Harvard – The Latest DEI Casualty

2023 was a really bad year for Harvard University. The run-away train of diversity, equity and inclusion (a.k.a, “DEI”) has unquestionably been the engine of its demise, which hasn’t stopped yet. DEI is like a cancer that metastasizes throughout an organization and is nearly impossible to eradicate. In recent years it has repeatedly proven to be true for corporations that if you live by DEI, you will die by DEI (or at least take a big hit). Now the same seems to be true for elite universities.

Former Harvard President Claudine Gay is the best example yet of everything that is wrong with DEI. Gay has spent all of her adult life in the liberal cauldron of academia. Before becoming the President of Harvard (the post she just resigned from) she attended Princeton, Stanford and Harvard as a student and then served as a professor at both Standford and Harvard. Dr. Gay’s academic specialty is political science. She distinguished herself in that field of study by winning the Toppan award at Harvard for writing the best political science PhD thesis.

With a background like that from the world’s premier universities and given her notable depth and expertise in political science, it should have been child’s play for Dr. Gay to answer questions in front of the US Congress. Relative to Dr. Gay’s academic achievements, the members of the House Committee on Education who questioned her would barely be considered literate. If that wasn’t enough, the topic of the hearing, and all the likely questions, were well known to Dr. Gay in advance. In theory, she should’ve wiped the floor with them.

That’s not what happened. In fact, the opposite occurred. Dr. Gay, along with the Presidents of MIT and Princeton, put on a thoroughly embarrassing performance that belied their lofty credentials. Is Dr. Gay a complete fraud? The “emperor with no clothes”?

No. We think it would be fairer to describe Dr. Gay as an exceptionally accomplished academic whose very capable mind has been completely and utterly imprisoned by the restraints of DEI. In the Congressional hearing, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik posed a very straightforward question directly to Dr. Gay:

 “At Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?”

In that moment, the universe of all possible responses from Dr. Gay was instantly filtered in her brain by the intrinsic (for her) requirement that some students could be hurt, sensitized, or worst of all, have their right to free speech violated if she simply answered “yes”. Thus, Dr. Gay dove headfirst straight between the proverbial rock and the hard place with her answer:

“It can be, depending on the context.”

As it turns out, uttering those seven words upended Dr. Gay’s career. As one of the world’s leading experts in political science, she had to know how the wolves in Congress would react to that answer. She gave it anyway. She came off as a rank amateur in the rough and tumble game of politics. The aura of being the President of Harvard, a super-elite in the elite world of academic attainment, provided no cover.  She had a choice to make, and she made a poor one.

As with all bad choices in life, there can be any number of unanticipated consequences that turn out to be worse than the original infraction. In this case, Dr. Gay’s failure to give a simple “Yes’’ (that calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules of conduct), spawned a deeper look by others into her past. That background check quickly uncovered several cases of possible plagiarism in her academic writings. Once that ball got rolling, its destructive effect grew exponentially and became unstoppable. Despite Harvard’s Board of Directors efforts to minimize her plagiarism, Dr. Gay was forced to resign as Harvard’s President after serving only six months.

To this day, the Harvard University board of directors continue to defend Dr. Gay and claim she did not engage in any kind of plagiarism. According to the Harvard student handbook, plagiarism is the most severe of academic offenses at the University. Harvard’s board, firmly ensconced on a higher plain of intellectual existence than all the rest of us, concluded that Dr. Gay used “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“. They apparently know the difference between that and plagiarism and the rest of us don’t.

Finally, and it’s not like we didn’t see this coming from 1,000 miles away, Dr. Gay and her supporters are now claiming racism and conservative bullying are solely to blame for what has happened to her. This is straight out of chapter one of the DEI playbook. The racism claim is particularly rich since Harvard itself was found guilty of racial discrimination (against Asian applicants) by the Supreme Court in 2023.

Last year, in front of the Supreme Court, Harvard tried to convince the world they were being more inclusive and diverse by actually excluding one group of applicants based purely on race. The university argued there was a DEI educational benefit for the overall student body by denying admission to some high performing Asian students. This was apparently a very advanced form of DEI heretofore unknown. Back in the real world, the Supreme Court held that Harvard’s admissions programs violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

At least one generation of young people has been lost to the ruin of DEI. It is pounded into them continuously that racism is as bad today as it was in 1860. They are also being convinced that gender and sexual identities are not what we’ve known them to be for thousands of years, but something entirely different. They are told the only way to fix all of this is to wildly overcompensate via the following:

1. Focusing intensely on the racial makeup of student bodies, board rooms, courts, political bodies, faculties, etc. to the exclusion of merit and other matters.
2. Injecting Gay, lesbian, and transgender subject matter into books, TV shows and movies in far greater proportion than is known to exist in the population.
3. Embracing the absurd claim of incorrect pronouns being used to address someone.
4. Including dozens of possible gender identifications and sexual orientations in conversation, on official forms, and as lifestyles.
5. Championing the participation of biological males in women’s sports

These only scratch the surface. Bright and otherwise very capable minds are being “wired” to believe that anyone who disagrees with the above list, or even calls them into question, is evil and part of an abhorrent counterculture. The net effect is to smother the way we converse, think, and exchange ideas by placing a long list of constraints on what we can say lest we offend someone. That usually results in laboriously (and often comically) constructed sentences or just nonsensical words and phrases given in answer to simple questions. Dr. Gay’s responses in the Congressional hearing were a shining example of this.

Thankfully, there is evidence of a self-correction happening at Harvard. Some law firms have stated they will no longer be recruiting on Harvard’s campus, and several Judges are now refusing to hire Harvard law students as clerks. A number of major donors to Harvard are withholding and even taking back their multi-million dollar contributions. Some prospective students have turned down early admission offers to Harvard this year, and overall, the number of applicants to the University has dropped.

We believe DEI has become the most destructive force in our society. It exacerbates racism and divisions. It destroys the ability, particularly for young people, to clearly articulate logical and reasonable thoughts because they must always pass through the DEI filter first. It encourages ambiguity and diminishes confidence. Worst of all, it has poisoned our higher education system. Harvard has been badly tarnished by DEI and it will take time and effort to recover. How many more lessons like this do our prized institutions have to learn?