The Patriot Post® · Claudine Gay's Bulletproof Vest of DEI

Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, is still the subject of heavy — and warranted — criticism having to do with her congressional testimony deeming Harvard students’ chants for genocide against Israel only anti-Semitic “depending on the context,” as well as the recent revelations of her numerous alleged instances of plagiarism in her various scholarly works (including her dissertation).

Her counterpart at the University of Pennsylvania, Liz Magill, resigned under pressure as a result of her testimony in which she stated the same thing Gay did — i.e., campus freedom of speech only applies when it’s radicals calling for genocide against the Jews. While Magill resigned, Gay has doubled down.

As our Nate Jackson covered previously, Harvard rallied around her by standing in support of both her plagiarism and her refusal to condemn anti-Semitism on Harvard’s campus. Gay has two big things going in her favor for the leftist ideologues that inhabit the once-hallowed halls of Harvard: one, she is a woman, and two, she is black. She hits two of the three “oppressed” classes in the reigning Marxist DEI victimhood hierarchy.

The president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, has also come out in defense of Gay. Frankly, it’s the weakest and yet most predictable defense imaginable: Anyone who criticizes Gay is racist. In a post on social media, Johnson wrote: “Enough is enough. Harvard President Claudine Gay is a distinguished scholar and professor with decades of service in higher education. The recent attacks on her leadership are nothing more than political theatrics advancing a White supremacist agenda.”

So, pointing out that she is a scholar who has lifted entire passages from others without acknowledgement to those said authors is … racist? Pointing out that students are wrong for calling for genocide is … racist? That dog ain’t gonna hunt.

Carol M. Swain, one of the authors and scholars that Gay didn’t credit in her writings, put it best in an article for The Wall Street Journal: “Harvard can’t condemn Ms. Gay because she is the product of an elite system that holds minorities of high pedigree to a lower standard. This harms academia as a whole, and it demeans Americans, of all races, who had to work for everything they earned.”

In other words, the very act of Harvard protecting Gay from the consequences of her blunders and intellectual theft is the real racism.

Gay should be “proud” after all; she herself helped to construct this ivory tower of job protection for herself. As journalist and researcher Christopher Rufo explains: “Gay quietly built a ‘diversity’ empire that influenced every facet of university life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as the dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university’s racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its ruling earlier this year, Gay said that it was a ‘hard day’ and defended the university’s policies, which were deemed discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to comply with the letter of the law, while remaining ‘steadfast’ in her commitment to producing ‘diversity’ — a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to evade the law in practice.”

Gay is the head of the DEI snake that has its coils in a chokehold around Harvard. Her rise to president was a direct result of Harvard purposely misunderstanding what racism is in favor of critical race theory dictates. Harvard now has two outright strikes against it in the original definition of racism — one against Asian and white students during the admissions process, and another for failing to defend its Jewish students from anti-Semitism on its own campus.

At the end of the day, perhaps it’s best Harvard showed its true colors. It’s losing lots of donations because keeping Gay as president shows the entire world the ideological corruption within the once-storied academic institution. It also gives potential students and their parents a clear view of what that institution stands for as well as provides a fresh, more urgent motive to build a better alternative to Harvard. The DEI monster only knows how to destroy. It’s a return to academic excellence, meritocracy, the teaching of how to think and not what to think, and a standard of morality that’ll foster such flourishing.

As Rufo states in a recent spate of pieces on the subject: “Recent campaigns against critical race theory, gender ideology, and DEI have eroded trust in educational institutions. Elites in tech and finance, such as hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, have become increasingly comfortable criticizing left-wing orthodoxy. Meantime, the Left’s rhetorical magic — smearing critics as ‘racist,’ ‘sexist,’ and ‘homophobic’ — has lost its power, due to years of unjustified use.”

The Marxists have pushed too far, and perhaps it’s not too late to re-sow the garden the leftist academics have left in ashes.