Moral responsibility shouldn’t take a back seat to a poisonous, divisive ideology
Harvard president Claudine Gay rightly — if somewhat belatedly — resigned from her position after a disastrous appearance before Congress last month that was followed by a steady stream of plagiarism accusations.
While Gay has many detractors, particularly after her congressional appearance where she failed to summon up the moral clarity needed to condemn antisemitism, she also has her supporters, including civil rights leader Al Sharpton.
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In a statement, Sharpton said he stood by Gay and denounced the attacks on her, calling them “an assault on the health, strength and future of diversity, equity and inclusion.”
To which the only response can be: Good, the more attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion the better. DEI policies have infected universities in the United States and Canada to such an extent that meritocracy isn’t just frowned upon, it’s spat upon.
Sharpton would have us believe that the resignation of Gay is about racism. “This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” he said in his statement.
But it’s not about race. It’s about accepting responsibility. Gay screwed up to such an extent that the only tenable response was to resign or be fired.
Gay, a social scientist and a former dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences, purportedly “thinks rigorously and imaginatively,” according to Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation who chaired the committee that hired Gay as president in December 2022.
But instead of being rigorous and imaginative, the Harvard president appeared evasive and shifty when she was in front of Congress and was questioned by New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik in early December.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment,” asked Stefanik.
“It can be, depending on the context,” said Gay, failing to summon up the mental acuity needed to answer in a straightforward manner.
A similarly vague answer was given by Liz Magill, president of Penn University. “It is a context-dependent decision,” she said.
A third president, Sally Kornbluth, the head of MIT, said that if the calls were “pervasive and severe” there might be an investigation.
It shouldn’t take great intellectual rigour to say that calling for the genocide of Jews is hate speech, pure and simple. Calling for the genocide of Blacks, or whites, or gays, or anyone, is hate speech. This isn’t context-dependent, nor does it need to cross over into conduct, it can be called out for what it is: hateful, inflammatory language.
And that’s what all three should have had the intelligence, the moral clarity and the common sense to recognize.
Gay later apologized for her testimony: “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
Let us be charitable and assume that her “guiding truth” is nothing more than a fancy way of saying she needed to remind herself about common decency.
Magill had the good grace to resign shortly after her appearance. Gay quit on Tuesday. Kornbluth is still hanging in there.
Appalling as these congressional exchanges were, worse testimony preceded it as the three presidents defended their racist DEI policies, even as they came under withering attack by Burgess Owens, a Black congressman from Utah.
Owens told the hearing that he experienced segregation in the ’60s and was now seeing it again on the campuses of all three universities.
He asked Gay about the Black-only, Hispanic-only and gay-only graduate ceremonies at Harvard.
“I oppose segregation,” answered Gay. “Well, I do too, but it’s happening on your campus,” responded Owens.
He asked Kornbluth about “chocolate city” — an area of Black-only dorms where whites are excluded.
“At MIT students affiliate voluntarily with whichever dorm they want to,” said Kornbluth. “It’s not exclusionary, it’s actually positive selection by students,” she said.
Owens was having none of it: “We are talking about segregation,” he said.
Finally, he asked all three presidents whether they would end DEI policies if it was found that DEI had a direct link to the growth of hateful groups. Owens cited Black Lives Matter, Antifa and pro-Hamas supporters.
However, so wedded are they to DEI policies that not one of the presidents would abandon their beloved and divisive ideology.
Gay’s disastrous appearance before Congress should have sealed her fate, but stubbornness is more than a match for moral responsibility.
Allegations of plagiarism began to surface shortly after Gay’s appearance, including in her 1997 Harvard dissertation.
The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, characterized the claims this way: “The allegations — many of which are individually minor but span Gay’s entire academic career — cast scrutiny on her scholarship.”
Only in a universe where diversity, equity and inclusion ruled would a president such as Gay be defended. No matter that she could not provide the moral leadership needed to condemn antisemitism, no matter that her academic record was dogged by plagiarism allegations, for too many people all that mattered was to champion the poisonous, splenetic and amoral ideology that is DEI.
National Post
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