Fight fiercely Harvard

      The president is venting his fury — a sentence I could embroider on a pillow and use to begin every column from now until 2029, since off-gassing his bottomless magisterial displeasure is the spoon stirring our national existence, now and for the foreseeable future.
     His vendetta against Harvard University, our nation's preeminent institution of higher learning, has raged for weeks: barring it from accepting foreign students, yanking back its tax exempt status, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support. I'm expecting the Army Corps of Engineers to fill Harvard Yard with coils of concertina wire next.

John Harvard

     My first thought was sympathy for Harvard's international students. Thousands of young people, a full quarter of the student body. Sure, many are no doubt scions of wealth, pampered and privileged and shipped off to lay the foundations for a life of same. Somebody has to pay full tuition.
     But some must have scrabbled their way there. Imagine studying in a wretched Third World slum. Hard work and smiling fate contrive to get you into Harvard, and then, while you're proudly wearing your new maroon sweatshirt around your shantytown, the president this buffoon blocks your way because ... because ... remind me, what does Trump have against Harvard?
     Oh right, they didn't bend their knee fast enough, didn't provide enough dirt on foreign-born students so he could choreograph their removal to Salvadoran El Salvadorian prisons.
     Not that I have a particular fondness for Harvard — though the boys at the Lampoon were indulgent to me when I was writing my college pranks book, allowing me the run of their library and archives. We shouldn't focus too long on one harm, because there are so many.
     The president is a whirling dervish of destruction, undermining our National Park Service here, our public health system there. It's hard to keep up.
     On Friday, he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for the crime of hanging pictures of Black folk. That hurt, because under her tenure, the gallery became perhaps the most vibrant wing of the Smithsonian. I love visiting it.
     This is a war on history — a literal white-washing — and all of us have a part to play, by being diligent stewards of the past.
     For instance, discussing the current assault, I told my wife: "Harvard was occupied by the British."
     What I meant was the place is very old, has been through a lot and will get through this, too.
     The very old part is true — founded in 1636, our nation's first university.
     But as often happens when you fire history from the hip, I missed. Plug "Did the British occupy Harvard?" into Google, and its AI chatbot pipes up with, "Yes, Harvard buildings were occupied by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War. In 1775, the Provincial Congress commandeered Harvard's buildings, and they were used to house 1,600 British soldiers, according to the Harvard Gazette."
     Being a trained professional, I then read the Harvard Gazette article Google AI linked to. Which did not say that. Sixteen hundred British troops weren't housed at Harvard; it was 1,600 American troops. An important distinction.
     How can everyone keep going on about how AI will eat our lunch, take our jobs and become our overlords? It can't even read a lucid article and differentiate between the British, who occupied nearby Boston, and the colonials, who settled in Cambridge, waiting for George Washington to assemble his Continental Army.

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Google AI learns fast. On Sunday it was this.

On Monday it was this.