The Reject's Revenge: Why I'm Rooting For The Asians In The Harvard Case
Abolish Chisrael by making it even more Chisraeli! And then press the endowments into the service of the state
“Oh, Charles, our people don’t go to Harvard anymore,” the old WASP in front of me at the dinner party said. “They go to Middlebury, Amherst, to Williams, to UVa, to Bowdoin. The Ivy League is for the Jews and the Chinese.”
Whenever I meet someone who attended Harvard, I usually say, “I promise I won’t hold that against you.” It’s meant as a joke but I’m not joking and it makes for awkward moments. I’m also lying. Yes, I will hold you going to Harvard against you, especially if I judge you not so bright, which let’s face it, you probably aren’t.
“Harvard Hates America,” said the title of a book I once read, and I, belonging to America, hate it right back. Fortunately I’m joined in my enmity by President Joe Biden, a University of Delaware alum, who has no patience for their nonsense. Stick to ‘em Joe.
Once upon a time Harvard belonged to America but that was long ago.
Yes, it was the first higher education institution in America. Yes, it is still the crown Jewel for educational standards in culture. And yes, Harvard still has the most alums in Congress and Senate. How’s that working out for you?
But for all Lizzy Warren’s braying about the “rich” not paying their fair share, charity begins at home. She wouldn’t dare take on the higher education lobby which dominates my native state of Massachusetts. I believed the propaganda and tried, tried, tried to go to the so-called elite schools but, I, too white and too middle class, didn’t quite make the cut despite superior grades and test scores from my browner, blacker, richer peers.
Am I bitter? No. Not all. Had I gone to Harvard, I suspect that I, too, would have become an enemy of America. That’s what that place does to you. I might have even joined the Federalist Society and gone to law school. After the financial crisis I settled for the school which gave me the most money — Claremont McKenna College, which, I am informed gives you the best return on investment for your education according to Fortune Magazine. As if that really matters.
Now to be fair to Harvard Law Professor turned U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, she lied about being a Native American because she, too, understood, at least on some level, the importance of scamming her way into the elite schools which are themselves a scam. She’s from Oklahoma, after all, bless her heart — something she tried to hide and I delight in bringing up. Rather than admit that she scammed the colleges, she tried to out woke-ify them by talking all about the Latinx. OK boomer. It didn’t work and she’s not really a serious player now. What is it about hating the game and not the player?
Anyway, I’ve long called for taxing the endowments of the colleges, institutions which I find totally opposed to the real American meritocracy. Indeed the things we want most are the things that supposedly progressive institutions are blocking are every turn. Did you know, for example, that Yale, of all places, is invested in that scam website Coinbase and the corrupt venture firm Andreessen Horowitz?
If Harvard’s endowment is over $50 billion no one should have to pay tuition. They could make Harvard free and that’s indeed what my friend and genius/gadfly Ron Unz tried to do in his quixotic bid to run for the board of Harvard Overseers. He failed, of course.
But that’s not how it works out. That’s because Harvard may be “need blind” but it is certainly not “wealth blind.” In fact The Boston Globe reports how Harvard’s well-off students outnumber low-income students by a whopping ratio of 23 to 1!
Americans support the generous tax carve outs that these hedge funds with schools attached enjoy. If Americans knew how rigged the admissions process is against them, perhaps that’d cut off the spigot of federal largesse.
Though Harvard is not accused by the DOJ of colluding with its peer institutions of rigging the financial aid packages offered to some of America’s poorest and middle class students, they had no problem taking a multi-million bribe paid by the Kushner family — stolen, of course from their investors. Kushner got access to all the right places and has now written a book after getting paid off by the Saudis and the Emiratis. Do you think when Kushner was flying around with MBS they were discussing how to Make America Great Again?
So, yes, I am looking forward to a bunch of Harvard and Yale Law alumni — only Amy Coney Barrett attended the non-Ivy Notre Dame Law School — getting rid of racial preferences at elite colleges.
Sure, they’ll be some cheating at the margin — there always is this is after all Harvard— but a lot of these colleges will become a lot more Asian and that suits me just fine.
One of the ways to limit the power of a lot of cultural institutions is to make them so Asian that they don’t matter anymore. It happened to Berkeley. It happened in Silicon Valley. It happened to CalTech and, I suspect, it’ll happen to the Ivy League, especially Chisraeli U — Harvard University. And I, well, I simply can’t wait. Call it The Reject’s Revenge.
A world in which the Ivy League is not so powerful anymore makes it way easier to pass laws reforming their endowments, like, say, requiring them to dispense up to five percent of their endowment like foundations do which would, in turn, put a lot of attention on how the colleges actually manage the billions upon billions of dollars to which they have been entrusted.
Daniel Golden discusses in his book, The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges - and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates (2005), how the higher education lobby used its college alumni networks to kill that proposal back in the early 2000s.
I hope Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (full disclosure: I am a donor) when he’s considering laws reforming how the endowments are doled out, addresses this very issue.
Perhaps he might also consider creating a system where those of us fund managers who want to be a part of the solution can be part of the solution.
I’ve often thought about managing money under a no fee, no carry basis for large funds for historically disadvantaged groups like Blacks, Native Americans, and the Scotts-Irish. (I’d feel a lot more comfortable, say, in managing Native American money if it weren’t put back into casinos or weird land deals.)
It’s not enough to force the endowments to divest from fossil fuels; they should also propose new, better places for that money to flow, rather than our Ponzi scheme Silicon Valley economics.
It’s time for dirigiste policies for these rather large financial flows.
As Harvard (and other schools) become more Asian those people who have been coasting on the Harvard brand — read: nearly all of the elite GOPers and all of the Democrats — will see the value of their degrees diminish. Good. America has no titles of nobility here. Not even for Harvard men. Our president — let me repeat myself — went to the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law. Deal with it.
I should admit that I was hook, line and sinker indoctrinated in this all of this nonsense but I grew out of the cult.
My father (Class of ‘75) and uncle (class of ~‘62) went to Harvard but the Harvard that they went to really doesn’t exist anymore if it ever did.
I suspect we way over weight the degree to which Harvard or the rest of Ivy League really matters anymore. It feels very GenX to care this much. Millennials, particularly high achieving ones, know full well that the game is rigged, particularly if you are white, bright, and male.
The good news is that I don't see any real evidence from my peers that a Harvard degree confers many benefits, if any, on your life. Unless you want to be a criminal. Or a congressman or both. See generally Elise Stefanik who looks like every woman from upstate.
I went to an elite prep school where a number of the students went to Harvard and to the Ivy League generally. None of them have really done anything of value with their lives. What's more I'm hard pressed to think of anyone in the last few years who I know who went to Harvard who is doing anything cool.
We were the first class to go to college during the financial crisis. I was straight up told that as I would need financial aid, I shouldn’t even bother applying to many of the schools I applied to. Their endowments, I was told, took a huge hit during the ‘07-08 crisis and I, too white and too middle class, wasn’t target demo.
America was bailed out by China to the tune of a $800B or so at the time, so I suspect that that time is when Harvard became Chinese and with it, Chisraeli. My view now is to finish the job. Let’s stop pretending that Harvard is a WASP institution and make it as Chinese or Jewish as they want. Call it the U.C. Berkeley of the East or, if you will, the more expensive New School.
The financial crisis was also the moment when Facebook began to really take off and where people had seemingly infinite time to talk to each other online about how elite they were.
Jim Breyers invested before Peter Thiel in Facebook and Breyers was a Harvard Business School grad who married Elaine Chao’s sister, Angela. Elaine Chao is also a Harvard Business School grad.
And let’s not forget that Harvard gave us Sheryl Sandberg (Larry Summers’s mistress!) and Mark Zuckerberg.
Do we even need to go there with Larry Summers and all of his corrupt dealings in Russia with Jewish-Russian oligarchs? Or how Summers got $115 million offered to him from the Chisraeli billionaire Larry Ellison before it was withdrawn?
Okay, fine, I’ll just post the photos of him with Jeffrey Epstein. It was Summers who gave Epstein his own office.
Can’t we do better?
Ditto. No sympathy for any of these schools. The only benefit to attending one of these places is to see for yourself how corrupt they really are. It's not necessarily true that you don't meet any interesting people there. There are some and you can identify them pretty easily. They're the ones who've stopped caring. Everyone else is just a "little box on the hillside":
And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same