If you are not a close follower of American college campus politics, you are likely to be unfamiliar with a woman who has been making headli
If you are not a close follower of American college campus politics, you are likely to be unfamiliar with a woman who has been making headlines for over a month in the US and increasingly around the world. The lady in question, one Claudine Gay, was President of Harvard, one of the most renowned educational institutions in the world, until earlier this week when she resigned over plagiarism allegations.
Why does or should anyone care about this? Well, Gay’s decision to step down is the culmination of long-running efforts to address the cancer at the heart of Western societies: the idea that the way to fix injustices of the past is to commit injustices today.
Following her resignation, Gay’s defenders were quick to emphasise the racial dimension of this story. Ibram X. Kendi, for example, tweeted that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism”.
And while his claims of this being a racist campaign are absurd, it is true that Gay was not targeted solely for seemingly adopting the personal motto: “I came, I saw, I copied”. She became a focus of major Harvard donor concerns and a media campaign led by Christopher Rufo – a man I would approvingly describe as the diversity industry’s greatest enemy – in the light of her mind-boggling testimony in Congress. Her statements, given alongside the Presidents of MIT and UPenn, revealed the core of the ideology the entire Western education system is based on in all its glory.
The oppressor vs. oppressed mindset which is - no matter how uncomfortable this may make some readers - cultural Marxism, says simply that white people and “over-performing” minorities like Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans should be discriminated against in hiring and student applications in favour of “underprivileged groups”. As a result, college campuses on which regular meltdowns have occurred for a decade over such “hate speech” as dressing in a Mexican costume for Halloween found themselves with nothing to say about pro-Hamas demonstrations and the harassment of Jewish students on their campuses in the wake of the October 7 attacks.
But even that is not painting the full picture. Yes, Gay, a darling of the diversity industry, was targeted for her plagiarism following her complete failure of leadership in recent months. But she was also partially targeted because of the assumption, if not outright conclusion, that the reason she was appointed in the first place was, to put it mildly, not merit alone.
After all, Gay’s primary achievement is not stellar academic work, exemplary managerial skills or even charisma and force of personality. She was appointed President of Harvard following a distinguished career in fields like “improving diversity” and researching “race and identity”. To put it bluntly, many people believe that she is a diversity hire and the reason she pushed the DEI ideology that eventually led to her appalling testimony in Congress is that she is herself a beneficiary of it.
To be clear, she has not been forced out for being black. She has been forced out for being placed in a position for which she had neither the skills nor experience to succeed and then failing in it. This is the rotten legacy of affirmative action, which, as Thomas Sowell explained decades ago in 90 seconds and in many of his books since, hurts the very people it is attempting to help:
If allowing students to enter universities in which they are destined to fail for the sake of diversity harms them, then what might be said about hiring people for leadership roles in major institutions in which they are destined to fail? This harms not only them but also the people who work and study at those institutions.
To be clear, I have no evidence that Claudine Gay was hired ahead of better, more qualified candidates. But it is not hard to imagine that a position holding the prestige, reputation and nearly $1-million-a-year salary the role of Harvard President commands could have been filled by someone with more executive experience, academic achievements and other relevant expertise.
This is the other curse of the counterproductive attempts to artificially increase the presence of “underrepresented” groups in employment and education. Because everyone knows that some people are routinely given unfair preferential treatment, it becomes easier and easier for the rest of us to suspect specific individuals of being there for reasons other than merit.
So here is the truth: we must return to pursuing the goal of a colour-blind society immediately. There is no such thing as positive discrimination. All discrimination is wrong. And because it is wrong, it will create precisely the kind of resentment that Claudine Gay is now facing. She is seen as the standard-bearer of the DEI industry and is being treated as such by people who have had enough.
All of us must be treated on the content of our character. When we refuse to follow this principle, we hurt everyone: white, black, hispanic, Asian, Jewish. A healthy society relies on the equal treatment of all individuals. The fact that we have to say this out loud in 2024 is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.
DEI must be dismantled. This will take years, perhaps decades. But, in recent weeks, for the first time in a long time, we have grounds for optimism.
