Laura Hirschfeld Hollis’s career as an attorney has spanned 28 years, the past 23 of which have been in higher education. Ms. Hollis has also been a freelance political writer since 1993 on matters of politics and culture. She is a frequent public speaker and has received numerous awards for her teaching, research, community service, and contributions to entrepreneurship education. She asks: “What’s Wrong With America’s ‘Elites’?

What’s Wrong With America’s ‘Elites’?

“It is becoming increasingly clear that some of America’s most serious problems can be traced back to our colleges and universities—or at least the ones educating the country’s most powerful people.

The Vietnam War era aside, it has traditionally been uncommon for events at universities to make national headlines. Absent something extraordinary, such as a president giving a commencement address, a dramatic scientific breakthrough, or the award of a prominent international prize to faculty, headlines with university names in them have tended to relate more to national championships in sports.

Not anymore. Over the past few years, news items about events on college campuses have come to dominate headlines. The subjects are some of the country’s most fabled institutions. And the stories are often negative, if not outright shocking.

In December 2023, the congressional testimony of three university presidents— Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—set off a firestorm. Under questioning by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) about [virulent, public] anti-Semitic speech and conduct on their campuses, the three women dodged and deflected, unwilling to state definitively that calls for the genocide of Jews violated university policies and codes of conduct.

The response was swift. Within days, Ms. Magill resigned. Ms. Gay survived the initial maelstrom, but the bad publicity prompted critics to start digging through her professional past, and she resigned less than a month later following accusations of [serial] plagiarism in her research publications. Some of the nation’s largest donors to these universities—many of them Jewish— began announcing that they would cease or pull back donations totaling in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

The chaos on campuses has only increased since, with pro-Palestine protests and marches at dozens of colleges and universities and horrific rhetoric bumping up against speech codes and demands for free speech. Across the country, Jewish students describe themselves as “living in a climate of hatred and fear” amid dramatic increases in anti-Semitic conduct, threats, slurs, and actual violence.

Recently, Stanford University sophomore Theo Baker published “The War at Stanford” in The Atlantic, in which he describes how the Israel–Hamas war has affected his campus. One Arab American graduate student told Mr. Baker that he thinks President Joe Biden “should be killed” and that Hamas should rule America.

Pro-Palestine protesters set up sit-in “camps” for months and shouted for the destruction of Israel, chanting, “We don’t want no two-state; we want all of ’48!” Guest speakers brought in to facilitate campus discussion of the complex issues have been shouted down. Stanford employees have been threatened (“We know where you live!”), the interim president’s home has been vandalized, and his effigy was carried around campus covered in fake blood. The administration, Baker said, seems paralyzed, indecisive, and defeated.

This isn’t an isolated incident at Stanford, and the Israel–Hamas war hasn’t caused it. In March 2023—months before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel—Stanford Law School students shut down a talk being given by federal Judge Kyle Duncan, shouting at him every time he attempted to speak or engage the audience, screaming epithets and holding up signs with vulgar accusations and calls for violence against Judge Duncan’s daughters.

Tirien Steinbach is Stanford Law School’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), who was on stage with Judge Duncan, explains her participation. She writes: “My participation at the event with Judge Duncan has been widely discussed. I was asked to attend the event by the Federalist Society, the organizers of the student protest, and the administration. My role was to observe and, if needed, de-escalate. [So, Stanford was expecting trouble from their student body, thereby admitting that they had failed to educate their students. Rather, their indoctrination of the student body in the art of thuggery was apparently successful—and valued.]

As soon as Judge Duncan entered the room, a verbal sparring match began to take place between the judge and the protesters. By the time Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to intervene, tempers in the room were heated on both sides. [Ms. Steinbach apparently was sitting on her hands while her students lost control of their emotions—and emotions, of course, are the motivating factor among today’s infantile college students.]

I stepped up to the podium to deploy the de-escalation techniques in which I have been trained, which include getting the parties to look past conflict and see each other as people. My intention wasn’t to confront Judge Duncan or the protesters but to give voice to the students so that they could stop shouting and engage in respectful dialogue. I wanted Judge Duncan to understand why some students were protesting his presence on campus and for the students to understand why it was important that the judge be not only allowed but welcomed to speak. [Of course, Judge Duncan already knew what the students wanted, and the students, of course, would not be satiated until, as all infants do, they got their way.]

To defuse the situation I acknowledged the protesters’ concerns; I addressed the Federalist Society’s purpose for inviting Judge Duncan and the law school’s desire to uphold its right to do so; I reminded students that there would a Q&A session at which they could answer Judge Duncan’s speech with their own speech, as long as they were following university rules; and I pointed out that while free speech isn’t easy or comfortable, it’s necessary for democracy, and I was glad it was happening at our law school.

[But, free speech WASN’T happening at her school, mob rule was!]

At one point during the event, I asked Judge Duncan, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” I was referring to the responsibility that comes with freedom of speech: to consider not only the benefit of our words but also the consequences. It isn’t a rhetorical question. I believe that we would be better served by leaders who ask themselves, “Is the juice (what we are doing) worth the squeeze (the intended and unintended consequences and costs)?” 

[The naivete and arrogance of Ms. Steinbach is staggering, and a sad reminder of America’s lost generations of students to the progressive-liberal Democrat cabal intent of destroying America as we know it. Such behavior was unthinkable before disaffected admirers of authoritative governments wormed their way into America’s colleges in the early 1960s.]

Similar behavior has been displayed at other schools, having nothing to do with claims of colonialism in the Middle East. Swimmer and activist Riley Gaines was cornered and forced to hide in a classroom at San Francisco State University, prevented from giving her talk about limiting participation in women’s sports to biological women.

In 2017, author Charles Murray’s scheduled talk at Middlebury College was interrupted by a mob that later physically attacked him and his faculty host, Allison Stanger. Ms. Stanger’s hair was pulled so hard by a protester that she suffered a concussion.

The poisonous rhetoric, intolerance, and violence are just the tip of the iceberg.

In an interview with The Daily Signal podcast host Rob Bluey recently, national pollster Scott Rasmussen described what he called “the most terrifying poll result” he has ever seen. A recent Rasmussen poll put this question to Americans: “Suppose there was an election and it was close but your candidate lost. And if their campaign team knew they could win by cheating and not get caught, would you want them to do so?”

Elites Would Rather Cheat

According to Mr. Rasmussen, only 7 percent of American voters overall said they would rather cheat to win. But among the group that he calls “the elite,” that number jumped to 35 percent. Among the “politically obsessed elite” (those who “talk politics daily”), it was a staggering 69 percent!

So who are these “elite”? Mr. Rasmussen said that they are the top 1 percent of the population. They make more than $150,000 per year. They live in densely populated urban areas. They have not only college but also postgraduate degrees. And large numbers of them “went to one of 12 elite schools [the Ivys, the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cal Berkeley, Duke].”

“The reason I bring that up is about half the policy positions in government, half the corporate board positions in America, are held by people who went to one of these dozen schools,” Mr. Rasmussen said, noting that they also shape “the mainstream media narrative.”

Not only does this group think it’s acceptable to cheat to win an election, but 70 percent believe that there is too much individual freedom in the United States, and an equal number trusts the government— which, of course, they control.

“They really believe that if they could just make the decisions and get us out of the way, we would be a lot better off,” Mr. Rasmussen said.

What’s going on at our most prestigious and exclusive universities? How have they produced generations of amoral, condescending authoritarians? And how do we put a stop to it?

Those are questions Americans need answers to.”

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America’s Elites Have No Moral Center

Mark Hendrickson is an economist who retired from the faculty of Grove City College in Pennsylvania, where he remains fellow for economic and social policy at the Institute for Faith and Freedom. He believes that Harvard’s Bigger Problem Is Our Society’s Bigger Problem—Maybe America’s Elites Have No Moral Center

“Last summer, I wrote about “Harvard’s Big Problem”— the problem of having so many people want to attend the school that it causes endless complications for its admissions office. It is a “problem” that many struggling colleges wish they had.

Since then, as you know, Harvard has found itself grappling with a much bigger problem—experiencing the public humiliation and disgrace of having an ugly cheating scandal come to light— not among the student body but among both the university’s administration and faculty.

In the most highly publicized case, the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was alleged to be a frequent plagiarist. In a move of shocking pusillanimity, the Harvard Corp.—the dozen or so people who are the legal chiefs of all of Harvard’s activities—unanimously praised Ms. Gay, reassigning her from administration to faculty at the same salary of more than $800,000 per year. [There’s the problem in a nutshell!]

Unfortunately for Harvard, Ms. Gay wasn’t the only highly visible official accused of cheating. A few months after Ms. Gay’s peccadilloes came to light, it was revealed that Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion (DEI) officer, Sherri A. Charleston, was accused of 40 instances of plagiarism. And with grim irony, Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School known for her work on dishonesty and unethical behavior, has been accused of falsifying results in at least four of her published papers.

How widespread is the alleged cheating at Harvard? Who knows? It may have been enough that applications to Harvard fell by about 5 percent in 2024, while applications to other universities with elite reputations rose. That’s just a blip. Harvard’s longstanding prestige and its powerful reputation for having connections with many of the country’s power centers mean that it is in no danger of falling to second-class status. Obviously, tens of thousands of applicants felt that the value of the Harvard brand was far more important to them than egregious ethical lapses.

However, it isn’t just Harvard that we need to worry about but also our country.

Academia, in general, is rife with fraudulent research. For example, writing in Reason, author and science correspondent Ronald Bailey said that “the journal Science and Engineering Ethics reported that more than 15 percent of researchers had witnessed others who had committed at least one instance of research misconduct (falsification, fabrication, plagiarism), while nearly 40 percent were aware of others who had engaged in at least one questionable research practice.”

According to a report in The Guardian published earlier this year, “tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals” and “medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.”

The Guardian also reported that more than 10,000 papers published in research journals were retracted last year alone, and that number is believed to be only “the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.”

A study of dozens of trials in government- funded control-trial medical research found that 44 percent contained false data. This has serious implications for public policy. It raises the question as to how trustworthy the various assertions put forth by government agencies reporting on climate change are.

A survey from 15 years ago found that 34 percent of scientists receiving federal funding “have acknowledged engaging in research misconduct to align research with their funder’s political and economic agenda,” according to the Foundation for Economic Education. Given the way that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention behaved during the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems likely that such misconduct may be even more extensive today.

The fact is that “official science” sometimes involves “adjusting” data. For example, according to multiple sources, such as Tony Heller of the Real Climate Science website and climate analyst Paul Homewood, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has repeatedly revised temperature records from decades ago downward while tweaking more recent measurements upward.

The NOAA also, according to a special report from The Epoch Times earlier this month, “fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 [U.S. Historical Climatology Network] reporting stations that no longer exist.” Yes, it actually records as actual data temperature readings from imaginary stations.

Cheating, plagiarism (a form of theft), fake science, data fudging, and fabricating are endemic and far-reaching. Even the president of the United States committed plagiarism in law school, but that hasn’t kept him from ascending to the highest position in the land.

We can all think of instances we’ve read or heard about in which everyone from college coaches to orchestral conductors to business executives to members of Congress have falsified their resumes. Dishonesty is rampant. The message to our children is sickening: “Hey, kids, the way to get ahead in the USA is to lie and cheat and steal.”

What this means for the future of our society is unknown, but it suggests a larger breakdown of morality, justice, and honest government (apologies to those of you who view “honest government” as an oxymoron). In fact, just a few days ago, a Rasmussen poll sponsored by The Heartland Institute showed that 28 percent of all voters say that they “would engage in at least one kind of illegal voting practice in order to help their preferred candidate—either President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump—win the 2024 election.” This is startling. In an age of 50–50 partisan splits and razor-thin election margins, it should alarm us all.

The cheating scandal at Harvard is huge on its own, but in the context of a society that seems to have lost its moral anchor, cheating seems more like an existential threat to our country. We clearly need a moral revival. Our children deserve better.”

America deserves better. Shakespeare was right to target “the lawyers” for extinction, but he didn’t go far enough. So called “experts”, “authorities”, “journalists”, and “academics” need to be seen as morally bankrupt for their shilling for the progressive-liberal elites who run this country. They should be on Shakespeare’s list.

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University Professors are Joining Demonstrations Roiling College Campuses

Douglas Belkin covers higher education and national news out of the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal. Melissa Korn writes about higher education for The Wall Street Journal. She covers college admissions, university finances and campus culture. She won awards from the New York Press Club and Newswomen’s Club of New York. Melissa graduated from Cornell University with degrees in English and history and has a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. They write:

“More university professors are joining the demonstrations roiling college campuses, both to voice support for Gazans and to defend their students’ right to protest.

Faculty, many of whom are in their 60s and 70s and came of age during the era of Vietnam War protests, are pushing back against university presidents, accusing the leaders of heavy-handed and inconsistent crackdowns on free speech, and warning against a wave of authoritarianism some say has been creeping onto campuses for years.

Professors in leadership positions are guiding calls for votes of no-confidence, spearheading classroom walkouts and visiting encampments alongside students. Many are facing punishment from police and their employers. Police have arrested professors during demonstrations at schools including Washington University in St. Louis, Emory University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Police disbanded encampments at the University of Virginia, University of Southern California and Art Institute of Chicago, while protesters at Vassar College in New York voluntarily ended their encampment after reaching a deal with administrators. The commencement ceremonies of University of Michigan and Indiana University were marked by student protests, but they were largely able to proceed as planned.

At Indiana, more than 3,000 faculty, graduate workers, students, staff and alumni have called for the resignation of President Pamela Whitten, saying she escalated confrontations between demonstrators and police by changing the rules of engagement for protesters at an encampment without adequately informing the campus.

In a statement, Whitten emphasized the school’s commitment to free speech and defended her actions, saying, “Antisemitic episodes have been linked to this national encampment campaign” and have “become magnets for those making threats of violence.”

At the University of Texas at Austin, more than 700 faculty signed a letter pushing for the school’s president, Jay Hartzell, to resign. The letter says he needlessly put students, staff and faculty in danger by calling in law enforcement to campus.

Pauline Turner Strong, a professor of anthropology and women’s and gender studies at UT Austin, said the show of force by police at a recent demonstration she attended was greater than other times since she started teaching there in 1993—except when there was an active shooter on campus. In that case, “we really felt like we were being protected from an active threat,” she said. “In this case, it feels like the police are the actual violent threat.”

A representative for UT said a host of weapons have been confiscated from protesters, and that both staff and police officers have been physically assaulted and threatened. “We will continue to safeguard the free speech and assembly rights of everyone on our campus, while we protect our university and students, who are preparing for their final exams,” the representative said.

Faculty have a long history of criticizing their institutions, and in some cases supporting student movements like free speech in the 1960s and divestment from South Africa in the 1980s, said Robert Cohen, a professor of social studies and history at New York University who studies social protests and student movements.

In the current wave of cam-pus unrest, he said, faculties have gone far beyond the types of advocacy they typically push: recommending a policy change via a university senate resolution or stopping by to express solidarity with students at a protest event. “It’s really unusual for faculty to be willing to engage in disobedience and risk arrest,” Cohen said.

Faculty are partly voicing concern that administrators are ignoring standards of shared governance, a unique system in higher education that gives employees a greater voice than they generally have in the corporate world. Faculty are often awarded oversight of academic affairs, and have at least some say in student discipline and other university issues.

UT Austin’s Strong said the administration’s move to quell protests is part of a drift toward more top-down decision making and authoritarian governance, which she attributes to cuts in public funding and a greater reliance on private donors. [But authoritarian governance at every level of government is the goal of America’s elites!]

Some faculty across the country are counter demonstrating against Hamas and in support of Israel. But, not surprisingly, at many schools, professors have overwhelmingly supported the pro-Palestinian students [secure in the fact that more than 90% of their peers on elite college campuses are committed progressive-liberals].”

Next time: The “elite’s” negative affect on Western civilization