In fact, some of the most vociferous advocates for the Palestinian cause when I was there at Harvard Law School were gay Palestinians who never would have been tolerated in the West Bank or Gaza, but found a safe refuge at Harvard from which they could be as pro-Palestinian as they wanted to be.
So you have a growing number of students from that background; you have the increasing wokeness of the faculty; the complete cowardice of administrators in the face of ridiculous and violent behavior by students from the Black Lives Matter movement and identity politics – and it’s all created this toxic brew in which the very best that can be said is there’s a complete indifference to the Jewish lives that were lost, to the Jewish victims of torture and rape at the hands of a genocidal, radical Islamist terrorist organization.
And then you had the 35 or so Harvard student groups who signed a statement hours after the October 7th attack, blaming Israel for the attack, saying that it was the Israeli “occupation” that was responsible.
If you look at the details of the atrocities that Hamas carried out – and I’ve been to many of the communities in Israel now. I’ve been back to Israel twice since the war began. I’d gone two weeks before the war to write about the Abraham Accords, which remain in place and are a serious effort at peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
But I went back twice during the war and I visited the communities. And you look at the horrific behavior of Hamas – the way they mutilated their victims, the way they sometimes killed entire families, burned people alive – and for Harvard students to have the lack of moral judgment to blame Israel for that, to confuse the right and wrong of the situation entirely, it was just shocking.
And what Harvard’s administration did is instead of rebuking the students, they said, we’re going to let the students say what they want. It’s a matter of free speech. Harvard’s own statement on October 7th was rather wishy-washy.
This is an administration that hasn’t really cared very much about free speech. They’ve canceled conservative speakers. They recently fired a dean who legally represented Harvey Weinstein.
You might not like Harvey Weinstein. I don’t like Harvey Weinstein, but there’s a principle that Harvard long stood for, at least in the legal sense, at least at the law school, that even the worst criminal deserves the best defense.
After all, many proud graduates of Harvard and other Ivy League schools have defended terrorists in American courts in Guantanamo Bay. They do pro bono work. They do it for free. It’s a great, wonderful, altruistic activity, and they put it on their resume that they’ve defended terrorists.
So if you can defend terrorists, why can’t you defend Harvey Weinstein?
And nevertheless, the Harvard administration made sure that he was out of there because the students said that they felt unsafe while this resident dean, who happens to be African American, was there and was the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein. Harvard became increasingly intolerant of speech and intolerant of the exercise of other rights, like the Sixth Amendment, right to counsel, and so forth.
So to have them standing up and saying, well, we are not going to comment on what these groups are doing or sanction them in any way for advocating for terror, essentially.
Harvard has done more to try to protect those students and those student groups from criticism than it has to protect the Jewish students on campus who now found themselves having to go to class through a phalanx of anti-Israel protesters, and if they get to class, the class is interrupted by people breaking the rules, interrupting the class, calling on everyone in the class to go to a protest. There’s nothing that’s done to these students. I think there are four students who were disruptive in class who are now being subjected to some sort of administrative procedure.
But generally, Harvard’s not enforcing the rules.
Michael Patrick Leahy: We have about a minute left, Joel.
Can Harvard be saved, or is it lost forever?
Joel Pollak: It is lost. Harvard is lost.
It will still be important to the people who think it’s important. But it is no longer synonymous with excellence, and America understands that now.
The fact that they retained Claudine Gay after she mishandled this crisis as president of Harvard and after plagiarism allegations against her.
It means that Harvard is trying to be the best social justice university, but that’s different than being the best university.
Michael Patrick Leahy: Exactly. Joel Pollack, my good friend, editor-at-large at Breitbart.
I agree with you. I think Harvard is lost.
Joel, thanks for joining us today.
Joel Pollak: Thank you.
Michael Patrick Leahy: We’ll have more when we get back.
This is The Tennessee Star Report. I’m Michael Patrick Leahy.
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Listen to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy weekdays from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm on WENO AM760 The Flame.
Photo “Joel Pollak” by Joel Pollak. Background Photo “University of Harvard Campus” by Joseph Williams. CC BY 2.0.
