#OWS Therapy: Watching Occupy Harvard Embarrass Themselves

Photo: Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

Mocking Harvard has become a very satisfying sport, particularly since that university has aroused so much ire in the last few years for its contributions to the breakdown of the body politic, starting with awarding law degrees to Barack and Michelle and supporting their advance to the White House.

Other contributions include race-card beer summits at the White House, promotion of such public health propaganda items as you have no right to your own body parts (and you know who does), partial birth abortion is a nifty thing (don't listen to what actual physicians have to say), and gov't should decide who gets what health care and when (you get to pay for it, whether you want to or not). Another Harvard-brew progressive nightmare that keeps people around the globe awake at night is "global warming is a man-caused global disaster" (i.e., hide opposing evidence).

Time and again, Harvard has proven themselves soooo easy to mock, it is embarrassing. All one needs do is repeat facts, such as:

On Wednesday, November 9, Occupy Harvard began. The university is frequently accused of being an “academic gatekeeper,” but the administration and police response to the nascent protest movement has made this gatekeeping uncomfortably literal: Harvard Yard has been placed on indefinite “lockdown,” meaning two-level ID-checks at every entrance.

That's rich. Pun intended. Howie Carr at the Boston Herald is among those who are appalled:

So let me get this straight: Harvard students are “occupying” the Yard to protest how the 1 percent keep the 99 percent in economic servitude. But the Crimson protest against capitalist oppression is by invitation only, and all the gates on campus have been locked, chained and padlocked to keep out the real 99 percent? 

Harvard's lockdown is that university's way of saying, "Tough luck" to extension students, visiting scholars, tourists, members of the press, and in general the folks in Cambridge who pay the property taxes that Harvard would have to pay if it paid taxes, which it does not.

By the way, this is the first time Harvard has ever been on full lockdown. Which is another way of Harvard saying that it is far more frightened of the 2011 "occupiers" than it ever was of the 1969 Vietnam War protesters. Think of that.

More from Carr:

The pampered pukes are saying their faux encampment of Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean tents is “symbolic.” It sure is — symbolic of the breathtaking hypocrisy of these limousine liberals.

They’re in solidarity with the rabble ... as long as the riff-raff stay on their side of the wall.

One certainly can empathize with Harvard for not wanting to scrape human excrement off its lawns and having tuberculosis and lice spread to its faculty and students. But Harvard is not too eager to grant other people the right to protect their property.

Now nobody can walk across the Yard unless he has a Harvard ID. They tried something like this in Arizona, and as I recall everyone at Harvard denounced SB 1070 as racism, as in, “They’re checking papers in Arizona!”

Now the moonbats are checking papers in Harvard Square. . . .

When political correctness comes in one of Harvard's gates, rationality flies out the window.

But what if an illegal alien wants to cross the Yard? Remember, when an illegal falsified his application to get into Harvard, they gave him a scholarship. When an American kid from Delaware tried to pull the same stunt, they gave him six months at Billerica House of Correction.

And what if Skippy Gates tries to take a shortcut across campus and he doesn’t have his ID with him? Will Barack say the campus cops “acted stupidly?” Will there be a sushi summit at the White House?

Carr tells it like it is:

Occupy Harvard Yard is like when you were 6 years old, and you went camping ... in your backyard, with your father. If you got scared, you could just run back in the house to get a hug from Mommy.

Which is the atmosphere one might reasonably expect Harvard to provide for their immature students new to the ways of the real world.

Harvard Yard is not altogether pink just yet. "Some freshmen from balcony dorms," those apparently still capable of rational thought, "yelled 'We are the 1 percent! We are the 1 percent!'” It is unclear whether those students were referring to their own incomes, their family incomes, or Harvard's income, which is not unsubstantial.

In 2008, Harvard's endowment was $37 billion, making it the second-wealthiest non-profit in the world, after the Catholic Church. When comparing the two institutions, it is useful to note that the Catholic Church has existed since the time of Christ and has acquired property in every location in the world in which Catholics have built a church during the last two millennia, whereas Harvard was founded less than 400 years ago and is pretty much confined, physically, to Cambridge, Massachussetts. When referring to Harvard, the term "non-profit" is most accurately defined as "pays zero taxes on its enormous investments and holdings, which circumstance does not stand in the way of it receiving enormous amounts of tax money collected from people locked out of Harvard Yard."

Sadly, any mocking of Harvard University is done through tears of woe. In just a few years, Harvard's students, rational or not, like the cadre of Harvard professors "serving" in the Obama administration, are going to be making decisions--big decisions--about your future and mine.

Because Big Nanny knows best.
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