Anti-woke gadfly Steven Pinker suddenly pimping for Harvard

By Mitt Castor

Tell me how someone is paid, and I’ll tell you how they are going to behave.

Harvard Professor Steven Pinker has long been an admired thought leader among anti-woke warriors, myself included. Which is why many of us were shocked, shocked when he penned a defense of the Kremlin-on-the-Charles in the New York Times titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.”

In truth it’s a thoughtful article, as is most of Pinker’s writing. It dutifully catalogues the most prominent sins committed by the university rated the country’s worst free speech offender by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). But then it pivots to offer a defense of the good bits of Harvard that haven’t been infected by the Woke Mind Virus, reminding us that its faculty invented baking powder, the golf tee, and the National Lampoon.

OK, those and more serious medical and scientific advances as well. Pinker makes the same plea the Babbling Beaver has been making since his inception. “We must save STEM!” Which, of course, includes restoring taxpayer funding for his own scholarly work, cut off by the Trump administration’s multi-pronged shock and awe campaign.

A little investigation shows that the good professor has been supported across his long career with taxpayer money to the tune of many millions of dollars. These have been funneled through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). Scale that up to the rest of Harvard’s STEM faculty and over the decades you’re into the billions.

I rarely hear any of these recipients organizing “thank the taxpayer” rallies. But all of them are now screaming bloody murder asserting their God-given right to help themselves to the public treasury.

Here’s the art of this deal, ladies and gentlemen of the sciences, both at Havard and at the other R1 universities.

Rally around the bloated and corrupt administrations and woke professoriate that brought the taxpayers’ wrath down upon you and you are going to lose. Join the forces of reform and help get our elite universities out of the woke indoctrination and activism business and the money spigot will get turned back on. Selectively, depending on what each college faculty does.

For better or worse, we live in a democracy. The voters made their choice, embodied in the man they put in the White House and the chainsaw wielding team he gathered around him. It’s time, now, for you to make your choice. You must either become an active part of the higher education reform movement or you can watch your cushy and privileged ivory tower benefices go *poof*.

Choose wisely.

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Mitt Castor is the pseudonym of the publisher of the Babbling Beaver.