There’s a celebration going on at Harvard University, and it highlights higher education's increasing abandonment of the unalloyed pursuit of knowledge in deference to an ideological agenda. The Ivy League institution is crowing over how students at its prestigious Kennedy School of Government (HKS) took the lead in making a critical race theory course mandatory for all master’s of public policy (MPP) candidates.
Is it a case of the inmates running the asylum or the children of the revolution taking the baton from their partisan instructors? Either way, the university has expressed its delight that disgruntled students have successfully demanded that a “Race and Racism” course taught by a radical professor be made a core requirement.
‘The Students of Color Had to Become the Teachers’
The Harvard Crimson, the school’s student newspaper, reported Oct. 7 on the assertive stridency of a pupil-turned-instructor:
“Diego A. Garcia Blum was only weeks into his first semester as a master’s of public policy student at the Harvard Kennedy School when he found himself unexpectedly taking on the role of a teacher.
“One of Garcia Blum’s classes, a course required for all first-year MPP students in fall 2019, launched a debate on the relationship between public officials and law enforcement ...
“‘A lot of things were said that were very triggering to students of those backgrounds,’ he said. ‘The students of color had to become the teachers in the class to ground the arguments in the history of public policy being used against our communities.’”
Students soon turned to organized disruption and petitions. “[A] coalition subsequently staged a full-day protest outside the Kennedy School’s cafeteria — the first of many actions by the group to push HKS to ‘adopt an anti-racist, anti-colonial culture and curriculum,’” the paper continued.
Kennedy School administrators reacted in a manner fully to be expected. They capitulated, if that is the correct word for acceding to demands they nurtured via decades of leftist-biased curricula. “HKS professor Cornell William Brooks emphasized the ‘essential, foundational role’ that student activism played in pressuring the Kennedy School administration to form the course,” The Crimson wrote. “Our students have done what we admitted them to do,” Brooks declared. “We admit them to lead, they insist upon leading — that’s not always easy, but they’ve done it.”
Open Radical on Harvard Faculty
The now-mandatory “Race and Racism” course is taught by Professor Khalil Muhammad. A summary description on the Harvard website reveals that critical race theory is the driving force behind it.
The course examines “the nature of race at the heart of the American project,” the post reads. “In the first half of the course, we draw from African American, Latinx, Indigenous and Asian American history, critical race theory, and whiteness studies to offer students historical knowledge about the role that race and racism have played in wealth creation, labor force participation, political culture, social institutions, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and civic life.”
In a further display of just how far removed from independent inquiry Harvard has become, Muhammad’s ties to overtly radical progressive organizations are touted rather than played down. Muhammad’s official title at the Kennedy School is “Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy.” The Ford Foundation “has been a major force in American culture and, because of its size, has given a great deal of money to left-wing and center-left organizations since its founding,” watchdog website Influence Watch says in a dossier on the powerful donor group.
Muhammad “is on the boards of the Vera Institute of Justice ... and The Nation magazine, as well as the advisory [board] of Common Justice,” his official university bio states. The Vera Institute of Justice has received more than $10 million from globalist progressive billionaire George Soros since 2016 to promote “decarceration.” The group has been vital in helping install soft-on-crime district attorneys in major cities across America. Common Justice is a project of the Vera Institute while The Nation is one of the oldest and most unabashedly leftist magazines in the United States.
(Photo by: Sergi Reboredo/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Muhammad is committed to fighting “white supremacy” and the “racial triumphalism” he sees inherent in supporters of former President Donald Trump.
“While the United States has expanded its borders of inclusion over time, the borders of whiteness have never fallen,” he wrote in an article for the Boston Review in 2017. “White nationalists who cry otherwise simply need to spend more time in museums. White identity is the mortar that binds the foundation of every institution in this country. It is the air we breathe. The beauty we emulate. It is the culture that borrows, commodifies and appropriates non-white culture and accomplishment as its own.”
As Harvard goes, so goes the rest of big-box higher education.
“Muhammad said he has spoken about the course with people at public policy schools at the University of California Berkeley, Columbia University, and Princeton University. The fall 2022 course catalog of Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy includes for the first time a class on race and public policy for its MPP students,” The Crimson detailed.
And the rot on America’s campuses continues to grow.
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