From bad to worse: The Harvard Law Review is facing multiple federal probes over reports, published in the Free Beacon, of racial discrimination at the journal. Its conduct in the face of those probes has only added to the furor.
The Review, our Aaron Sibarium reports, “retaliated against a student editor for allegedly leaking documents … and demanded, as part of the journal’s disciplinary process, that he request their destruction.” Those actions came as the journal “was under a document retention order” from the feds. As a result, they “verged on witness intimidation and could get the law review in even deeper trouble with the government,” attorneys told Sibarium.
“What do they call it when a criminal tries to intimidate the witness?” said Jason Torchinsky, a former official in the Justice Department’s civil rights division. “If you know someone is a witness in a federal investigation, and you try to intimidate them into stopping cooperation with the government, that in itself is its own offense.”
Band-aid over a bullet hole: Racial discrimination isn’t the only problem plaguing Harvard. There’s also the issue of pervasive anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on its campus—something the school pledged to combat in part by hiring a Professor in Residence in Modern Jewish Studies at its Divinity School. That professor, Harvard announced on Wednesday, is self-proclaimed “counter-Zionist” Shaul Magid.
For Magid, Zionism is “unjust” and can be “set aside” along with “Manifest Destiny, colonialism, and any number of other chauvinistic and ethnocentric ideologies of the past.”
Magid’s appointment did not land well with Rabbi David Wolpe, who spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Divinity School. Magid’s views are “very fringe” and don’t “represent anything like the mainstream view of the American Jewish community,” Wolpe told us. “He is not an answer to the problem that Harvard has with their Jewish students or with the exclusion of mainstream views.”