What a difference a week makes. Just days ago, news broke that Harvard’s comically underqualified, disastrously inept, and morally obtuse president Claudine Gay has resigned. Hers will be the shortest tenure of any Harvard president on record. Not exactly a good sign for Harvard’s first black president.
This much, we must say, could have been avoided. Had Harvard chosen a president based on merit, not race, they may have found plenty of better candidates for the post who are also black. But for the Harvard Corporation that runs the school, it wasn't enough to have a launch a search based on scholarship, they needed someone who checked all the boxes and so that was their priority. They sought a black, woman, leftist who would uphold principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, otherwise known as the principle of marginalizing the so-called oppressor, dismantling the dominant culture, and ensuring that Harvard continued on its path as a Marxist indoctrination center that would disrupt the American leadership class.
Had Harvard wanted to appoint a black president, it could have turned to the likes of Professor Carol Swain – who, among others, Claudine Gay plagiarized – or, if they wanted a less controversial choice with existing Harvard connections, to someone like Henry Louis Gates, who at least has the distinction of being a critic of Critical Race Theory and its resentful, undercooked creator, Derrick Bell. Moreover, while we would like to believe that the next Harvard president will be selected entirely based on merit, we are not naïve; the school has not exactly shown itself as a bastion of courage, lately. We fear that best that we can hope for from Harvard, at least for now, seems to be an ideological commissar with actual credentials and an academic record that consists of more than the Copy + Paste function in Microsoft Word.
Not, of course, if Harvard alumni like the crusading Bill Ackman have anything to say about it. In fact, it may be Ackman himself who makes the difference between Harvard rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, or swerving to avoid the proverbial iceberg of DEI. For example, Ackman’s statement slamming DEI in terms most conservatives have been using for years has been praised even by unlikely figures such as Matt Yglesias. “DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports work on behalf of the so-called oppressed,” Ackman thundered. Just so, and we hope he continues to force Harvard to face the music, including by forcing resignations from its board, as he suggests he will do.
However, make no mistake, while there is definitely still work to be done, and we are mindful of the wisdom of pessimism like that evinced by Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, the removal of the likes of Gay from an office and university that she had befouled is a victory not only for conservatives, but for American education. If you doubt that, you have only to look at the reaction from the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of DEI.
“Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black (sic) people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism,” hyperventilated famed “antiracist” scholar and accused embezzler Ibram X. Kendi about Gay’s firing.
“Academic freedom is under attack,” whined Nikole Hannah-Jones, architect of the celebrated historical fanfiction known as the 1619 Project. “Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.”
“The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black (sic) woman,” cried Marc Lamont Hill of BET News. Then, when asked if this included conservative activist Candace Owens, he then hilarious backpedaled: “This is the problem. Y’all really think Black (sic) people are interchangeable.”
We hate to state the obvious, but no, Professor Hill, we do not think black Americans are interchangeable. It was people like you, who chose a nonentity like Claudine Gay solely because she was a black woman (and because she helped bring DEI to Harvard), who treated black people as interchangeable. Qualifications? Leadership ability? Collegiality? Who cares; she’s a black woman. That’s your standard, not ours, so why not Candace Owens? Why not the first black woman you can find in the Boston phonebook, if that’s all it takes? Don’t tell us that you now care about individual attributes or qualifications. If you did, you wouldn’t insist on making a fetish of skin color and sex. The President of Harvard is not an adult film star, Professor Hill, their race and sex don’t matter to the job.
No, Nikole Hannah-Jones, black women will not be made to pay. Bigoted hustlers like you will be made to pay. In fact, it’s blindingly insulting that you think all black women are like that. Come to think of it, maybe the first black woman in the Boston phonebook might be an improvement; she at least, might have a smidgeon of common sense. In fact, she almost certainly would be more likely to know how to live within a budget than the rest of Harvard’s administration.
But it is Kendi’s statement where we think the cause for celebration comes in. Because Kendi, a man whose SAT score would qualify the average white student for nothing more than understanding the systemic transmission of French Fries to customers, has somehow managed to state a profound truth, once you get past all the weasel words. Because unlike his peers, who pretended nonsensically that Gay’s defrocking was an attack on all black people, Kendi included a revealing caveat: namely, that it was only an attack on all black people who “are not reinforcing the structure of racism.” Translated from “race hustler,” this effectively means that any black person who believes in merit, hard work, being on time, or even rational thinking (all of which were fingered by an embarrassing Smithsonian Exhibition in 2020 as “white values”) is in the clear. Which is to say, most black people, who only a hardened racist would mistake for sharing the worldview of Ibram X. Kendi, have nothing to worry about. However, Kendi (and his less disciplined peers) are right to be afraid – afraid, in fact, that they will be canceled.
And that, we think, is the real triumph of Claudine Gay’s firing. For almost a decade now, it has been de riguer in elite institutions to throw people out of positions that they are qualified for on the grounds of being “problematic” (read: in any way committed to values that work, rather than ones that sound good to #Resistance twitter). “Cancel culture” was widely understood as a way to punish both the Right and (perhaps even more significantly) the liberal Left for having the audacity to exist.
And yet now, the president of Harvard was just – there is no other word for it -- canceled for being too left-wing.
Let us repeat that: the president of Harvard University was just canceled for being too-left wing.
Let’s be clear: that an event like this could be possible would once have been as inconceivable as the Pope being excommunicated for being too devoutly Christian. It is a seismic shift in global politics that Harvard – by some accounts, the fons et origo of elite American culture – has been forced to eject the architect of its own surrender to DEI. Yes, the University of Pennsylvania had already ejected its (white) president for similar faux pas where antisemitism was concerned in Congress, but meaning no disrespect to UPenn and its alumni (including President Trump himself), UPenn does not have the same hold on America’s elite psyche that Harvard does. Not by a very wide mark. Nor, for that matter, does the resignation of a woke white woman pack nearly the punch as the ejection of Harvard’s first black president – a woman sponsored by Barack Obama himself – from her post. Every university president in America will have to sit up and take notice of that. Every elite cultural institution in America, period, will have to sit up and take notice of that.
Will it be enough to stop the rot of America’s elite institutions? No. That kind of complacency would be fatal. But one of the great strategic errors of woke politics has been to treat all concessions to their position as insultingly insufficient, which essentially makes all such concessions pointless to make, at all. By contrast, we understand that when institutions – even those as corrupted as Harvard – manage to take even the barest step back from the precipice, they deserve the same “attaboy” as a drug addict who spends their first night in rehab. It doesn’t mean that person’s clean; no more than Claudine Gay’s resignation means that Harvard is clean, let alone that elite America is clean of the scourge of DEI. But after this step, the odds are at least a bit better that they will be clean, one day. We want to encourage that. We want to applaud that.
Because if those steps continue, then the result will be good not just for Harvard, or for elite America, but for America itself. You might even say that with enough of these steps, we could finally make America great again.
