The Debate That Claudine Gay Is Evading

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

If you could question leaders of academic institutions under oath, like a member of Congress, forcing them to contend with any aspect of higher education in America, what would you ask them?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

On Tuesday, Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard’s president. She had been under pressure to go due to allegations of plagiarized passages in her published scholarship––academic misconduct that was flogged in recent days by longtime critics opposed to her for unrelated reasons. (Gay defended her academic record in an op-ed published Wednesday.)

What is at the core of that bigger conflict?

“My hope is that by stepping down,” Gay wrote in The New York Times, “I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

But I don’t think that Gay’s most significant critics, whether measured by the strength of their arguments or by their ability to influence stakeholders within the university, seek to undermine excellence, openness, or truth at Harvard. Rather, the core of their conflict with Gay, granting some variation among individual critics, concerns the desirability of the policies that she presided over in the realm of DEI, an acronym that stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” but that is better understood as one left-leaning faction’s contested interpretation of those values, much as the Patriot Act was one right-leaning faction’s contested interpretation of patriotism.

(This debate is confusing in part because DEI can refer to or encompass so many distinct policy and personnel questions. For example, should race be a factor in faculty hiring? Should DEI statements be required of job applicants? Should the Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan have lost his position as a faculty dean for joining Harvey Weinstein’s defense team? Should trigger warnings be used on class syllabi? Should Harvard aim for equality of opportunity or outcome? Disaggregating and debating such questions should be a priority at the institution.)

The hedge-fund billionaire Bill Ackman is easily Gay’s most significant antagonist––an alumnus of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, he has given tens of millions of dollars to his alma mater over the years. In recent weeks, he has become an outspoken advocate for new leadership at Harvard, often on X (previously known as Twitter), where he publishes long essays for his more than 1 million followers.

After Gay’s resignation, he wrote, “I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.” What followed is too long to quote in full, but this passage is representative:

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology …

Some of you reading that passage believe it is a relatively accurate account of the prevailing ideology in higher education today. Others of you believe that it is a straw man. Wherever you fall on the spectrum between those poles doesn’t matter for my purposes: My claim here is that, right or wrong, millions of Americans, including many liberal professors at universities, are earnestly convinced that what is variously called DEI or “wokeness” or “social-justice ideology” or “the successor ideology” or “the identity synthesis” has corrupted higher education.

Some even believe that DEI itself is racist––they argue, for example, that Harvard’s discriminatory treatment of Asian American applicants, which the Supreme Court declared unlawful last year, amounted to prejudicial treatment of a racial group based on pejorative stereotypes.

Their faction is not going to stop fighting administrators they believe to be complicit in the corruption of the university absent real engagement with their critiques, whether in the form of conversations or debates or attempts to forge compromises among factions with different values.

Too often, however, their critiques go unaddressed while their characters and psychologies are attacked. “For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal,” Gay wrote in the Times, adding, “I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution … Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”

I don’t doubt that some of Gay’s critics are cynical opportunists and others are racists who would reflexively distrust the competence of any Black woman hired to lead Harvard. Still others may be reprobates who, say, cheat orphans, steal penguin eggs, or stick chewed gum in airport charging outlets. But constructive academic elites don’t focus scarce public attention on their most easily discreditable critics––they engage the most formidable criticism they can find.

Gay’s narrative, in which she stands for “excellence, openness, independence, and truth” while all antagonists worth mentioning seek to destroy those goods, is as transparently self-serving as it is unconstructive––deficiencies best illustrated by comparison to a Harvard colleague who does much better. Danielle Allen is a scholar who first came to my attention via her brilliant commentary on the Declaration of Independence. She was a co-chair of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which delivered recommendations in 2018. Reflecting on that work and campus DEI efforts more generally last month in The Washington Post, she did not elevate her least-sympathetic critics to malign them and their motives. She surfaced strong critiques of Harvard’s approach and wrestled with how to improve upon it. Her conclusions don’t happen to mirror my own, but her constructiveness is exemplary.

Death, and Then Something

The logician Kurt Gödel believed in an afterlife. In Aeon, Alexander Englert recounts his argument for it, as Gödel presented it to his own mother:

In a letter dated 23 July 1961, Gödel writes: “In your previous letter you pose the challenging question of whether I believe in a Wiedersehen.” Wiedersehen means “to see again”. Rather than the more philosophically formal terms of “immortality” or “afterlife”, this term lends the exchange an intimate quality. After emigrating from Austria to the United States in 1940, Gödel never returned to Europe, forcing his mother and brother to take the initiative to visit him, which they first did in 1958. As a result, one can intuit here what must have been a deep longing for lasting reunification on his mother’s behalf, wondering if she would ever have a meaningful amount of time with her son again. Gödel’s answer to her question is unwaveringly affirmative. His rationale for belief in an afterlife is this:

“If the world is rationally organised and has meaning, then it must be the case. For what sort of a meaning would it have to bring about a being (the human being) with such a wide field of possibilities for personal development and relationships to others, only then to let him achieve not even 1/1,000th of it?”

Ask Me Anything

Perry asks, “Do you think democracy is dead in the U.S.?”

No. I think American democracy is more alive today than it was for the entirety of the time that the franchise was restricted on the basis of race or was denied to women. Beyond the franchise, I believe that American democracy is better for the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment; and like millions of people from countries across the world who want to immigrate to America, I am long on its future as a place where people of all sorts will be able to make better lives for themselves. That is not to minimize concerns about American democracy, or to deny that keeping it will require vigilance and struggle. But I think it will prevail in my lifetime.

Do you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future installment? Email conor@theatlantic.com or reply to this email.

Provocation of the Week

At Notes From the Middleground, Damon Linker continues to explain why he is worried about both Donald Trump and what he perceives as counterproductive overreactions to Donald Trump:

Where we find ourselves is deep in the throes of a legitimacy crisis, with one of our two parties—the GOP—increasingly wedded to the populist line that our institutions are corrupt, and that the high-minded appeals to principle favored by the elites who run these institutions conceal their own efforts to hold onto power in defiance of democratic public opinion. I think this is largely wrong or at least wildly exaggerated … But whatever its origins, the resulting legitimacy crisis is very real and much broader than Trump himself.

And … the fact that the legitimacy crisis began on the right is ultimately irrelevant. It now threatens to upset every aspect of our politics. Those in favor of disqualifying Trump under the 14th Amendment seem unconcerned that tens of millions of their fellow citizens would consider that a thoroughly illegitimate move—the very antithesis of the “rule of law,” and instead, a rather blatant and bold power grab by Trump’s political opponents to disenfranchise Republican voters.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.