Below is my column in the Hill on the hypocrisy of Harvard in yet another controversy involving a resident house dean. Gregory Davis is accused of hateful, racist messages, but, so far, it is not viewed as “untenable” by the university. His rage is righteous in the view of many.
Here is the column:
Gregory Davis is really sorry for the “disruption.” For a Harvard resident dean, one would think that he was referencing a malfunctioning fire alarm, not years of racist, hateful messages.
It is akin to Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger (D) referring to the “poor choice” of words of her endorsed candidate for attorney general, Jay Jones, when he said that he wanted to kill his political opponents and their children.
These figures reflect the cynical calculation that apologies are just background music in an age of rage — heard but not really registered.
Davis personifies the unblinking hypocrisy of Harvard. For several months, Harvard faculty have been portraying themselves as victims of political intolerance after the Trump administration sought to force the university to restore intellectual diversity in its departments. The same faculty that spent years purging conservatives and dissenters from their school hyperventilated at the notion that anyone else should object to ideological conformity.
For the record, I opposed measures directed at Harvard as inimical to free speech and academic freedom. Harvard has long been an example of the destruction of higher education in America and the lowering of academic standards to achieve far-left policies. However, Harvard is hardly worthy of sympathy, but it is not worth sacrificing the core principles of free speech to go after it.
So far, there is nothing “untenable” about House Dean Davis, who has encouraged hatred toward police, spewed racist viewpoints, and shrugged off the possible deaths of conservatives.
After President Trump contracted COVID-19 in 2020, Davis reportedly wrote, “F— that guy” and added, “I don’t — at all — blame people wishing Trump ill.” He later reposted the gif from Rocky IV where Ivan Drago says, “If he dies, he dies.”
Critics have unearthed a long string of such unhinged, violent and hateful postings by Davis. He has responded with an effective shrug, insisting that his comments were “made on social media prior to my start in the Resident Dean role.” Some have challenged that claim as a lie, insisting that his call for people to “hate police” came when he was the Interim Resident Dean of Dunster House.
Even if these statements were made entirely before Harvard selected him, they would still be damning. This was not a case where a faculty member or a house dean revealed himself as an extremist after tenure or appointment. Davis never hid his radicalism. Indeed, for Harvard, it might have been part of his attraction.
Not long before his appointment, Davis suggested that “Whiteness is a self-destructive ideology that annihilates everyone around it. By design.” As a professor of critical race theory at UCLA and “gender identity law” at Southwestern Law School, Davis has helped fuel race-based anger against conservatives and police. He has written that everyone “should ask your cop friends to quit since they’re racist and evil.” In another post, he explained how “Rioting and looting are parts of democracy just like voting and marching.”
Davis encouraged students who are “Black or otherwise of color, queer, neurodivergent (ADHD), first-generation, a public high school graduate, from a low-income background, or from urban areas” to reach out to him for advice.
Like many radicals exposed for hateful comments, Davis deleted his postings and offered a perfunctory apology. It is the type of “check-the-box” apology that is now so common. Liberals like Zohran Mamdani spent years denouncing the law enforcement and calling for defunding of police, only to offer the same shrugged apologies when he ran for mayor. None of their radical supporters believes the apology any more than their critics. The key is that it was made, and the media can now move on without causing real damage.
Davis describes himself on the school website as “a Black, queer, neurodivergent (ADHD), first-generation, public school graduate from Detroit.” He encourages students, therefore, to “feel comfortable showing off [their] whole self with [him].” That hardly seems an inviting prospect if you are one of those “evil” people who want to go into law enforcement or one of those whose deaths appear to be of little concern to him.
Still, Davis has little to fear. He hates the right groups. His rage is not dangerous but righteous.
After all, he did not offer representation to any unpopular defendant. At Harvard, that would be “untenable.”
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of the bestselling book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Harvard has been on my “Mo Hire List” for decades. Harvard graduates need not apply.
Professor Turley: For the record, I opposed measures directed at Harvard as inimical to free speech and academic freedom.
For the record, as an American taxpayer, if you want to fund the anti-Semitic, misogynist and racist policies of Harvard’s Democrats to showcase your complete support of the First Amendment to all legal extremes, then you can pull out your checkbook and do it yourself, Professor Turley.
The right for your fellow Democrats at Harvard to engage in that vile, disgusting, poisonous behavior does indeed exist. However, they do not have an accompanying right to continue getting federal taxpayer funding while doing so. Like elections, choices of what free speech and other actions to engage in also have consequences.
Check your theoretical academic elitistism at the door Professor Turley. Use your wallet to replace the American taxpayers funding Harvard’s version of what is First Amendment free speech.
Totally right! Here’s the problem: no one’s been hanged since 11/22/63….
60 BILLION DOLLAR ENDOWMENT talks.
Here are three of the most important functions of a Resident House Dean:
1) Academic advising
As practiced by “Whiteness is a self-destructive ideology” Davis: You sure you want to take that racist course on American history? Take instead this ethnic studies course. You’ll be enlightened by the anti-racist 1619 Project.
2) Personal support
Davis’ interpretation: Your parents voted for Trump?! Write them off. Don’t go home for the holidays. But demand that they keep sending you money.
3) Community Building among the students
Davis’ take: You with the MAGA hat. Walk the line of shame, as the rest of us jeer at and spit on you.
CRT1619 is obama’s and eric holder’s “mein kampf”.
All of this, rhetoric and all, is exposing the radical left for what they are: murderous commies trying to take over the old democrat party.
Communists will call themselves anything except a communist.
Democratic Socialist if you’re ‘nice’ commie-lite, and if you’re already at the murderous commie stage, you’ve got antifa.
That’s why commies like murder and violence so much, it ‘works’ for them.
Well nice try commie, no sale.
Communism cannot be fully instilled here as long as there are any that oppose it and our constitution stands.
Sorry commie! USA is immune to it.
WOW living in a dem run city can be bad for your health
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Challenged on Chicago’s sanctuary city policies in relation to a horrific rape committed by an illegal alien recently, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (D) condescendingly said, “Let’s move on.”
I love it. All this noise about a building that no-one really cares about!
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Notably, the East Wing is not part of the iconic White House Executive Residence, but a fairly unremarkable outbuilding, dating in its current form to the 1940s, when it was rebuilt to hide the parallel construction of a bunker for the late President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Fools… you goofed again.
Original construction was 1902 by Teddy Roosevelt. I’ve monitored “news” reports on this question and have yet to find one that correctly reported these basic facts. Grok AI got it right though. Hopefully Elon’s Grokpedia will make some headway at Wiki is frequently the “lie of omission” so pervasive now in “higher ed” it nearly defines it.
Diversity (e.g. racism, sexism, etc). And DEIsm (i.e. institutional, systemic Diversity). #HateLovesAbortion
Why are homosexuals and politically congruent (“=”) socially distancing from simulants?
Someone should make an AI video of God pooping on Trump.
Nope, just on you. Yet the left really loves murder even more.
I pity you people
Should be God pooping on Harvard and YOU!
Should unfair people be punished for being unfair?
The transgendered just want to pursue happiness as stated in the Declaration of Independence, that most holy of founding documents. Does this ad hoc committee of curmudgeons, AKA the Turlely blog, get to decide how everyone can pursue happiness, or should people decide for themselves as rugged individuals?
And you Anonymous want to pursue happiness with children. Indeed, who has the right to keep you from finding your excitement with the kiddies. You should be careful. They might take your typing rights away and you might have to sit in your cell with nothing to do.
Pedophilia etc are sexual orientations legal under Democratic law under the Pro-Choice religion in progressive sects. #NoJudgment #NoLabels #LoveWins
Think
Nice
No one cared at all about their pursuit of happiness until they started trying to force everyone to go obey their dictates. Any adult is free to change their sex at their own expense. I’ve seen no one even hinting that should be banned. But as the old saying goes: “Your right to throw a punch ends at my face”. When they demand that I must change my language and behavior to conform to their preferences or face violence, we have a problem. We they demand that we must allow children to be permanently mutilated, we have a problem. When they demand we allow male convicted sex offenders into women’s locker rooms, we have a problem.
You are free to pursue your happiness. But so am I and everyone else. Your pursuit of happiness doesn’t get to trample on mine just because the communists have declared you more worthy on the holy progressive stack.
Simulants are homosexuals with a heterosexual kink. Politically congruent (“=”) are trying to socially distance simulants from other trans (e.g. homosexuals). Advocates want sims gratitude with forward-looking profits to maintain gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) simulation, which has been clinically demonstrated to not prevent entertaining abortive ideation. Another wicked solution.
Homosexuals? Others in the transgender spectrum? Albinophobes? Dreams of Herr Mengele.