https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/07/claudine-gays-tyranny-of-dei/
With her ousting this week, Claudine Gay has the dubious honour of being both the shortest-lived president of Harvard University and its most notorious. As significant as America’s most prestigious university is to the rest of the world, producing the future leaders who will rule over the nation that we are all both privileged and cursed to live downstream of, few outside the American elites pay much attention to it, or notice when the deckchairs are shuffled among its leadership team. Not so for Gay. Her resignation – following her woeful response to anti-Semitism on campus and revelations about rampant plagiarism in her academic work – made headlines the world over. For it was a pivotal moment in the clash of values that has been raging in American academia, and spilling out across the West.
This clash centres on DEI, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ – an ideology that, like so many of the most malignant ideologies today, is presented as something only a monster could oppose. In truth, while dolled up in the language of anti-racism, DEI represents a divisive, racialised worldview – and a corresponding set of policies – that has taken hold in higher education, corporate capitalism and the state. Roughly speaking, it amounts to the institutionalisation of left identity politics and all the ugly things that come with it: concepts of permanent black victimhood and permanent white guilt; racial discrimination revived in ‘progressive’ garb; and an authoritarian bureaucracy to punish wrong-think and ‘protect’ minorities from anything that might offend their allegedly delicate sensibilities. Even at a university, where merit and free speech are supposed to reign.
At Harvard, Gay was its totem. She became president two days after the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down racial preferences in higher education, euphemistically referred to as ‘affirmative action’. Harvard was a key focus of the case. Its policies were found to have discriminated against Asians to free up places for blacks and Hispanics. The policy had been exposed as an immoral failure. Not only were students – including non-white students – being discriminated against, but the most well-to-do black Americans – many of them the children of wealthy black immigrants – had long been affirmative action’s primary beneficiaries. Gay vowed to respect the ruling, while hinting that Harvard would find a way around it. ‘We will comply with the court’s decision, but it does not change our values’, she said. Harvard would ‘continue opening doors’.
This was pure doublespeak. Gay, who was dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences before she ascended to the presidency, presided over policies and initiatives aimed at closing minds and carving students up according to race. Christopher Rufo, the conservative crusader who helped expose Gay’s rampant plagiarism, has catalogued the materials pushed on Harvard students by Gay’s diversitycrats. They propagandised that America is marred by ‘systemic racism’ and ‘weaponised whiteness’. Students, Rufo notes, were encouraged to ‘unpack’ their ‘white privilege’, ‘male privilege’ and ‘white fragility’ – a word, popularised by author Robin DiAngelo, used to demonise those who dare push back against the lectures of race experts.
How DEI fuels anti-Semitism
