My wife, Julia Pollak, is running for the Harvard Board of Overseers. She has a week left in which to collect the required 3,300 signatures from Harvard alumni in order to qualify as a write-in candidate. (The deadline is January 31.)
You may not care much about Harvard, figuring that Harvard doesn’t care about you. But you should.
It’s the oldest university in the United States, where many of the Founders of the country encountered the ideas that would fuel the American Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, Harvard produced the poets and writers that forged the American literary tradition. And though the university barely honors their sacrifice today, many sons of Harvard volunteered — and died — to end slavery in the Civil War.
Harvard is — or was, until recently — the most prestigious university in the world, an institution that has contributed to the progress of humanity more than any other.
Even its dropouts — Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Matt Damon, to name a few — have changed our world. It has a massive, $50 billion endowment; it’s not going to disappear.
It can be a force for good — for “truth,” or “veritas,” as its motto says. It can also be a force for evil, turning our country’s elite against its foundations.
It faces a choice.
Julia is running on the “Renew Harvard” slate (click the link!) backed by reformer Bill Ackman — four excellent alumni, each of whom served in the U.S. military as well. (And if you just want to nominate her alone, and you’re a Harvard alum, you can do so directly, here.)
My wife does not know I am writing this, and I have not asked her for permission, because she cannot do media outside of work. She’s a labor economist in a public-facing role at a company that is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, so she has to be as apolitical as possible.
But she is serious about saving Harvard University from the abyss of antisemitism, identity politics, and mediocrity into which it is falling. You can read her platform here, at julia4overseer.com.
I think you’ll agree: she is the answer.
Julia is brilliant, as well as beautiful (dare I say). She wrote her thesis under the guidance of the great Kenneth Rogoff, then went on to work at the Heritage Foundation, studying the defense budget.
She soon joined the U.S. Navy Reserve, where she was the top recruit at boot camp, and served for eleven years as a helicopter mechanic. She studied at the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and taught at Pepperdine, before her current job. She knows the labor market better than anybody — expertise Harvard can use.
But why now?
Because Julia is, like me, Jewish — and unlike me, she was a victim of actual racism, born in a segregated hospital under the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Julia’s birth certificate classifies her as a “Coloured,” part of the large mixed-race population of the Cape. Her great-grandfather, Clements Kadalie, was the first black trade unionist in South Africa; her mother, Rhoda Kadalie, was a black feminist who would serve on the Human Rights Commission during Nelson Mandela’s presidency.
Those are seriously “woke” credentials.
But Julia herself is not “woke,” nor was she raised to be.
Rhoda opposed racism of any kind — including “reverse” racism. She served on the boards of the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch University, and resigned from each when they appointed less-qualified black faculty and staff ahead of highly-qualified white males.
Since the students were predominantly black and disadvantaged, Rhoda felt, they should receive the best education possible, full stop.
Rhoda encouraged Julia to attend Harvard when she saw what was happening to South African universities — campuses torn apart by race, classes interrupted by protests, professors paralyzed by political correctness.
Harvard was a meritocracy — and Julia savored it.
She studied, as a freshman, with then-Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who referred to her, jokingly, as the “right wing” of her seminar because of her skepticism of socialist economic policies (the result of her African experience).
Julia found her path to Judaism at a Harvard that was probably the most philosemitic, and pro-Israel, of all the Ivy League universities. Her inspiration was the legendary Yiddish literature professor, Ruth Wisse. She became the education chair at Harvard’s Chabad house — even before she had converted. She launched a pro-Israel journal called New Society — and tried reaching out to the Society of Arab Students for contributions. In those days, there was still some hope for civil dialogue.
Both of us have watched, in horror, as the “woke” mind-virus has taken over at Harvard.
The administration tried canceling single-sex organizations, in a misguided attack on elite social clubs; it apologized for Harvard’s minimal exposure to slavery, instead of celebrating its bold history of abolitionism; it defended discrimination against Asians, in the name of “racial justice”; and then it started canceling speakers with controversial views, and firing law professors for defending the “wrong” people.
The antisemitism that has gripped Harvard’s campus was a long time coming; it did not start on October 7, but that was the event that brought it to light. And it has not abated since the resignation of Claudine Gay.
Students returned this week to a campus where posters of Israeli hostages had been vandalized with grotesque antisemitic graffiti. The interim president appointed a professor with a history of extreme anti-Israel rhetoric to chair a task force on antisemitism and Islamophobia. And on, and on.
Antisemitism has destroyed every institution and society in which it has taken root. This may be the last chance to rescue Harvard from that fate.
Julia was not planning to run; she only joined the race a couple of weeks ago, after being urged to do so by Jewish friends on campus. But if there is anyone who can lead the pushback, it is Julia. She has the intellectual chops, an award-winning commitment to diversity, and a passion for her faith.
If you know a Harvard alum, please send this to them – before it is too late.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
