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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