I’m reading “How a Proxy Fight Over Campus Politics Brought Down Harvard’s President/Amid plagiarism allegations and a backlash to campus antisemitism, Claudine Gay became an avatar for broader criticisms of academia” by Nicholas Confessore, in The New York Times.
Dr. Gay’s defenders… warn[ed] that her resignation would encourage conservative interference in universities and imperil academic freedom. (Though some experts have rated Harvard itself poorly on campus free speech during Dr. Gay’s tenure in leadership.)…
What a delicious parenthetical!
That link on “poorly” goes to the FIRE website, where you have to do a search to see where Harvard ranks. I did the search (and you can too). We’re told the “speech climate” is “abysmal.”
But of course, this article, outside of its parentheses, portrays conservative critics of academia as the threat to freedom. Note that the FIRE analysis is looking at “student free speech and open inquiry,” while the NYT article has Gay’s defenders concerned about “academic freedom,” which connotes the interests of faculty.
Back to the NYT article:
———
Rifts dividing students, faculty and donors have widened
👀
SCOOPLET + 🧵Danielle Allen, a highly respected Harvard poli sci prof, interviewed for the presidency in 2022.
She didn't get past an early round.
Worth asking why Gay got the job while Allen didn't come close.
I'm not saying I know. But it sure wasn't scholarship…
— Alice (@AliceFromQueens) January 3, 2024
Ronald Sullivan deleted this one word post written in response to former Harvard president Claudine Gay's resignation: "Karma".
As Dean of Faculty of Arts and Science, Gay refused to defend Sullivan's right to provide legal counsel to an unpopular client and played a key role… pic.twitter.com/WCPTG42I5G
— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) January 3, 2024
Mara Gay — a member of the NYT editorial board and one of America's most infamous diversity hires — is perhaps best known for claiming on live TV that $500 million divided among 327 million people would give each person $1 million. https://t.co/P8uOwaQBSs
— i/o (@eyeslasho) January 3, 2024
You’d think nothing in the article could top the headline, but then you see @AP’s definition of scalping. https://t.co/BaC9cJaBjs pic.twitter.com/WORZ2IqISp
— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) January 3, 2024
As much as I would like to blame Claudine Gay for her shenanigans, I think most of the fault lies with "us," the people who designed, supported and/or tolerated the current systems of affirmative action, diversity, equity, inclusion and all the other nonsense for the past 50… pic.twitter.com/Ud8kNxKwxA
— Thomas Sowell, The Genius of… (@AlanWolan) January 3, 2024
And:
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.
Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. More.
I don’t like playing the racism tabulation game, but, given that Claudine Gay’s defense has amounted to smearing her opponents as racist, let’s put it to the test, comparing Claudine Gay’s racism to that of her critics.
Evidence that Gay is racist:
–Oversaw a discriminatory admissions program ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
–Led a discriminatory DEI bureaucracy that sought, among other things, to reduce the visual presence of “white men” on campus
–Minimized antisemitism and the call for the violent “decolonization” of Jews
–Supported policies that reduce individuals to racial categories and judge them on the basis of ancestry, rather than individual merit
Evidence that Claudine Gay’s critics are racist:
–Claudine Gay claiming, but providing no hard evidence, that some unknown person or persons sent her mean emails