The guy who is leading the case against Harvard for antisemitism is a big admirer of Hitler:
The cornerstone of the Trump administration’s justification for cracking down on Harvard University is that the Ivy League school has allegedly allowed antisemitism to fester on campus.
“The choice was made, let’s not give federal taxpayer dollars to institutions that exhibit a wanton indifference to antisemitism,” the lawyer defending the government’s case said in federal court in July.
Yet that lawyer, Michael Velchik, when he was a senior at Harvard 14 years ago, submitted a paper for a Latin class written from the perspective of Adolf Hitler, according to three people studyingin the department with knowledge of the incident. The assignment was to write from the perspective of a controversial figure, but Velchik’s choice of Hitler so unnerved the instructor that he was asked to redo the assignment.
And in an email to a peer about 18 months later,as he was preparing to enter law school, Velchik wrote that he‘d enjoyed Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” more than any other book he’d read recently during a year of travels, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Boston Globe. He did not mention Hitler’s perpetration of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered.
He was into Hitler:
In the fall of 2011, Velchik’s senior year, his Latin class was asked to write a 250- to 300-word composition in Latin “from the perspective of a controversial historical or literary figure justifying your actions and defending yourself against potential accusations,” according to a copy of the assignment obtained by the Globe. The assignment said students could choose a “classical figure such as Nero or Cleopatra; a mythological figure such as Medea or Theseus; or anyone from the post-classical world, whether a Shakespearean villain or a twentieth-century tycoon.”
The students’ aim should be “syntactic rather than historical (or literary) accuracy,” the assignment said.
Velchik submitted a paper written in Latin from the perspective of Hitler, according to three people studying in the department at the time with knowledge of the assignment. Two of the sources read the paper and said they found it disturbing. The third had not read the paper but knew of the incident at the time. (The Globe was not able to review the paper.) The instructor declined to grade it, instead telling Velchik to re-do the assignment, according to all three sources, a decision meant to turn the incident into a teaching moment.
He’s the guy who argued the case against Harvard’s alleged antisemitism? I guess it takes one to know one.
This guy is apparently quite brilliant. And obviously a total fascist.