- Harvard seems to have embraced the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) movement with great enthusiasm, fostering a far-left ideology, impacting free speech and academic excellence, and potentially leading to its downfall as a premier institution of higher learning.
- No one, including the self-proclaimed paragon of DEI, Bernie Sanders, seems to know what terms like ‘Equity’ and ‘Equality’ in the DEI framework are supposed to mean.
- Claudine Gay, appointed to champion DEI at Harvard, must be held accountable for pushing radical views and undermining academic standards, leading to controversies and clashes with faculty members.
- The impact of DEI as a movement warrants investigation, considering the negative outcomes such as a decrease in applications and potential risks in different industries.
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” opined Samuel Johnson on the vagaries of altruistic efforts and their eventual outcomes. The normal dictum here is that benign acts of kindness and compassion should advance humanitarianism within society and help the less fortunate to navigate their passage in life better. And hasn’t this indeed been the credo of the liberal Left that magnanimously aims to rid our society of all the evils and push us on the path that befits our social conscience? However, lofty words and noble intentions remain just that – words and the ground realities belie the intended consequences, leaving the system and society prone to severe manipulation and exploitation by grifters. It is in this frame of context that you have to deconstruct the DEI quagmire that was proffered to us as the holy gospel but is fast revealing itself to be the devil’s doctrine.
Let us scratch the surface here and look at the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) monster in context with Harvard, considering that Harvard is the Mecca of all things learning and knowledge and that the global academia ecosystem is cued on to Harvard’s code of ethics, in all matters. More so, considering that all the bad news from Harvard today emanates from DEI.
Wayward Harvard
Nobody in their sane mind will ever deny that, conceptually, DEI stands for the betterment of society. “To be clear, Harvard’s commitment to ideals like diversity and inclusion is good — when done correctly. Fostering a racially diverse, gender-balanced community helps to create nuanced conversations that enhance education and critical thinking.” [1]
Let’s go the whole hog on DEI, deemed Harvard. What could go wrong? As it turns out, plenty of things. For starters, the very definition of the components of DEI. What does ‘Equity’ really stand for? And what exactly is the difference between equity and equality? Nobody knows for sure. When questioned, Bernie Sanders didn’t know.[2] For the rest of the primetime TV experts, it is just a “wormy” word that can be twisted to a nefarious end.[3]
Enter Ms. Claudine Gay, a mediocre academic but with the right gender and the right tone of melanin, and brimming with the same set of revolutionary ideas, precursory to DEI. And thus began the slide of Harvard on all counts – from academic excellence to free speech on campus.
Soon, Harvard and other institutions warped and distorted DEI to replace “the basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.” [4]
Like the trendsetter it yearns to be, Harvard was one of the pioneers off the blocks to capitalize on the new consciousness generated out of the George Floyd murder and embrace the DEI framework without even subjecting it to the academic rigor that it supposedly applies to all precepts before onboarding them. They needed a champion to embody and imbibe these new-found DEI principles and ensure that Harvard maintains its edge as the groundbreaker and trailblazer in its academic conceptions and abstractions. Enter Ms. Claudine Gay, a mediocre academic but with the right gender and the right tone of melanin, and brimming with the same set of revolutionary ideas, precursory to DEI. And thus began the slide of Harvard on all counts – from academic excellence to free speech on campus.
There is a curious memo from August 2020 that then Dean Claudine Gay sent to the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences – written while she was shortlisted for Harvard presidency, “People across the world have risen up in protest against police brutality and systemic racism, awake to the devastating legacies of slavery and white supremacy like never before. The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” [5]
If you unpack this poppycock alphabet soup by Claudine Gay, it is clear as daylight that this memo forms the bedrock of all the anti-semitism that’s rocking American universities currently and that it served as an action plan for all the ugly protests at Harvard and other college campuses around America that demanded the extermination of the Jewish people.
As per her memo, Claudine Gay believes Harvard’s obligation is to combat “systemic racism” and “structural inequality.” And that “racial justice” is Harvard’s primary goal, with “anti-racist action” being its preferred methodology. As per Claudine Gay, Harvard needs to be metamorphosed from a haloed portal of higher learning to a brainwashing center and foster a rabid, militant, far-left-wing ideological belief system. Are you seeing the grave problem here? In a normal world, Claudine Gay’s nonsense of a memo would have set the alarm bells ringing in the higher echelons of management, but Harvard gave her the top job precisely because of her incendiary point of view. What is worse is that this memo also indicates that everything that Claudine Gay testified at her disastrous Congressional hearing was simply a cold-blooded lie.
…students who could play the role of ‘victim of systemic racism,’ no matter their actual lived experience, had a much better shot of getting in than those who couldn’t or wouldn’t, regardless of how much better the latter group’s test scores and grades were.
The problem at Harvard stems from the very initial process of admissions, which not only discarded the merit of students seeking entry but redefined merit to mean race. If you consider the Students for Fair Admissions cases, it is quite evident that Harvard favored those “who claimed to suffer trauma due to their race, especially if they were black or Latino, no matter how objectively privileged they were. In essence, students who could play the role of ‘victim of systemic racism,’ no matter their actual lived experience, had a much better shot of getting in than those who couldn’t or wouldn’t, regardless of how much better the latter group’s test scores and grades were. And if you were an Asian applicant, even off-the-charts academic performance couldn’t earn you a fair shot at getting in, regardless of how many actual difficulties you and your family had faced.” [6]
The first lecture Harvard conducts for its students delivers an uncanny lesson to be learned – “Market your identity-based oppression. And if you’re not oppressed, start acting like you are.” No wonder Harvard needed a snowflake like Claudine Gay as the head of the varsity.
Maudlin Claudine
Harvard couldn’t have found a better trophy poster child of wokeism than Claudine Gay. Besides being a woman of color, she just had the right mindset. She mouthed all the correct phrases that were in lockstep with the newly emerging ideology and terminology that redefined racism and colonialism. And she put it all out in the open for the academic world to see, as her 2020 memo indicates. It never really mattered to the Harvard Board that Claudine Gay probably has the thinnest academic excellence record, with the least number of papers and zero books published.
The first lecture Harvard conducts for its students delivers an uncanny lesson to be learned – “Market your identity-based oppression. And if you’re not oppressed, start acting like you are.” No wonder Harvard needed a snowflake like Claudine Gay as the head of the varsity.
Her position was further aggravated as even her barest-minimum academic papers turned out to be all plagiarized. Despite regular exposés in the news media, Claudine Gay and Harvard hung on, only for her to resign on New Year’s Eve. But wait, there is more to this story: when her resignation letter was put through a plagiarism checker, it too showed traces of plagiarism in its text.[7] The point here is that despite humongous support from the Harvard Board, the Left-liberals, and their attendant media mouthpieces, Claudine Gay turns out to be a person with not enough competency credentials to run a hotdog stand at Harvard, let alone run the entire varsity that shapes global opinion. However, as a champion of DEI, it would be worth checking how much she really empowered her fellow academicians of color. Sadly, Claudine Gay fails miserably on that count, too.
Claudine Gay coordinated a witch hunt against an economics professor, Roland G. Fryer Jr., after his research did not reveal the racial disparities that were in sync with the race victimhood card played by the likes of Gay. Mind you, Roland Fryer is an acclaimed whizkid in his domain. At 30, Fryer became the youngest black person to receive tenure at Harvard. The MacArthur Foundation declared him a genius in 2011. In 2015, Fryer won the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, given yearly to the most promising economist under 40. But then, why did Claudine Gay hate such a celebrity? Because Fryer’s research upends many commonly held assumptions about race, discrimination, education, and police violence. “She felt threatened by Roland Fryer’s heterodox research agenda because he published papers with uncomfortable data that do not fit the politically correct narrative — such as the fact that there are no racial differences in officer-involved shootings. So Claudine Gay lynched him.”[8]
Then came Ronald Sullivan – a law professor at Harvard Law School and its first African-American Dean, who had taken on the infamous Harvey Weinstein as a client. Claudine Gay went out of her way to drag Sullivan’s good name through the mud. As Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, the Law School was not exactly her responsibility. Yet, in an unprecedented move, she made sure to commission a survey of students to gauge how they felt about Sullivan. “The college dean, Gay, commissioned this survey. They’ve never done this before—survey from the students. And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results. Why did they never release the results? They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came back positive for me, and it didn’t fit their narrative because most of the students were fine. So they never released it. And, you know, I challenge them to this day. Release it,” Ronald Sullivan went on to challenge Claudine Gay later on Lex Fridman’s podcast. [9]
It is alleged in the academic circles that Claudine Gay nursed a grudge against Sullivan as he had previously called Gay’s investigation into Fryer “deeply flawed and deeply unfair” and that investigators “weighted the credibility of white witnesses far above minority witnesses,” that there was “no semblance of due process or the presumption of innocence,” and that “It shows what the current [#MeToo] movement, some blood in the water, and good coaching [of witnesses] can produce.”
Suffice it to say that Claudine Gay has gone from being a poster girl of DEI to its worst possible ambassador in mere years. It goes on to show that whenever institutional meritocracy has taken a back seat, the institution takes a huge hit, even when it has a heritage of around four centuries, like Harvard.
Dangers of DEIfication
DEI has been a meal ticket of many victim-card peddlers in academia and media, and naturally, the DEI bureaucracy has a lot of support in the Left-liberal circles.
DEI has been a meal ticket of many victim-card peddlers in academia and media, and naturally, the DEI bureaucracy has a lot of support in the Left-liberal circles. This is largely evident in how a section of the mainstream media has gone after Bill Ackman and Christopher Rufo, deriding their educational degrees from Harvard and even going after Ackman’s wife and kids in retribution for bringing down Claudine Gay from Harvard’s presidency. But couldn’t the media have done better if it had portrayed the worthiness of DEI-related sciences and the scholarship therein? The moot point is how DEI disciplines fare when put to the test.
…a paper on dog humping won an award for exemplary scholarship in DEI.
Since 2018, a bunch of researchers have been putting DEI subjects to the test at the highest scholarship levels and making a documentary about their DEI escapades. Their objective is that if they get at least a few absurd papers in the best DEI-related journals, they could force open the eyes of leading educational institutions like Harvard. Eventually, seven papers got accepted before their ridiculous story broke out. It would have been funny if it was not so tragic. “Our dog-humping research paper used black feminist criminology to interpret bogus data and concluded that we can repair rape culture in humans by emulating dog training methods on men. It won special recognition for excellence.” [10] Imagine the absurdity of the situation that this absurd, satirical hoax of a paper on dog humping won an award for exemplary scholarship in DEI.[11] It only gets more ludicrous from here as they “rewrote a section of Mein Kampf as intersectional feminism, and this journal has accepted it.”
The researchers got canceled after the story broke out, but the point here is the sheer amount of state funding this asinine and farcical DEI gets over hard science and the unwarranted respect it evokes amongst the creme de la creme.
Concluding Remarks
Claudine Gay and Harvard have done a thoroughly bad PR job for DEI. Since Gay’s disastrous Congressional testimony, Harvard College has received 17% fewer applications for early admission from high school seniors this year, the lowest total in four years, according to the school’s website.[12] Yet, DEI remains their top priority despite having “eclipsed the end that it is meant to serve: a well-rounded education that challenges students to think critically not only about their ideas but the scrutiny of others.” [13]
Asian students and Indians, in particular, have a lot to lose in this new scheme of DEI things, considering how “people were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues.”[14] James Kirchick puts it concisely: “Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews.” [15] He might as well have added “> the Hindus” at the end to articulate it further. DEI indeed needs to die before Harvard brings it to the shores of Bharat while looking to replace their much-touted Critical Race Theory sham with the Critical Caste Theory.
The question is: how long before the world wakes up to Harvard and DEI? They have already ravaged the media and academia ecosystems, along with whichever industry they have managed to penetrate.
The question is: how long before the world wakes up to Harvard and DEI? They have already ravaged the media and academia ecosystems, along with whichever industry they have managed to penetrate. Recently, a United plane was nearly totaled after a hard landing. Why? Because of a co-pilot – a former flight attendant who was fired and rehired through United’s DEI program, despite being on a list to not return to United. [16] How long before DEI formally starts killing people? No wonder a colored ex-DEI officer was utterly disillusioned with DEI: “If a Klan member wanted to make sure black people never moved upward in any kind of way, societal or economic, this whole DEI thing is a great strategy” [17]
America needs to see the endgame and see the larger picture here. Today, Harvard is teaching America’s elite students to hate Israel as a white colonial settler state. And guess which is the next prominent white colonial settler-state that these very students will go on to hate? Obviously America![18] It won’t be long before the battle for survival will be drawn between DEI and America… and DEI needs to die for America to survive.
Citations
[1] Hajjar, Carine. 2024. “After Claudine Gay, Harvard needs to reform DEI culture.” The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/03/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay-dei/.
[2] National Review. 2023. “Bernie Sanders Can’t Explain Difference Between Equality and Equity.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgt8PlKTVNQ.
[3] Maher, Bill. 2023. Real Time with Bill Maher on X: “What is the difference between equity and equality? We didn’t know. Bernie Sanders didn’t know. Nobody knows. So we asked linguistics professor @JohnHMcWhorter about this “wormy” word. WATCH: https://twitter.com/RealTimers/status/1636152724109795328?lang=en
[4] Weiss, Bari. 2023. “Bari Weiss: End DEI.” The Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/end-dei-woke-capture
[5] Thompson, Bradley. 2023. “C. Bradley Thompson on X: “I have received from inside Harvard sources a smoking gun August 20, 2020 memo …” https://twitter.com/CBradleyThomps1/status/1733529080828502141.
[6] Loury, Glenn. 2023. “A Peek Behind the DEI Curtain – Glenn Loury.” https://glennloury.substack.com/p/a-peek-behind-the-dei-curtain.
[7] Amuse. 2024. @amuse on X: “SHOCK: Disgraced Harvard President Gay released her resignation letter this morning. I ran the letter through Grammarly’s plagiarism checker and to my surprise it found evidence of plagiarism. Full text of her letter is the next post in this . https://twitter.com/amuse/status/1742261717025927582.
[8] Brunet, Christopher. 2022. “The Curious Case of Claudine Gay – by Christopher Brunet.” Karlstack. https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay.
[9] ibid
[10] Boghossian, Peter. 2024. Peter Boghossian on X: “It is important to understand that DEI is not simply an admin arm of higher ed but an ideological apparatus that grew from a body of academic literature. https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1744139671708303426.
[11] Nayna, Michael. 2024. Michael Nayna on X: “It gets even more absurd, a hoax paper about dog humping won an award for exemplary scholarship. The research & credentials that prop up the DEI movement are a farce, yet it still informs policy, absorbs vast amounts of state funding . https://twitter.com/MikeNayna/status/1743083900984025162.
[12] Lorin, Janet, Mark Schoifet, and Peter Martin. 2023. “Harvard College Sees Early Applications Drop 17% From Last Year.” Bloomberg.com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-15/harvard-college-sees-early-applications-drop-17-from-last-year.
[13] Hajjar, Carine. 2024. “After Claudine Gay, Harvard needs to reform DEI culture.” The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/03/opinion/harvard-claudine-gay-dei/.
[14] Weiss, Bari. 2023. “Bari Weiss: End DEI.” The Free Press. https://www.thefp.com/p/end-dei-woke-capture.
[15] Kirchick, James. 2015. “Rock, Paper, Scissors: A Guide to the New Victim Politics.” Tablet Magazine. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/victimhood-olympics.
[16] St, Ashley. 2024. “Ashley St. Clair on X: “Hey @united On July 29, a United plane was nearly totaled after a hard landing Who was flying that aircraft? Was the co-pilot a former flight attendant who was FIRED and then rehired through United’s DEI program despite being on a.” https://twitter.com/stclairashley/status/1743346866186514878.
[17] Loury, Glenn. 2023. “The First Thing You Learn at Harvard.” Glenn Loury. https://glennloury.substack.com/p/the-first-thing-you-learn-at-harvard.
[18] Yang, Wesley. 2023. Wesley Yang on X: “The decolonial ideology that frames Israel as the paradigm case of settler colonial violence has a larger, more important target in mind: the United States of America, Israel is an attempted proof of concept for how such societies can be. https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1734340266830528654.