It’s about Carole Hooven.
Never heard of her? I didn’t think so. But Hooven’s story speaks volumes about the real problem at Harvard, and in American universities more broadly: the lack of academic freedom for diverse perspectives.
We’ve heard the word diverse a lot since Gay stepped down because she was Harvard’s first African American president. I don’t know if she was targeted by her right-wing critics because of her race, as her defenders alleged. Nor do I know if her record of lifting unattributed passages from other scholars should have disqualified her for the presidency.
Here’s what I do know: Harvard talks a good game about diverse views, but it doesn’t actually protect them. And that’s very bad news for higher education.
Hooven had to learn this lesson the hard way. She was a lecturer in the department of evolutionary biology at Harvard when she went on Fox News in 2021 to promote her new book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. During the interview, she said that there are just two biological sexes: male and female.
Hooven made a point of distinguishing sex from gender, which can assume many different forms. “We can treat people with respect and respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns, so understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect,” she said, repeating the term respect three times.
No matter. The director of her department’s diversity and inclusion task force took to Twitter (now X) to denounce Hooven’s “transphobic and hateful” comments. “This dangerous language perpetuates a system of discrimination against non-cis people,” the director added. “It directly opposes our Task Force work that aims to create a safe space for scholars of ALL gender identities and races.”
Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise, was, to quote Talleyrand, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.
Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Philips academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite—in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.
And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed leftwing megaphones like the New York Times and the Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics—and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.