The Patriot Post® · In Brief: How to Fix Harvard
Claudine Gay finally resigned last week amidst allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, as well as outrage over her pathetic failure to condemn genocidal anti-Semitism. Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager and alumnus of Harvard University took to the pages of the Free Press with ideas on how to fix what’s really wrong with Harvard. (Note: His wife, former MIT professor Neri Oxman, has been hit with new allegations of plagiarism as well.)
I first became concerned about Harvard when 34 student organizations, early on the morning of October 8 — before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza — came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel “solely responsible” for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be? I wondered.
He visited Harvard himself to investigate.
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem. It was simply a troubling warning sign — it was the “canary in the coal mine” — despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard but the educational system at large. I came to understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form. Rather, DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
Ackman realized that under the DEI construct, everything and everyone is racist, which he proceeds to explain at length with numerous examples. Thus, his big takeaway is critical:
DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.
Fortunately, given Ackman’s extensive experience in the real world as opposed to academia, he has a number of ideas for fixing Harvard and other institutions of higher learning. Universities are, after all, businesses and need to be run as such, perhaps by promoting presidents from the business world rather than the academic one. Harvard and others must rededicate themselves to being meritocratic and nurturing free speech. The entire board of Harvard should be replaced, and the school should consider a new constitution.
He concludes:
It is time we restore veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.