Claudine Gay’s exit from Harvard put a spotlight on DEI and what it really means.
This piece from the New Criterion puts it in perspective:
Bill Ackman seemed stunned by the real agenda of dei. It is much worse than he thinks. Claudine Gay, as everyone knows though not everyone will admit, is a dei personage. That is, she was hired, groomed, and promoted by Harvard not because of her scholarship, which would hardly qualify for tenure at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. It wasn’t for her fund-raising prowess or her educational vision that she was made president of the most prestigious university in the galaxy. It was because she was a black female whose parents were Haitian immigrants. True, her uncle owns the biggest concrete company on that unfortunate island and she went to school at Exeter. But the fact that Gay grew up in a bubble of wealth and privilege is but a small liability. She may have benefited from the free market. But she did not let that impinge upon her support for the entire smorgasbord of anti-capitalist, woke attitudes about race, gender, race, climate change, race, identity politics, and . . . race.In other words, Gay was the right kind of black. She labored both as a dean and then as president to be what one commentator called “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.” As has been widely noted, as dean she buried complaints that one Harvard scholar, Ryan Enos, had falsified data in a study about public housing. Why? Because Enos had come to the right (i.e., the left-progressive) conclusions in his study.At the same time, Gay went out of her way to destroy the career of the economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. because, though black, he published a study showing that there are “no racial differences” in the use of extreme force by police. When Fryer was implausibly accused of sexual harassment by an assistant whom he had fired, Gay asked Harvard’s then-president to revoke his tenure. That didn’t happen, but Gay helped engineer his suspension without pay for two years as well as the shuttering of his research lab.The point is the dei agenda is an agenda with teeth. Its operation is naturally coercive. It is the latest name for that essentially Marxist—which means essentially totalitarian—project that Gramscians looked forward to when they spoke of the “long march through the institutions.” A critical part of that march is the subordination of everything to politics.
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