We Are Being Taught by Fools - Harvard University Proves It
Imagine this: A young man, brilliant, driven, the son of Indian immigrants, applies to medical school. His grades are strong. His test scores are competitive. By every objective measure, he is exactly the kind of student these schools claim to want. He gets rejected everywhere. So he tries something different. Same grades. Same essays. Same human being, but this time he shaves his head, calls himself JoJo, and checks a different box on the race question. Black. He gets invited to interview at eleven medical schools, including Harvard.
Photo credit: CNN
His name is Vijay Jojo Chokal-Ingam, and his story, documented in his book Almost Black, is not a parable or a thought experiment. It is a firsthand account of a system that was exposed not by a lawsuit or a congressional hearing, but by one Indian-American man who decided to find out what would happen if he simply told the form what it wanted to hear, and he got in.
This is the logical conclusion of what a court-appointed statistical expert demonstrated during the landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard trial — the case that eventually reached the Supreme Court and ripped the mask off one of America’s most carefully curated myths. An Asian-American male applicant with a 25% chance of admission would see his chances rise to 36% if he were recorded as white, jump to 77% if he were recorded as Hispanic, and soar to 95% if he were recorded as Black. Same person. Different box. Different future.
Welcome to Harvard University: the world’s most prestigious engine of social engineering, dressed in crimson robes and pretending it’s about merit. Here is what Harvard’s 388-year history actually looks like when you strip away the Latin mottos and the Nobel Prize announcements: a single unbroken thread of institutional discrimination, updated every few decades to fit the prevailing cultural winds, but always, always pointed at the same targets.
Act One: The Original Sin - Jews, Quotas, and the Birth of “Holistic” Admissions (1920s–1960s)
The first target was straightforward. In the early 1900s, Harvard’s gates were open on paper and closed in practice, reserved almost entirely for the sons of wealthy white Protestant families from the Eastern Seaboard. Then something unexpected happened: the children of Jewish immigrants began arriving, and they were exceptional. By 1908, Jewish students made up six percent of Harvard’s student body. By 1922, they had climbed to twenty-two percent. And they were still climbing.
Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, a man who had tried to ban Black students from freshman dormitories, held secret trials to expel students suspected of homosexuality, and served as vice president of the Immigrant Restriction League, looked at the enrollment numbers and panicked.
“The anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing,” he wrote to a colleague, “and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.” The solution to hatred, according to Harvard’s president, was to give the haters what they wanted. But the hatred wasn’t random. It had a source. Jewish students were outperforming their Protestant peers on every measurable academic standard, and winning the seats that old-money New England families had considered theirs by birthright. The problem, in Lowell’s mind, wasn’t bigotry. The problem was Jewish excellence.
So he invented two instruments to fix it. The first was the quota, a hard cap of fifteen percent on Jewish enrollment. His faculty committee rejected it. Too visible. Too embarrassing. So Harvard did what elite institutions always do when blunt force becomes inconvenient: it reached for something more elegant. The second instrument was legacy admissions, preference for the sons of alumni. A policy that sounded like tradition and loyalty, but functioned, with mathematical precision, as a filter. If your grandfather hadn’t gone to Harvard, your merit didn’t matter as much. And whose grandfather had gone to Harvard? Not yours, if your family had arrived from Eastern Europe a generation ago.
One mechanism was rejected for being too honest. The other survived for a century, because it was dishonest enough. In 1926, Harvard introduced what it called “holistic admissions.” The entrance examination, the one Jews kept passing at inconvenient rates, would no longer be the primary criterion. Instead, applicants would be evaluated on “character.” “Likability.” “Fitness.” Traits that couldn’t be measured, couldn’t be appealed, and not coincidentally, could be assigned by people who had already decided who belonged. The quota was the blunt instrument. Holistic admissions was the scalpel. Together, they solved the same problem: too many Jews getting in.
The system worked. Jewish enrollment fell. And to make sure it stayed down, Harvard quietly introduced another mechanism in the 1930s: legacy admissions. The logic was elegant in its ugliness. Give automatic preference to the sons of Harvard graduates. Harvard graduates were overwhelmingly white Protestant. You never had to say the word “Jew” out loud. You just called it tradition.
The proof that all of this worked is written in brick and mortar. After World War II, with Harvard’s doors still only half-open to Jewish applicants, a group of American Jewish clergy, academics, attorneys, and businessmen concluded they had no choice but to build an alternative. In 1948, they founded a new university outside Boston. They named it Brandeis, after Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice whom Harvard’s own Lowell had campaigned to keep off the bench because he was Jewish. The existence of Brandeis University is not a footnote. It is a monument to institutional antisemitism. The Jewish community had to build its own Harvard because Harvard wouldn’t have them.
Act Two: The Great Shuffle - Legacy, Legacies, and the White Protestant Lock (1930s–1990s)
For the next half-century, the formal Jewish quota quietly faded. But the machinery it built did not. The personal essay and the alumni interview, now considered hallmarks of Harvard’s celebrated “holistic” process, were introduced in the 1920s for one purpose: to give admissions officers a subjective tool to mark Jewish applicants as lacking “character.” The same tools, the same language, the same logic, repurposed decade after decade for whoever the current target happened to be.
Legacy admissions followed in the 1930s, locking in the Protestant establishment under the cover of tradition. And while that system quietly protected white Christian families, Black students were living under a different set of rules entirely, literally. Harvard’s dormitories remained segregated well into the late 1950s. The university that preached national ideals and civic virtue maintained physical separation on its own campus, a fact it has never prominently advertised.
Meanwhile, in the 1930s, Harvard created national scholarships, which it described as expanding access and opportunity. Black students were not included. The geographic diversity Harvard sought was white geographic diversity. This is the period Harvard calls its evolution. It’s maturation. Its gradual opening to the world. What it actually was: a careful reorganization of exclusion. Different targets, different mechanisms, same institution. The gate never really opened. It just got a new lock.
Act Three: A Century Later, the Same Scalpel — Asian Americans and the Return of “Character” (2000s–2020s)
By the early 2000s, a new pattern had emerged in Harvard’s admissions data, one that looked, to anyone paying attention, uncomfortably familiar. Asian Americans were outperforming every other demographic group on every objective measure Harvard tracked. Their academic ratings were stronger than those of white applicants. Their extracurricular profiles were stronger. Their recommendation letters were stronger. And yet, in the one category that remained entirely subjective, the “personal rating,” assigned by admissions officers who had never met the applicants, Asian Americans consistently ranked last. They were rated as less likable, less courageous, less kind, and less widely respected. By strangers. From a file.
The statistical expert who analyzed Harvard’s own data during the SFFA trial found that if admissions were based solely on academic credentials, Asian Americans would represent more than 51% of the admitted class. Instead, they represented roughly twenty percent, held precisely in place by personality scores that tracked race with remarkable consistency.
Harvard didn’t cap Asian enrollment with a formal quota. It simply decided, systematically and statistically, that Asian Americans had bad personalities. The parallel to Lowell’s campaign against Jewish “character” a century earlier is not a metaphor. It is a pattern.
Act Four: The Woke Revolution and the New Hierarchy (2010s–2023)
Then came the woke revolution, and Harvard didn’t just change its admissions policies. It changed its entire self-understanding. The transformation began gradually in the 2010s, accelerated violently after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and institutionalized itself through a sprawling new bureaucracy: Harvard’s Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, which shaped how students were expected to think, speak, and understand themselves in relation to race.
Harvard’s official DEI materials instructed students to examine their “white privilege” and “white fragility,” to see American society through the lens of “systemic racism” and the “weaponization of whiteness.” This was not fringe ideology operating at the margins. It was official university doctrine, administered by a dedicated apparatus and presided over by the president herself.
Under this framework, identity politics didn’t just influence admissions. It reorganized the entire moral map of the campus. The sorting principle was brutally simple: oppressor or oppressed. Privileged or marginalized. Which side of history are you on? Within this new theology, different groups found themselves repositioned with startling speed.
Black Americans occupied the top of the protected hierarchy, and not without historical justification. The legacy of slavery, segregation, and documented institutional exclusion gave Harvard moral grounds to prioritize Black representation. Affirmative action, dedicated scholarship programs, task forces on racial equity, research into Harvard’s own ties to slavery, the renaming of buildings, and the machinery were substantial. And in December 2022, the project reached its symbolic apex: Harvard named Claudine Gay as its first Black president.
Identity was now currency, and at Harvard, it was the most valuable currency on campus. Meanwhile, Jews were quietly reclassified. The same institution that had once tracked Jewish students in order to exclude them now rebranded them as “white and privileged”, erasing centuries of persecution, pogroms, and documented discrimination at Harvard itself with a single ideological stroke. Under the new theology, Jews didn’t belong in the category of the oppressed. They belonged with the oppressors. Their exclusion wasn’t just permitted. It was ideologically required.
While Black students were ascending the hierarchy of victimhood and Jewish students were being recast as white oppressors, a third group was quietly climbing to the top of that pyramid entirely. Not through academic performance. Not through legal struggle. But through two forces that had been working in parallel for decades, largely invisible to the public.
The first was money.
Qatar - the small Gulf emirate that simultaneously hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East and serves as the primary financial patron of Hamas had identified American elite universities early as the most efficient vehicle for reshaping Western public opinion on the Palestinian question. Between 2001 and 2021, Qatar contributed an estimated 4.7 billion dollars to American universities. Harvard, Georgetown, Northwestern, Cornell, all recipients. The money didn’t arrive with explicit instructions. It didn’t need to. It funded Middle Eastern studies departments, endowed chairs, supported student organizations, and quietly shaped which narratives received institutional legitimacy and which did not. A 2020 study found a direct statistical correlation between the volume of Gulf donations to a campus and the presence and intensity of pro-Palestinian activist organizations on that campus and the rise of Anitisemitism.
The second force was intellectual, and it had begun much earlier. At Columbia University, a Palestinian-American professor named Edward Said spent decades constructing what would become the theoretical architecture of the entire left. His book Orientalism was a scholarly work that asked how power shapes knowledge, how the West narrated the Arab world to serve its own interests, and whose voices were systematically excluded from the academy.
Instead of using Said’s framework as a tool for more honest discussion for understanding complexity, correcting distortions, and expanding the range of voices taken seriously, they weaponized it. They took a framework designed to interrogate power and turned it into a hierarchy of victimhood. They took a critique of Western bias and converted it into a license for a different bias. Israel became not a state with a complex history but a colonial project. Palestinians became not one party in a territorial conflict but the archetypal oppressed, the purest embodiment of victimhood in the postcolonial imagination, beyond scrutiny, beyond complication, beyond accountability.
Merit gave way to identity. Complexity gave way to hierarchy. And DEI - the institutional expression of this entire framework- didn’t level the playing field. It just changed who was allowed to discriminate and called it justice. By the time the woke revolution reached full force in the 2010s, the infrastructure was already in place. All that remained was to slot the Palestinian cause into the top of the pyramid.
Act Five: October 7th and the Moment the Mask Slipped
October 7th, 2023, did not create the atmosphere at Harvard. It revealed it. On the morning of October 8th, before Israel had carried out a single significant military operation in Gaza, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters across the country organized “days of rage.” The speed of mobilization was not grief. It was infrastructure. Decades of Qatari funding and postcolonial theory had built a machine waiting for the moment to fire.
At Harvard, thirty-four student organizations signed a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the Hamas massacre. Jewish students reported harassment, intimidation, and encampments calling for intifada on the very campus whose official bureaucracy had spent years proclaiming its commitment to combating hate.
And then came December 5th, 2023. The U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Claudine Gay sat before Congress alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Representative Elise Stefanik asked a simple question: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s code of conduct? Gay replied that it “can be, depending on the context.” The president of the world’s most famous university could not bring herself to say that calling for the murder of Jews is categorically wrong, ot wrong in principle, wrong only depending on context.
Gay was not the disease. She was the symptom. She was the product of a university culture so thoroughly captured by an ideological framework that frames Jewish suffering as a geopolitical inconvenience rather than a human rights emergency.
Epilogue: The Gate That Never Really Opened
The numbers tell the final chapter. Jewish undergraduate enrollment at Harvard today stands at approximately seven percent, the lowest level since before World War II, and less than a third of the roughly twenty-five percent average recorded in the late twentieth century. Among peer institutions, no school has experienced a steeper decline in the recent decade. Harvard has never been a meritocracy. It has been, in every era, an institution that decides which groups deserve access and which don’t, and then builds an admissions system to deliver that verdict while maintaining plausible deniability.
One more personal word.
I live in Boston, not far from Harvard University. After October 7, after the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, we went to demonstrate for the hostages. We went holding their faces on signs, asking for the simplest thing a human being can ask of another: help us bring them home. What we received was a roaring, hate-filled mob. Tthroat-slitting gestures. spit and people screaming in my face that I was a Nazi.
And Harvard, its administration, its faculty, its institutional culture, made that possible. Enabled it. Nurtured it for decades, one endowed chair at a time, one identity politics framework at a time, one Qatari donation at a time.
I stood there, and I wept. Not only for the hostages. But because I understood, in my body, what it means to come to the world’s most celebrated institution of learning, in the country that took in our grandparents, and be met with the same ancient hatred wearing a new costume.
A small moment. Standing at Harvard University. Waiting for compassion. For solidarity. For basic human decency.Instead - threats, hatred, and spit. Harvard - we will never forget the back you turned on us.
This is what one hundred years of Harvard looks like. From Lowell’s quotas to the mob that greeted us with slashing gestures while children sat in tunnels. The current administration in Washington fined you for your antisemitism. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. We felt it. The Jews of Boston felt it. We stood in front of your gates, and we wept. You were supposed to be a place of knowledge, of unity, of moral courage. You have none of it. And that is exactly how history will remember you. Shame on you, Harvard.
𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑘 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑘 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔, 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑏𝑒𝑖𝑛𝑔 ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒. 𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝐼 𝑑𝑜𝑛’𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠 𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑑, 𝐼 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑. 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝐼 𝑎𝑚 𝑓𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡, 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑐𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑢𝑛𝑖𝑡𝑦, 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑡ℎ. 𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛 𝐼 𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝 𝑤𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔. 𝐼𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑒 𝑤𝑜𝑟𝑑𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢, 𝐼’𝑑 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 𝑖𝑡 𝑖𝑓 𝑦𝑜𝑢 become a paid subscriber 𝑠𝑜 𝐼 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑘𝑒𝑒𝑝 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑑𝑖𝑟𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑙𝑦. 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑏𝑦 your 𝑟𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑒𝑠𝑡 — 𝐼’𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑠𝑜 𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝐵𝑢𝑦 𝑀𝑒 𝑎 𝐶𝑜𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑒 ☕ 𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑠 𝑎𝑙𝑤𝑎𝑦𝑠, 𝑚𝑦 𝑏𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑠 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑤𝑎𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 📖 𝐾𝑛𝑜𝑤 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑤ℎ𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑘𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 ℎ𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑠𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠?
𝐺𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 𝑎 𝑔𝑖𝑓𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑚𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒. 😊
𝑆ℎ𝑎𝑏𝑏𝑎𝑡 𝑆ℎ𝑎𝑙𝑜𝑚 ✨ and much love,
Y
This is incredible work. Harvard has been so disgusting in so many ways. Your article covers so much of it, but there is even more. Harvard systematically punishes faculty, bans speakers, and cuts funding for any project deemed to express a 'conservative' (really just 'non woke') thought. Harvard has earned its bad press, and it deserved its targeting by Trump.
The question is, can the institution reform to become egalitarian, open to a range of views, and shed its hate of Jews? Or is it rotten to the core?
Harvard is proven to be the paradigm of the greater world at large: willing to turn away and to take money.
We all need a scapegoat. Always have. Some are scapegoats du jour. Some since time immemorial.
Excellence, like cream, rises to the top.
The Jews have done that.
Jealousy is ugly.
As is the hatred.