Within hours of my last post, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned under fire. I hoped for this first sign of national change, and it happened. Unfortunately, it’s a small step unless her successor brings real change.

Larry Summers, an ex-president of the school, is an obvious candidate. Forced out for noticing differences between men and women by a woke board, his reinstatement signals that the University is moving away from the soup it’s now in. However, he is unlikely to accept an offer from a Harvard Corporation (the Governing Board), composed of the same type of politically correct members that previously kicked him out.

So long as Penny Pritzker leads the corporation as the senior fellow, any reform candidate will unlikely accept the post. The Hyatt Hotel Heiress was behind Gay’s selection. She kept her in place for over a month in the face of the same horrible congressional testimony that caused the immediate ouster of the Brown president. The sister of progressive Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker is loyal to the policies of landing the University in its present fix.

These policies, such as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I.)” and “Critical Race Theory (C.R.T.),” are seen by many as responsible for the rise of anti-Semitism and other ills on the campus. Unless changed, the board can’t attract the needed change agent.  

The job is significant and essential because the rot in academia extends to the humanities and even to the hard sciences. Harvard does considerable research and provides much material to “relevant journals.” We now find out that things other than pure science affect the research in these digests.

Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krause recently looked at how bad the corrosion has become in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed. Like the Harvard motto, Veritas (truth), science’s goal is facts we can rely on without extraneous stuff getting in the way. Presently, in many academic fields, this is different. With things such as “Observing whiteness in introductory Physics” published in significant journals, one can only fear for our future progress.

To set the pace for academia, Harvard would need someone with a record of toughness bringing change. Larry Summers is a fine person but didn’t change Harvard as president. The recently retired Purdue President, Mitch Daniels, has a long record of effecting positive change wherever he’s been. Purdue, two-term Indiana governor, Cabinet member, or Eli Lilly C.E.O., Daniels has an unmatched success record. As a regular Washinton Post columnist, he has respect across the spectrum.

However, at 76, he may not want to spend his remaining years in a brutal academic battle. Harvard may find him hard to swallow with Princeton and Purdue on his resume. 

I want to offer a dark horse suggestion, John P.A. Ioannidis. The Stanford Professor of Medicine is a known campaigner against faulty research. The renowned researcher showed his intellectual chops and toughness when he came out early against the Covid lockdowns. Using sound principles, Ioannidiis and other Stanford stalwarts, Scott Atlas and Jay Batharcharria, pointed out how foolhardy it was to shut down the entire economy. Where people such as Dr. Fauci floundered into massive error, he calmly presented proper research to offer correct conclusions. 

With Dr. Ioannidis as Harvard President, everyone would know tolerating sloppy, fraudulent, or plagiarized work isn’t acceptable. With Harvard setting high standards and shaming them, other institutions and journals would be under pressure to follow.

I don’t know if he’d be interested, but the doctor would instantly regain lost respect. Given grudgingly from some areas, everyone knows Harvard’s direction. At least he isn’t an alum of a rival U.S. University. The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens is his Alma Mater. Look at him on YouTube and see the man yourself.

The New York Times, unfortunately, still shows no signs of reform. Instead of recognizing Claudine Gay embarrassed Harvard in her congressional testimony before a national audience and acknowledging she wasn’t up to the job, the paper attributed her fall to pressure eroding support.

 Blaming conservative activist Chris Rufo in an extensive opinion piece, Tressie McMillan Cottom Rufo coordinated with other conservatives in bringing down Gay. The author tells us that “nontraditional” university presidents are highly prized in modern universities. Their boards view them as market-friendly and business-savvy.” Really? We can all see how that worked out. Of course, working in mentions of race are mentions of race is a given.

Continuing the torching of any successful Republican Presidential candidate so a Democrat will face low-ceiling Trump, the Times featured economist Paul Krugman joined others in jumping on Nikki Haley’s failure to say Slavery caused the Civil War. Even if Haley’s reply is inarticulate, framing the cause of the Civil War differently than just saying Slavery might be enlightening. After all, people held as chattels have been around for thousands of years without any nation torn apart over it—the enslaved persons or peasants revolted, but nations or empires divided, no.

Why, then, did it happen in America in1861? Distorting history to make Slavery or serfdom a more recent construct muddies the water for this obvious question. Pointing out Russia freed its serfs at approximately the same time, Krugman tells us both serfdom and Black Slavery were relatively recent, beginning in the 16th century. I cover subsaharian Slavery at length in the series “The Long Journey to More.” Established centuries before the Portuguese and other Europeans became an option to ship people to the new world, adding to West African monarchs’ wealth, African Slavery was nothing new in the 16th century. 

Head-scratching is the idea of people as chattels arrived as serfdom in 16th-century Russia. Krugman cites M.I.T. economist Evsey Domar’s 1970 paper as the assertion’s source. This idea seemed strange, so I googled Wikipedia about both Slavery and serfdom in Russia and found Slavery had existed for centuries before the 16th and serfdom had occurred in Russia since the 12th century. 

Tieing labor to the land was a long process culminating in Peter the Great’s conversion of all enslaved people to serfs in 1723. Selling enslaved people for profit or settling debts could denude noble holdings of labor, making their holdings useless. The ruling class eliminated this option but hardly improved the lives of these people.

Hunting for anything to support your attack on someone you oppose rather than finding the truth goes against journalistic principles. If I could locate the facts in minutes, surely Nobel Prize winner Krugman or his Times editors could. Maybe they did, but they found it didn’t fit their narrative. The Times could use an Ioannides journalistic clone as publisher.

My theory for the timing of civil war is that the thousands-year-old agrarian societies clashed with the capitalistic industrial revolution. Slavery is just part of the challenged age-old agricultural society class or caste systems.

California has yet to make any reform moves but will now provide health insurance to undocumented immigrants. This move adds billions to a state facing a $68 billion deficit. Well, it least covers sex assignment surgery. The madness continues.

Oh well. Harvard may be the crack in the progressive dam, which may widen.