It is actually astonishing that a university that respects itself would allow this kind of framing for an academic event. The worst part isn't the bias. Bias is inevitable for all of us, even if we do our best to fight it. I don't mind walking into an academic event that ends up leaning one way or the other. The worst part is the shameless shallowness of it all, the utter surrender to that bias. The whole point of a university is to expand knowledge, to fight bias and complicate our understanding of the world. But elite universities no longer view that as their mission. They're busy shrinking our knowledge, ignoring truths and forgetting lived experiences. They literally incentivize through promotion and social pressure the purposeful teaching of half-narratives and quarter-truths. And they openly, unabashedly justify this fundamental failure as advocacy - literally taking pride in failing their most basic mission. This event, like so many before it, won't hurt Israel. It will only ever hurt Harvard.
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