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What’s Really at Stake With ‘Harvard’ |
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By Roger Kimball |
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Commentary
The appalling testimony by the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania before the House Education Committee earlier this month has been the subject of widespread criticism, ridicule, and head-shaking surprise. Asked by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) whether calling for the genocide of Jews would contravene their institutions' rules of conduct, all three temporized that it would depend on the “context.” Clearly, they had all been prepped by the same lawyers, or at least lawyers who themselves had been prepped by the same head office. The public response was quick and brutal. The president of UPenn, Liz Magill, was forced out within days, as was the chairman of Penn’s board. When Harvard’s board of overseers met in an emergency session, many predicted that Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, would suffer the same fate. I could have reassured them that that wasn't going to happen. Why? For the same reason I believe Claudine Gay was appointed president: because she's black and ideologically on page with the progressive, i.e., anti-white, anti-American mindset, that has taken over elite education like a parasite inhabiting its host. As the commentator Francis Menton explained in “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!,” Ms. Gay had long functioned as “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.” When the klieg lights of public scrutiny swiveled in Ms. Gay’s direction after her humiliating performance before Congress, the public was treated to two data points. One was already known by anyone who had considered the case of Claudine Gay. She was, in terms of academic achievement, utterly unqualified to be president of Harvard. In a wide-ranging piece about Ms. Gay, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, refers delicately to her “slim portfolio of publications.” In fact, the portfolio is practically anorectic. But that was almost beside in the, ah, context of the revelation that those meager writings showed unmistakable evidence of plagiarism. Harvard instantly convened what Mr. Wood rightly describes as a “cover-up committee” to pretend to investigate the charges. Unsurprisingly, the committee returned with the determination that Ms. Gay’s corpus showed evidence not of plagiarism but only a “few instances of inadequate citation.” You have to admire their brass. Between 1998 and 2016, Mr. Wood notes, Ms. Gay published but 11 articles. All of them were about race. All of them were—a kind word—“derivative” of other people’s work. And this, Mr. Wood continues, brings us to the center of Ms. Gay’s appeal for the panjandrums that run Harvard. “She is a tireless advocate of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement. It is the carriage that brought her to the ball.” Moreover, her commitment to the stew of DEI ideology is the “link between her disheartening unwillingness to protect Jews from antisemitic threats of violence and her disheartening disregard for the standards of academic dishonesty.” If “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are the cynosures of your life, what difference does intellectual honesty or basic moral probity make? |
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Mr. Wood points out that when she was a dean at Harvard, Ms. Gay forced 27 students to withdraw because of “academic dishonesty,” i.e., plagiarism. She also was a cheerleader for “mandatory training” to correct the egregious wrongthink of “using wrong pronouns,” etc., practices, the woke orthodoxy insists, that are tantamount to “violence.” As I write, applications to Harvard for early admission are down 17 percent. I suspect that trend will continue and accelerate. I certainly hope so. It's a bad sign for Harvard that even the satirists are on the case. The Babylon Bee, for example, recently ran a piece with the headline “‘Did Not Attend Harvard’ Now Number One Quality Employers Seeking In Job Candidate.” Funny, yes, and also right on target. Many commentators have tried to frame the behavior of Claudine Gay and her colleagues in terms of “free speech.” I think that Heather Mac Donald is right that “free speech” is a blunt instrument with which to understand what’s happening. For one thing, as Ms. Mac Donald points out, there are obvious double standards at work. The “high road,” which precious few academics actually advocate, is to demand “free speech across the board: for opponents of preferences, say, and for opponents of Israel.” It's much more common, she notes, to “adopt in reverse the same double standards that have been so nauseatingly on display in every pronouncement about a university’s undying commitment to academic freedom.” “Too many alumni,” she writes, “have taken the second course. While rebuking their school’s intellectual monoculture and intolerance of dissent, they demand the silencing of anti-Zionist speech in the same breath.” I think this is true, but I also think that trying to understand what's happening in our educational institutions on a template provided by the demand for “free speech” is doomed to failure. To begin to understand why, we can return to Elise Stefanik’s question: Would calling for the genocide of Jews violate your school’s code of conduct? To my mind, if you find yourself in a situation where that question has to be posed, you have conceded defeat. The truth is, the colonization of education by the ideology of “wokism” and identity politics renders considerations of free speech and academic freedom moot. The triumph of wokism entails the destruction of traditional academic standards and, indeed, the very raison d’être of education, K-12 as well as college. Once upon a time, we educated our young in order to pass along the values of our civilization. Then we—that is, the elites to whom we entrusted our future—decided to reject that civilization. They, our masters, decided that “whiteness” was evil, that “objectivity” was a patriarchal plot, that even so basic a reality as biological sex was an alibi for oppression. That's the real lesson of this latest shipwreck of progressive grandstanding. That our educational institutions—like so many other institutions in the West—have sacrificed their legitimacy on the altar of a corrupt and mendacious ideology. The way out, I fear, isn't through reform but through revolution. “Harvard”—I used the scare quotes to denote not just that one institution but the state of mind it represents—must be utterly superseded if it's to survive. Like Claudine Gay, it has set to be a “transformational” force whose goal is to undermine, to invert, our civilization. Civilization, if it's to survive, must acknowledge the radical nature of that challenge and respond in kind. |
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