Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Is Claudine Gay the Gift That Keeps On Giving?

By George Leef

Monday, December 25, 2023

 

Perhaps we should be happy that Harvard is determined to keep Claudine Gay as its president. Nothing could do more to focus attention on the institutional rot the university has been suffering for many years.

 

Professor William Jacobson contemplates here the harm that has been done to the “Harvard brand.”

 

He notes that Claudine Gay is a non-scholar whose academic publications wouldn’t get her tenure at a low-level college. Ah, but Harvard no longer cares about scholarship — it is clearly concerned only about having a leader who will push the “diversity” agenda full throttle. In that regard, she was in on the nasty attack on Professor Roland Fryer because he (a scholar of repute) wrote a paper that undermined the leftist narrative about race. He also writes that she plagiarized the work of (among others) Professor Carol Swain.

 

Jacobson writes, “Gay is a child of privilege who learned how to play the game among other elites — she stole from Swain and shut down Fryer on her path to the presidency.”

 

Bullseye! That’s what DEI is all about — a game that elites from “underrepresented” groups can play to get ahead. You don’t have to be good; you just have to say the right things, which won’t be challenged by anyone else who’s playing the game. Harvard’s choice of Claudine Gay as president is cut from the same cloth as the thousands of academic decisions these days where having the right ancestry and pledging fealty to the idea that America is irredeemably racist and must be completely transformed puts you at the top of the ladder.

 

Yes, some Americans believe that, but I think there are far more who think that individual merit ought to outweigh diversity and ideology.


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