Let’s be honest.
Conservatives did not attack former Harvard president Claudine Gay because she had plagiarized some of their academic research. They did not pursue her because she gave Congress a morally indefensible answer to the question of whether calls for the genocide of Jews on campuses violated speech codes.
They went after her because she represented what her right-wing critics believe are the crimes of the diversity, equity, and inclusion movement, and because the very existence of DEI is offensive to those who believe we live in a meritocracy where everyone starts at one level. playing field and excellence floats to the top. Basically, they decided she had to go and then designed a campaign against her.
opinion columnist
Robin Abcarian
“While his resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning,” Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the charge against Gay, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. It turns out that Rufo is also the architect of the false panic around critical race theory. “If America wants to reform its academic institutions,” he wrote, “the symbolic fight for the Harvard presidency must evolve into a deeper institutional fight.”
Perhaps Gay, despite having weaker academic credentials than previous Harvard presidents, would have been a superlative president, a phenomenal fundraiser, a visionary university leader. We will never know.
It is now a notch in the belt of conservative ideologues seeking to undo what they see as left-wing ideological excesses prevalent on American universities.
“TWO DOWN,” trumpeted New York MAGA Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik. Her calculated questions about whether students who called for the genocide of Jews following the horrific October 7 Hamas attack in Israel violated university speech rules also led to the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill.
This is yet another salvo in the conservative war against the “woke” forces in higher education. “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader,” Gay wrote last week in a New York Times essay. “For the opportunists who push cynicism about our institutions, no victory or overthrown leader exhausts their zeal.”
She is absolutely right. Gay’s ouster, according to the Wall Street Journal, “has emboldened Republican lawmakers and their conservative allies, who believe they have new momentum and a new playbook to reverse what they see as the creeping takeover of American education.”
That effort was already underway. Nearly half of states have proposed or passed laws banning DEI initiatives on public campuses.
Last year, Republican presidential hopeful and MAGA specialist Governor Ron DeSantis staged a high-profile takeover of the public New College of Florida, a liberal arts bastion with a large LGBTQ+ population. In: athletics. Out: gender studies. The diversity office was eliminated. (Rufo, not coincidentally, is one of the newly appointed members of the school’s board of directors.)
Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor and Harvard alumnus who pushed for Gay’s ouster, demanded last week that the Harvard board members who hired her resign and that the university’s DEI office be closed and its staff fired. .
“Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman does not mean that one is necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged.” Ackman wrote. in a 4,000-word statement published on X.
He makes some good points in his long thread, including that a climate of fear on campuses has led to self-censorship, that “microaggressions are treated as hate speech,” and that “campus speakers and professors with unapproved opinions They are yelled at, rejected, and canceled.”
But Ackman’s statement also illustrates the particular cluelessness of the privileged who refuse to acknowledge that history did not begin last week or last year, or that individuals are subject to social and political systems that are beyond their control. .
And yes, while the color of your skin, your gender, or sexual orientation will not automatically condemn you to a life of oppression and poverty (that argument is a straw man), people who possess those traits have in fact been oppressed and disadvantaged. and, in many cases, they still are. Acknowledging that doesn’t make you a wide-eyed Wookiee. It means you’ve paid attention to American history.
I’ve spent a lot of time on college campuses over the last decade, and it’s clear to me that one of the most cherished aspects of diversity (diversity of viewpoints) has taken a backseat to political correctness, which is tragic. A few years ago, I had conversations with students at UC Berkeley, the cradle of the freedom of expression movementwho argued that speakers like then-popular conservative contrarian Milos Yiannopoulos should not be banned.
In the Washington Post last month, Harvard professor Danielle Allen, a contemporary of Gay who teaches political philosophy, ethics, and public policy, wrote about her experiences trying to balance competing values on campus. As an advocate for DEI, she also believes, quite rightly, that it needs to be reformed.
“We have focused so much on academic freedom and freedom of expression,” he wrote, “that we have neglected to set standards for a culture of mutual respect.”
This might seem like a contradictory view from a liberal academic who was co-chair of Harvard’s Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging, which produced an 82-page plan. focused on ways to promote inclusion and mutual respect between very different sectors. But if we examine it more closely, it is not at all.
Allen is a realist: “Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous attacks on common sense” (certain mandatory diversity training initiatives come to mind), “but the values of lowercase i inclusion and diversity of lowercase letters remain fundamental for a healthy life.” democracy.”
They surely will, and despite the efforts of people like Rufo and DeSantis, they always will.
