Wednesday roundup

Kamala Harris's dad is none too pleased with his daughter at the moment:

Sen. Kamala Harris's Jamaican father has vigorously disavowed his daughter's comments regarding marijuana, accusing her of fraudulently stereotyping Jamaicans and pursuing "identity politics."

The senator said in a radio interview last week that she supports marijuana legalization and has smoked weed herself, citing her ethnicity to buttress her boast: “Half my family’s from Jamaica. Are you kidding me?”

Harris's father isn't laughing.

In a statement to Jamaica Global Online, Donald Harris said his immediate family wanted to "dissociate ourselves from this travesty.”

“My dear departed grandmother … as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected, in any way, jokingly or not with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in the pursuit of identity politics,” he said.

“Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” wrote Mr. Harris, an economics professor at Stanford University.

My first exposure to Jeffrey Hart was reading his syndicated column in the Indianapolis Star in the early 1980s, when I was on the cusp of my conversion experience. After it, I went on a conservative-magazine-subscribing binge, and, obviously, one such periodical was National Review, where I became better acquainted with his work and mind, and discovered the unique role he played on the Dartmouth faculty, where he taught English literature.

I read his book From This Moment On: America in 1940, which fleshed out my understanding of various things.

He passed away recently, and NR has reprinted a symposium from a few years ago, in which various colleagues, friends and former students shared their memories.

A taste from Peter Robinson's recollection:

In all of his courses Hart stressed two skills, reading and writing. These sound commonplace. As he approached them, they were not. He asserted that a great poem or novel can sharpen its readers’ perceptions and enlarge their understanding—but only if they submit to it and read it. Hart was never rude in the classroom, but whenever a student started talking about how a poem made him feel, Hart would shift the discussion to the poem’s historical context, its rhythm and rhyme scheme, or its diction. He was not interested in a 19-year-old’s ability to emote; he was very interested in the text. In The Age of Johnson, JH gave an exam that consisted only of a list of names drawn from Boswell’s Life. The students were charged to identify each character, in no more than a sentence apiece. I missed half of them, including (this has stayed with me) Topham Beauclerk, Dr. Johnson’s close and much younger friend. Like many students, I found the exam infuriating. We should have been asked about big ideas! To this grumbling, JH responded calmly: Do your reading. Experience the characters the author presents. Enter his world. If you don’t know who Topham Beauclerk was, you have done a deficient job of reading Boswell’s text.

In writing, Hart valued the simple, the original, the direct. The models he held up were journalistic, not academic. He stressed that Dr. Johnson was a working journalist, not an Oxford don, and he noted that journalism had shaped his own writing. “My newspaper column has taught me a great deal about directness,” he once explained. “Now, when I look at my first book, on Viscount Bolingbroke, which was my doctoral dissertation, I see the examining board on every page.” When a classmate of mine, who worked for the student newspaper, The Dartmouth, asked Hart how to improve his writing, Hart told him to write for the sports page. “Sports are objective and concrete,” Hart said. “It’s something you can write about.”

LITD thinks this would be an ill-advised move: Apparently there are rumblings around Washington that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats may be on the way out.

Important piece at The Federalist by Rachelle Peterson entitled "How Higher Education Incubated the Eco-Socialism of the Green New Deal." You can now get fancy-pants degrees in "sustainability":

. . . sustainability has become a key organizing principle for higher education, as Peter Wood and I documented in “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism.” Colleges and universities have rushed to introduce some 458 degree programs in sustainability including sustainability doctorates and sustainability-themed MBAs. And they have hired some 452 sustainability professionals, according to a 2017 study by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Campus Sustainability Directors earn a median salary of $82,000.

(By the way, I have to share an experience I had last evening that sent my blood pressure through the roof. I was covering the local city council meeting for a local radio station's website. The business on the agenda was conducted efficiently, but then a bunch of kids in grades 2 through 6 from a local Catholic school were brought into the council chambers. In waves of three at a time, they spoke to the council about how the city needs to "up its game" regarding "climate change," citing recent floods, droughts and such as some kind of evidence of a crisis. Basically laid down demands, in their adorable little way, that the city organize a task force and set goals with measurable results. I left their  horrifying little display out of my story about the meeting. Who the hell put these kids up to this? How far up the chain of decision-making at this school did this germinate? The council members and the mayor all sat there, charmed, or at least looking like it.  A lady from the administration explained to the students that "we are taking measures along these lines, but here at City Hall we call it sustainability." I came real close to jettisoning all trappings of an objective-journalist bearing. Alas, I have bills to pay, so I kept my trap zipped.)

You may have heard about the Trump administration initiative, led by US ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, to end worldwide criminalization of homosexuality. You'd think that everyone with an unconventional sex life would be pleased. but you just can't win with some people. Out magazine says, "Rather than being about helping queer people around the world, Trump's campaign looks more like another instance of the right using queer people to amass power and enact its own agenda."

Seven members of The UK's Parliament have left the Labor Party. Over the party's marked increase in antisemitism.