The Harvard President Scandal Has Become So Bad It Could Be Killing Off Diversity-Equity-and-Inclusion

Things have not calmed down on the campus of Harvard. Quite the opposite — behind the ivy-choked masonry in Boston, the atmosphere is roiling. After the campus president inflamed the country, we now have faculty members stepping up to decry her stature, and businesses are showing signs of backing away from the once austere character of the college’s graduates, as we are seeing evidence of a viral mindset infecting this school.

You know things are bad when a story like this not only remains in the news cycle but continues to evolve. Following her testimony before Congress over the actions (or specifically, the lack thereof) towards blatantly antisemitic protests and calls for violence against Jews, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay continues to be a fixture. In the wake of her appalling appearance, we have come to see she operates in a realm that is divorced from reality.

I recently covered how Claudine Gay’s words have exposed not only the way DEI has metastasized on her campus and others but also that the press supporting her testimony has also become compromised. For the better part of a year, the media have been scorching Elon Musk for supposedly fostering hate because he has lowered the barricades on expression on Xitter. But one thing still not tolerated on his platform is any content making the use of threatening language. Yet, as Dr. Gay has stood by students calling for the eradication of Israel and similar language, the press appears unbothered.

Yet her testimony was only the beginning of problems for the Ivy League president. Two days after she tried to defend her inaction towards calls for Jewish genocide, claiming that she was essentially a free-speech absolutist, we saw Dr. Gay blocked a debate from taking place at Harvard because one of the speakers criticized her comments to Congress. (Babylon Bee need not comment, it is already parody.)

Then, word began to spread that Claudine’s publishing record was an item of dispute. It was said some of her papers (less than a dozen in total, a woeful amount for a college president) contained plagiarized elements. By now, the examples are numbering into the dozens, with her lifting content from up to 20 sources. When the New York Post looked into this matter — months before Gay’s Congressional appearance – the school allowed its president to go back and correct some attribution errors. Harvard expels students found to be lifting the work of others, but somehow, its leader was granted a Hall Pass. Then, the allegedly free-speech absolutists sent a legal team after The Post for defamation.

This growing cloud of discrediting detail has led to ramifications over the past couple of weeks. Billionaire hedge-fund manager and alumnus Bill Ackman has been leading calls for Gay’s ouster. One prominent law firm has declared it is pulling out of on-campus recruitment. As we also covered, early enrollments are already seeing a significant plunge following this controversy.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of a tidal shift — and possibly one that is tectonic — comes from a letter penned by a sitting member of the Harvard faculty. Mark Ramseyer delivered an email to the rest of the faculty that is scathing in its approach to not just this issue surrounding Claudine Gay but as to DEI, as well.

Eloquent and heartbreaking. From Harvard Law Professor Mark Ramseyer's email to a Harvard list (with permission). I came for my PhD in '99, he came as a prof in '98. We were each publicly attacked for our views in '21.
"Harvard is a vastly less tolerant place than it was when I arrived in 1998. The intolerance is a function of an increasingly large fraction of our colleagues. And we – the rest of us on the Harvard faculty – let it happen. The cancelling, the punishments, the DEI bureaucracy, the DEI statements, the endless list that we could all recite – all this happened on our watch. We saw it happen, but we did nothing. We were too busy. We were scared to speak up.
We – we on the faculty – let Harvard become what it is. The Harvard that we have is the result of our own collective moral failure.
The alumni who are furious are not trying to turn Harvard into something we do not want. They are trying to rescue Harvard from what we let it become.
We as a faculty failed. That is why the alumni are speaking up. That is why we formed the Council on Academic Freedom in the first place." — Carole Hooven (@hoovlet) December 18, 2023

These are not small pronouncements. Stating definitively that the faculty has failed and that the alumni are trying not just to help but “rescue” Harvard speaks volumes about the problems. It is also encouraging. The very fact that someone in the faculty is willing to speak out about the cancerous issue of DEI and declare it to be a “moral failure” is deeply significant. That one of the most esteemed colleges in the nation is looking at this matter in such a way could lead to this becoming the start of other schools walking away from the poisonous institution.

It may have been inevitable that these policies and actions would manifest into this kind of reaction. Claudine Gay is being revealed as someone probably installed under the veil of the DEI insistence on appearances and labels and its diminished focus on standards. For the sake of higher education in this country, one can hope that this signals DEI being recognized for the problem it is and what it has created. (Or, more accurately, for what it has torn down.)

That an austere institution like Harvard had to first endure a lengthy process of diminished import as a result of these policies before reaching this stage is the reality. It is already being seen that the school’s name is morphing into a punchline. It remains to be seen if they can repair the damage Professor Ramseyer says resulted from what they “let Harvard become.”

“My work is grounded in the principle that scientific integrity can only realized when we acknowledge and integrate into our research practices the ethos of diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity and honoring different ways of knowing.”

A Kenyon college teacher (founded by an Episcopal Bishop in 1824) has her beat: Excerpts:

intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality...has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial...movements...animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise... representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity...Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies...Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity...our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality...are embodied and experienced."

Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104. - Author is Brianna Thompson, who teaches courses in American women’s literature, queer theory and utopias/Afrofuturism at Kenyon college (founded by Episcopal Bishop in 1824). Course is Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214, https://www.kenyon.edu/academics/departments-and-majors/english/academic-program-requirements/courses-in-english/

Yet lowering standard is nothing new for Harvard.

In a Harvard Crimson article, noted conservative Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield contended that,

"Grade inflation got started … when professors raised the grades of students protesting the war in Vietnam..." "At that time, too, white professors, imbibing the spirit of the new policies of affirmative action, stopped giving low grades to black students, and to justify or conceal this, also stopped giving low grades to white students." The problem was essentially seen as the predominance of the notion of self-esteem, "in which the purpose of education is to make students feel capable and 'empowered,' and professors should hesitate to pass judgment on what students have learned." Such assertions resulted in no small controversy.

Harvard alumnus and author Ross Douthat attributed this problem partly to socioeconomic differences, and noted that "Harvard students are creatively lazy, gifted at working smarter rather than harder", being brilliant largely in their tactics "to achieve a maximal GPA in return for minimal effort." Few people who have taught at Harvard agree with Douthat's notions. - https://www.conservapedia.com/Harvard_University

Harvard STEM courses are still rigorous! Pre-meds at Harvard are still afraid of getting a low grade in Organic Chemistry, and thus failing to get into Med School!

Then there are the Honors programs in humanities, especially History and Literature, with reputedly the smartest undergraduates at Harvard. These require a senior thesis. NO plagiarism,. please!

Graduate programs in science still require completing a rigorous and original PhD thesis based on experimental work, and defending it before a committee. PhD programs in humanities and social science also require research-based original theses, but of course there are no experiments. Plagiarism is and should be a major disqualification for such theses!

Grade inflation occurs everywhere, especially at Yale! But it won’t get you an acceptable PhD thesis!

Restoring Harvard’s honor will require such steps (at a minimum) as pulling Gay’s PhD degree for plagiarism, invalidating all her plagiarized papers, and firing her from the presidency. So far, Harvard has not been up to the challenge. Lord have mercy!

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