Let’s be honest.
Conservatives didn’t come after former Harvard President Claudine Gay because she had plagiarized some of her academic research. They didn’t come after her because she gave Congress a morally indefensible answer to the question of whether calls for genocide of Jews on campus violated speech codes.
They came after her because she represented what her right-wing critics believe are the crimes of the diversity, equity and inclusion movement, and because the very existence of DEI is offensive to those who believe we live in a meritocracy. Basically, they decided she had to go, then reverse-engineered a campaign against her.
“While her resignation is a victory, it is only the beginning,” Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the charge against Gay, wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Rufo also happens to be the architect of the phony panic over critical race theory. “If America is to reform its academic institutions,” he wrote, “the symbolic fight over Harvard’s presidency must evolve into a deeper institutional fight.”
Gay is now a notch on the belt of the conservative ideologues seeking to undo what they consider to be left-wing ideological excesses pervading American universities.
“TWO DOWN,” trumpeted New York MAGA Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik. Her calculated questions about whether students who called for the genocide of Jews in the aftermath of the gruesome Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel violated university speech rules also led to the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill.
This is yet another salvo in the conservative war against the “woke” forces of higher education. Nearly half the states have proposed or passed laws outlawing DEI initiatives on public campuses.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor and Harvard alum who pushed for Gay’s ouster, has demanded that the members of the Harvard board who hired her should step down and that the university’s DEI office be closed.
“Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged,” wrote Ackman in a 4,000-word statement posted on X.
He makes some good points. But Ackman’s statement also illustrates the particular cluelessness of privileged people who refuse to acknowledge that history did not begin last week, or last year, or that individuals are subject to social and political systems well out of their control.
And yes, while the color of your skin, your gender or sexual orientation won’t automatically condemn you to a life of oppression and poverty — that argument is a straw man — people possessing those traits have in fact been oppressed and disadvantaged and, in many cases, still are. Acknowledging that doesn’t make you some wide-eyed wokie. It means you’ve paid attention to American history.
I’ve spent plenty of time on college campuses in the last decade, and it’s clear to me that one of the most precious aspects of diversity — viewpoint diversity — has taken a back seat to political correctness, which is tragic.
In the Washington Post last month, Harvard professor Danielle Allen, who teaches political philosophy, ethics and public policy, wrote about her experiences trying to balance competing values on campus. A proponent of DEI, she also — quite reasonably — believes it needs to be reformed: “We have been focused so much on academic freedom and free speech that we have neglected to set standards for a culture of mutual respect.”
This might seem like a counterintuitive take from a liberal scholar. But on further examination, it isn’t at all.
Allen is a realist: “Across the country, DEI bureaucracies have been responsible for numerous assaults on common sense” — certain mandatory diversity training initiatives come to mind — “but the values of lowercase-i inclusion and lowercase-d diversity remain foundational to healthy democracy.”
They surely do, and despite the efforts of folks like Rufo, they always will.
Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
