Harvard Chooses DEI over Academics

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

 

Claudine Gay is off the hook. Harvard’s president brought opprobrium upon herself following a glib performance before a congressional committee last week. There, she and two of her counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania displayed conspicuous tolerance for acts of antisemitic harassment. The same performance cost Penn president Liz Magill and a university board member their jobs, and some assumed that Gay, too, would find herself on the wrong side of Harvard’s stakeholders. That was a misreading of the extent to which Harvard has committed itself to the pursuit of ideological objectives over and above, you know, academics.

 

The academy has contorted itself into hideous logical pretzels in its effort to shield Gay from consequences for her actions. The hundreds of Harvard faculty who have rallied around her maintain that calls for Gay’s job are nothing less than a full-frontal assault on academic excellence. But no sooner did they attempt this exercise in subject-changing then was it discovered that Gay herself has little fealty to the tenets of proper scholarship.

 

As the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium and others have now demonstrated beyond any doubt, Gay’s modest contributions to the sum of human knowledge were plagued by plagiarism. This offense, too, was summarily dismissed by Harvard’s stewards. The university has made an exception to its own rules by allowing Gay to update her decades-old work so that it comports with the academic standards to which she should have adhered at the time of their publication.

 

Why are we witnessing this herculean lift on Gay’s behalf? Because, unlike Magill, Gay represents the full flowering of the voguish progressive commitment to social-justice activism. To sacrifice Gay to her critics would be to indict the whole project. It wasn’t her work that propelled her to the august position she occupies. “That’s about the number you’d normally need to get hired as a first-year tenure-track assistant professor at a decent state university,” said New Mexico Associate Psychology professor Geoffrey Miller of the whopping eleven peer-reviewed journal papers Gay published in her academic career. Rather, her ascension to Harvard’s president represented the culmination of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.

 

Don’t take my word for it. The Harvard Crimson makes that case in its write-up of Gay’s appointment to Harvard’s presidency. They emphasized her biography and accidents of birth over her academic accomplishments. Her foremost challenge as president following the “shortest selection process in almost 70 years” this summer was not, in the Crimson’s estimation, anything having to do with scholarship. Rather, it was the challenge presented to colleges and universities after the Supreme Court’s decision striking down race-based admissions policies as unconstitutional. Her introductory video is replete with the vacuous polysyllabic pablum that serves as the secret handshake among administrative professionals — the lingua franca of the academy that advertises little more than an individual’s membership in the club.

 

This form of institutional capture is self-perpetuating, as evinced by a letter in support of Gay’s continued tenure from Harvard’s black faculty. In it, the faculty insisted that the notion Gay would not “stand boldly against manifestations of antisemitism” a “specious and politically motivated” charge, notwithstanding all the evidence that Gay has not, in fact, stood boldly or otherwise in opposition to the antisemitic harassment Harvard’s students have endured. The letter is a threat. The consequences they foreshadow are implicit but not hard to ascertain. In a contest between the inviolable tenets of DEI and a commitment to the free and open exchange of ideas governed by timeless codes of academic conduct, DEI wins.

 

Upon assuming her role, Gay devoted outsize attention to the psychological trauma endured by students who objected to the Court’s striking down of racial litmus tests in the admissions process. “To our students, faculty, staff, researchers, and alumni — past, present, and future — who call Harvard your home, please know that you are, and always will be, Harvard,” she said. Much to the detriment of Harvard’s reputation, she seems to have been right about that.