Year Begins With Major Defeat for DEI as Harvard’s Claudine Gay Resigns
Claudine Gay announced Tuesday that she is resigning from her position as president of Harvard University. The decision, she said, was “difficult beyond words.”
Public resistance to Gay had escalated across the nation in recent months as she repeatedly displayed the toxicity of the “diversity, equity, and equality” movement, which she has made central to her career and purpose. Her tepid initial response to Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israel on Oct. 7 exposed DEI’s radical ideological adherence to the belief that Jewish people are “white” oppressors who perpetrate “settler colonialism” via the Jewish state. Her equivocation before Congress on whether calls for genocide against Jews are violations of Harvard’s code of conduct showed the total moral bankruptcy of the DEI movement. And her plagiarism scandal — which demonstrated that her professional record is a total farce and that all there is to her (professionally) is her DEI activism — revealed that DEI does not concern itself with merit, the advancement of truth, or integrity; for DEI, only advancing the ideology matters. (READ MORE from Ellie Gardey: Harvard Students Question Presidential Selection Process Amid Claudine Gay Plagiarism Scandal)
The DEI movement, which seeks active discrimination on the basis of race for the sake of achieving racial equity, has already been under attack in recent months as a result of the wave of anti-Semitism that has emanated from colleges, the ideology’s foremost headquarters, since Hamas’ terrorist attacks. But Gay’s resignation shows that opposition to the DEI movement — which she embodies and to which she is totally committed — is significant and mainstream enough to lead to the resignation of the president of Harvard University.
Gay’s career is entirely founded on DEI. As dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the position she held prior to Harvard’s presidency, her focus was addressing “structural inequality.” She “reactivate[ed]” a “cluster hire in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration”; sought a “visual culture” that “celebrat[ed] the diversity and vitality of our present” (i.e., she sought to reduce the number of pictures of white men on campus); implemented a “strategic vision for inclusive excellence”; worked to “address[] the racial disparities in our administrative leadership”; and appointed the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ “inaugural Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.” Gay also oversaw Harvard’s patently racist and racially discriminatory admissions office for five years. The office gave black applicants a 1,000 percent greater chance at admission than white and Asian applicants in the first four deciles of academic achievement, from which Harvard primarily draws its students. Gay additionally sought the “denaming” of anything at Harvard associated with past injustices, including the Winthrop House, which was named after John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her ouster is thus a referendum on basing everything on “racial equity.”
In explaining the resignation, both Gay and Harvard’s governing board sought to blame racism. Gay, for her part, wrote that it was “frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” while Harvard’s board wrote that attacks against her have “taken the form of repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol.”
Others on the left have blamed Gay’s resignation on conservatives’ ideological efforts. For example, Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard, told the New York Times: “I am saddened by the inability of a great university to defend itself against an alarmingly effective campaign of misinformation and intimidation.” Similarly, when the Harvard Crimson editorial board wrote to voice its support for Gay’s continuance in office, it asserted that criticism toward her had been “manufactured by conservative activists intent on discrediting higher education.” Evidently, the Left is aware that backlash against Gay represents an indictment of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo, who published the initial public report on Gay’s plagiarism, wrote following her resignation, “My strategies, however unorthodox, have proven successful at exposing corruption, changing public opinion, and moving institutions.”
Harvard’s search process to select Gay as its president took five months. Her tenure likewise began just over five months ago. Harvard now begins its search for its next president, a process that may also take as long as Gay’s tenure.
The major test for determining whether Gay’s actions have been sufficiently revelatory of the harmful nature of DEI is whether Harvard’s succeeding president exhibits her same level of ideological commitment to the cause.
READ MORE from Ellie Gardey:
The Loser of the Year: Ibram X. Kendi
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