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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25695 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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*ding* *ding* *ding*

Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, is out. Yep, it's true, absolutely not Fake and Gay. No Gay here, no siree...

Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision.

...

Gay weathered scandal after scandal over her brief tenure, facing national backlash for her administration’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work.

Even the Harvard Crimson, which is about as institutional-woke aligned as you can get pulls no punches in its article. She really seems to have completely fallen from the graces of the powers that be in academia. The plagierism allegations aren't new either, they've been going around for a year at this point, but it looks like they only really started to matter when she put a mark on herself and the sharks smelled blood.

Before that point they were just ignored and the general fishiness around her dates back to the early 2000s. This means that Harvard did not care about the allegations when they were appointing her to the presidency (just 6 months ago, when these allegations were all out there), but only started to care once she became a personal liability to Harvard rather than merely an academic one. Alternatively they did care but their vetting process is so bad something so open and shut as her plagierism passed through undetected. Either way it looks really bad. A pox on Harvard!

On a more cynical note I admit to being personally surprised by this, of all three presidents she was the one I expected the least to get deposed even though Sally Kornbluth, the MIT president came across as by far the most consistent and reasonable person at the hearing (she didn't do that well either, but it wasn't a car crash at least).

I've been skeptical of the "now the Jews are going to turn on DEI", but earlier today Bill Ackman, who publicly led the effort to oust Gay, posted a viral article that does take it head-on. It's interesting he more or less admits that he's changing his position on DEI because of anti-semitism:

In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.

I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered. ...

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

Translation: he only cares now that it affects the interests of Jews and Israel. He didn't care it's been used as a bludgeon against White Americans, and he still doesn't care about that now.

Translation: he only cares now that it affects the interests of Jews and Israel. He didn't care it's been used as a bludgeon against White Americans, and he still doesn't care about that now.

From the article:

DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.

You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.

To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.

...This passage, and many more like it, appear to be straightforwardly caring about how DEI has been used as a bludgeon against White Americans. At first glance, this post appears to be a straightforward conservative rejection of Progressive identity politics and all its attendant works. If this attitude carried the day, I think it would be a straightforwardly good thing.

It's still possible that this clarity will disappear once his ox stops being gored, but judging the statement on its own terms, your summary does not seem accurate.

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