Sowing the Wind
How did Gay's tenure become such a disaster?
The same ideology that triggered outrage against Claudine Gay is what protected her until her last days as president: a commitment to identity over truth.
It is, at this point, not news to point out that a dedication to the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion animates much of the Harvard administration. But while concerns over wokeness were previously somewhat abstract, its consequences have been brought into full view.
This past semester, the extreme left was forced to take its ideas to their logical conclusions. In front of the world, it defended calls for genocide. In spite of Hamas’s terrorist attacks, pro-Palestinian protesters insisted that the Jewish people were colonizers, making them the true villains. Fitting the Israel-Palestine conflict into the convenient oppressor-oppressed narrative required downplaying—or, more sinisterly, justifying—the October massacre.
Adherence to this narrative also compelled the administration to turn a blind eye to this antisemitic hatred. Christians chanting “globalize the crusade” or white nationalists protesting the fact that the College is integrated would be almost certainly reprimanded. Yet, supporters of Hamas were allowed to engage in parallel actions because they are considered protected minorities. Harvard, rated last in the country for free speech, suddenly cared deeply about the concept when it applied to so-called historically marginalized groups.
After her congressional testimony on the protests, Claudine Gay said that she “failed to convey what is [her] truth.” But there is no such thing as “my truth.” Gay’s repeated use of the phrase hints at how the University’s practice of academic freedom has become so unbalanced. Its early defenders would argue that academic freedom was necessary because it imputed a degree of humility or that engaging with incorrect ideas could still be intellectually valuable. But they would not—or should not—have conceded that “my truth” and “your truth” could be different and simultaneously true. To do so makes academia pointless except as a tool for exerting political influence.
The move to justifying academic freedom on the grounds of moral relativism necessarily had wider consequences for the university. Without truth as our lodestar, the university and its members had to find a new way to relate to one another. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it retreated into the categories like race, given a new gloss under DEI so as not to offend progressive sensibilities.
Today, people at Harvard are often reduced to their identities. This process starts even before classes do. During orientation, freshmen are asked to describe and rate themselves across eleven categories, including ethnicity, sexual orientation, and religious affiliation.1 These are the categories through which Harvard students are conditioned to view each other. These are also the categories through which their behavior is viewed. What is acceptable or unacceptable, what is good and evil—it all depends on the color of your skin and the gender on your ID.
That attitude pervades Harvard from top to bottom. Gay’s identity was a focal point of her inauguration; DEI was mentioned nineteen times and Gay’s identity as a black person, woman, or a daughter of immigrants another sixteen times.2 A member of the Student Advisory Committee to the presidential search went so far as to argue that Gay was someone who “by background… carries a different perspective from her predecessors” and admitted that search efforts were framed against the then-ongoing conversation about affirmative action.3
This undue emphasis on her identity also fueled the attempts to salvage her presidency—even amidst allegations that would have destroyed the career of any other academic. For weeks, plagiarism accusations were dismissed as racially motivated insinuations. Never mind the fact that Gay had only published eleven journal articles by October 2022; it was deemed racist to question her academic record. Once her plagiarism became clear, for a time it seemed that the university could not allow its first black female president to be pushed out. Even now, Claudine Gay still refuses to confess to her academic misconduct. The university’s pursuit of diversity impacted not just its grasp on moral truths, which has long been tenuous, but also its commitment to scholarship as a process by which to learn new truths about the world. Only after the damage became truly unbearable did Gay resign.
Ultimately, Harvard’s obsession with identity created the chaos of this past semester. It defined the administration’s twisted response to both antisemitism and Claudine Gay’s academic integrity. Insofar as people are judged by their color rather than their character or actions, and insofar as competence is ignored in favor of identity, Harvard will struggle to remove itself from scandal.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Erinna, “Thinking Inside the Box,” Salient 3, no. 3, 2023, pgs. 16-17.
The University took down its video of Gay’s inauguration. The Salient used this same quote from the recording (when it was public) in our report on her inauguration: Auctores Varii, “The Inauguration of President Gay,” Salient 3, no. 2, 2023, p. 20.
Ibid.
Thumbnail image credit: Chensiyuan via Wikimedia Commons
I applaud the Salient for speaking the Truth. I fear, however, that the pervasiveness and power of those speaking their own ‘truths’ will render Gay’s removal as a mere speed bump on the road to whatever the ultimate goal is of the left. After all, they did not fire her. Nonetheless, those dedicated to open debate must continue to fight the good fight. Thank you for all you do!
Am I the only Harvard observer, for whom it was a revelation that a senior Harvard faculty/administrator is paid somewhere north of $900K? And why is Claudine Gay allowed to keep such situation after her failed Presidency? I smell a deal between her and the Board. She keeps her job and her plagiarism is spun away. She does not throw the Board under the bus for having preset the tone she would take before Congress and the way in which they would all stonewall in the aftermath.