There’s a conservative blog called Legal Insurrection. I’d vaguely heard of it before, but that’s all. I saw that it had a post about Connie St Louis, so I took a look. I read the first few sentences, and was amazed. I skipped down to the comments and was amazed more. I googled Legal Insurrection and found the handy Wikipedia digest in the left margin:
William A. Jacobson
Professor
William A. Jacobson is an American lawyer, professor, and conservative blogger. Jacobson is a 1981 graduate of Hamilton College and a 1984 graduate of Harvard Law School.
Education: Hamilton College, Harvard Law School
Oh yes? Well then you would think he would be able to get the most basic facts right.
Here’s why my jaw dropped – his third paragraph:
I recently reported that Dr. Tim Hunt, a Nobel-prizing winning physiologist, a British knight, and a leading advocate for science education that is usually promoted by women’s rights activists, made a lame joke about single-sex labs. His punishment in the wake of a vicious social justice campaign was his forced resignation from the University College London.
No. No, no, no.
He was not employed by UCL. He did not resign from UCL. He did not work there so he couldn’t resign from working there.
Jacobson gets it wrong again at the end:
I will also note that given how brutally Hunt was treated in social media, and the consequences to his career, it is little wonder the sources wishes to remain unnamed.
There are demands that Hunt’s critics apologize. However, the talented scientists is still out of a job.
No he is not. He was already retired from his job. His honorary professorship at UCL was not a job.
But every single one of the comments on this wretched piece rages about Hunt’s loss of his job.
William A Jacobson of Harvard is a hack.
Maybe a hack, maybe a dissembler.
LMFTFY: William A Jacobson of
HarvardCornell is a hack.So the Wikipedia thing in the margin was wrong. Tss.
Oh, I get it. No I meant “of Harvard” meaning having gone there.
Cornell seems much more at risk from the person presently under discussion.
No matter what Jacobson has done or might do, he simply cannot drag Harvard down any further than they fell when issuing a graduate diploma to one Geo. W. Bush.
If you reported his account exactly, then he also needs to get a lesson in grammar and when you make a word plural and when you don’t.
I’m not sure I would agree with “Harvard must be slipping”, even if it does turn out that this guy went to Harvard Law. “Slipping” implies that it used to be better. I sincerely doubt it.
I went to an Ivy Leagues school, and there were an amazing number of people there who were very, very impressed with themselves and thought they already knew everything and so didn’t need to listen or learn anything. To judge by the letters they write to our alumni magazine, they were quite successful at the not listening or learning part.
So, no, this William A. Jacobson sounds about par for the course for just about any Ivy League school.
Oddly enough, I’m at Harvard right now…
Okay, strictly speaking, at a bar at Harvard Square. Having lunch…
As I feel no particular impulse to declare Dr. Hunt the victim of a pogrom as yet, I think we can tentatively conjecture it’s nothing in the beer.