Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman speaks in New York City, USA, on January 4, 2024, protesting his campaign for diversity, equity, and inclusion and his attack on former Harvard University president Claudine Gay. People marching in front of the office.Reuters/Shannon StapletonShannon Stapleton/Reuters
Claudine Gay published an op-ed in the New York Times after she resigned as president of Harvard University last week. I found this very convincing, but not for Mr. Gay’s side of the argument.
But one part of her editorial is completely spot on: the headline. “What happened at Harvard is bigger than me.”
The major events that have taken place, and not just at Harvard University, began with anti-Semitism on campus and questions about the line between free speech criticizing Israel and hate speech attacking Jews. It quickly evolved into a broader fight over his DEI movement.
DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and is a system of mantras and methods that has become pervasive at nearly every university in North America over the past decade. As hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, one of Ms. Gay’s chief critics, recently explained, when she began lobbying her alma mater to take anti-Semitism seriously last fall, she only gave a vague idea about DEI. He only recognized it. Then he did some research and identified what was at the root of the brand.
As he said last week, Tweet to Mark Cuban: “DEI is not about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trust me, I fell into the same trap as you.”
If you’re over 40 or 45 and don’t work at a university or union headquarters, none of this may mean much to you. Your mind lives in what I call the liberal world.
In the liberal world, we believe that we should strive for a society where all people, regardless of race, are treated as if they were endowed with equal rights and dignity. You may think of race as simply the color of your skin, a thin mask covering our common humanity. Remember Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech? “My dream is that my four young children will one day live in a country where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” And yes, I think that’s the opposite of racism.
The liberal world holds fast to the classic liberal values that fought slavery in the 19th century and racism in the 20th. But expressing such thoughts today risks being laughed at or kicked off campus.
DEI World is the new dominant ideology that professors and students, whether they agree with or not, know they have to pay some lip service to.
The DEI world has a very different concept of race. I don’t want it to go beyond race. This concept feels ridiculous and even racist. Instead, we want to see everything through the lens of race. Judgments about rewards and punishments, merits and demerits, justice and injustice, and even whose speech is protected and to what extent are filtered through particular, especially American, conceptions of race. Race is the Rosetta Stone for telling many things, including who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed.
Why did a fight over how universities respond to anti-Semitism quickly turn into a debate over DEI? Because Jews don’t fit into the racial hierarchy of the DEI world.
Are Jews, historically discriminated against as a racial minority, entitled to special consideration and protection? Or are they just white people?
In a liberal world that believes in universal rights of universal application, these questions, posed as legitimate as opposed to historical questions, lie somewhere between irrelevant and incomprehensible. In the DEI world, it’s a different story.
A recent Harvard Cap Harris poll asked Americans, “Do you think Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors, or do you think it’s a false ideology?” Asked.
Queries come directly from DEI World. No doubt many older adults found this completely baffling, and the overwhelming majority of adults called it a “false ideology.” However, 67 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 who grew up in the DEI world said Jews are a class of “oppressors.”
So, let’s go back to Mr. Gay’s story. She was unable to maintain her position as president of Harvard University due to increased revelations of plagiarism in her academic publications. But DEI is front and center for her, especially among her defenders, who often suggest that the real reason critics go after Ms. Gay is because of her race and gender. was.
Gay agreed in an editorial. This may have appealed to his readers in the DEI world, but it wasn’t a rebuttal of facts (which still matter in the liberal world).
“My hope,” she wrote in what journalists call the article’s nutgraph, “is that in my resignation I will be able to live up to the ideals that have animated Harvard University since its founding: excellence; , and to deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine Harvard.” Openness, Independence, and Truth. ”
Again, instead of engaging with the critics’ best arguments and fighting back with better arguments (which is what academic discourse is supposed to be), she confuses the other side by accusing them of pure malice. I have discontinued my involvement.
Gay’s most prominent critics, such as Ackman, may not be right about everything about DEI and his relationship with the academy. But they are not looking toward a future in which universities celebrate mediocrity, promote insularity, celebrate academic incompetence, and spread falsehoods. Here in the liberal world, at least we see that.
