By the same token, the efforts of Harvard and Ms. Gay, echoed by left-wing media mouthpieces, to make her demise a story of racism indicates weakness—that the regime cannot or will not defend itself on the merits, but rather must resort to smearing those exposing the rot endemic to that regime.
Sustained pressure could still cause the DEI house of cards to topple—albeit not without a war with the left’s stranglehold over the elite academy, and, by extension, all the institutions it feeds, at stake.
Harvard Corp. accepted Ms. Gay’s resignation “with great sadness.” It thanked Ms. Gay for her “deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.” It lauded Ms. Gay for devoting “her career to an institution whose ideals and priorities she has worked tirelessly to advance.” And it touted Ms. Gay’s “extraordinary contributions.”
Far from condemning her, the Harvard Corp. coronated her.
Only five paragraphs in did the board note, “with sorrow,” that Ms. Gay “acknowledged missteps”—without any detail of what those “missteps” were—and had “taken responsibility for them.” It then quickly pivoted to how “she has shown remarkable resilience in the face of deeply personal and sustained attacks,” including “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol directed at her.”
Harvard Corp. wants you to believe that Ms. Gay is a victim, you see. It wants to make the real scandal here one of bigotry. It wants the public to conflate the claimed senders of despicable messages to Ms. Gay with those who scrutinized her record to make the case that she was unfairly targeted as Harvard’s first black woman president—not for conduct infinitely more egregious than what the University of Pennsylvania’s white president Liz Magill had resigned over.
Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations if the idea is that Ms. Gay should be held to a different standard than anyone else for allowing genocidal anti-Semitism to build and erupt on her campus; for her morally bankrupt congressional performance, which did perhaps irreparable damage to Harvard’s reputation; and for her alleged unethical conduct as a scholar, which would likely result in expulsion for mere mortals.
That essentially one Republican member of Congress, a prominent Harvard graduate, and a handful of conservative journalists exposed all this only adds to the DEI regime’s shame, explaining in part the unhinged reaction to Ms. Gay’s resignation.
Ms. Gay’s own statements parallel those of the Harvard Corp.
To read the letter, one will search in vain for any explanation for why she was compelled to resign. She merely says that after having consulted with the Harvard Corp., “it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
But why is this a “moment of extraordinary challenge?”
And what did Ms. Gay do to make herself the “focus?”
“For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned,” she wrote.
Could the criticism have had anything to do with her own words and actions?
Ms. Gay again notes that she’s had bigoted invective hurled at her. But the legitimate criticism on the merits is what forced her to step down. Not crazies sending emails or making phone calls. In her piece, Ms. Gay again elides all this. She laments only that she had “neglected to clearly articulate” what she really believed about calls for Jewish genocide on campus in falling into a “well-laid trap” by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. It was Republican pouncing and seizing that was at issue, apparently. Further, despite “[duplicating] other scholars’ language” in her thin paper-writing record, Ms. Gay wrote that she “proudly” stands by her work “and its impact on the field.”
Ms. Gay continued in her opening to the op-ed: “My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”
But alas, DEI undermines those very ideals by subordinating merit and virtue to left-wing ideology cloaked in the moral garb of promoting the downtrodden based on their place in the identitarian victim hierarchy.
“Diversity” is code for left-wing ideological conformity among people of different colors and sexes.
“Equity” is a call for social engineering so that representation in every realm is proportional to America’s identity makeup—as opposed to letting individual achievement without regard to immutable characteristics drive the composition of our institutions.
“Inclusion” excludes everyone that DEI deems an oppressor—through no fault of their own, since DEI judges people on bases entirely out of their control, save for their politics.
Where DEI pervades, excellence wanes, illiberal ideological monocultures flourish, and hatred and division take hold.
Today, the hatred is directed most visibly at Jews, who are cast by DEI adherents as the most “white”—a people repeatedly persecuted throughout history as the oppressor par excellence. But Jews are the canary in the coal mine for America and the Judeo-Christian West.
Ms. Gay is right when she says in The New York Times that the scandal she sits at the center of is one “skirmish in a broader war.”
But that “war” is not about “[unraveling] public faith in pillars of American society.”
Rather, it’s about restoring those pillars hollowed out by our credentialed pseudo-elites to strength and splendor by ensuring that institutions once again prioritize merit—virtue and excellence—over politics (the racial Marxism of DEI).
Harvard has shown neither contrition for the failures culminating in Ms. Gay’s resignation nor willingness to otherwise hold itself accountable or change.
For that reason, it’s incumbent on the public to maintain pressure on it and all schools to radically restructure in pursuit of academic rigor and excellence.
We dismantle the DEI regime, or the DEI regime will dismantle us.
