The venerable Glenn Reynolds, proprietor of Instapundit, asks poetically in his Substack blog: “Claudine Gay has gone away, is this the dawn of a new day?”
Professor Reynolds is referring to, inter alia, the ubiquitous and heinous policy of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) when hiring: in the private sector, government, and the academy. Read a short description of this discriminatory woke practice here, in typically banal and seemingly benign language.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is a term used to describe policies and programs that promote the representation and participation of different groups of individuals. DEI encompasses people of different ages, races, ethnicities, abilities, disabilities, genders, religions, cultures and sexual orientations. It also covers people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills and expertise.
A still shorter definition: all genuine qualifications for a situation are secondary in importance to minority status. If a job candidate is fortunate enough to be a member of a preferred minority group, he gets first dibs at a position, even if less qualified than ones not so lucky in birth, i.e., whites and Asians (Asians, it is true, are a minority also, but since they are generally successful, they are disqualified).
Claudine Gay is an obvious example of DEI hiring, possessing zero qualifications that higher ed institutions not long ago used to demand of potential officers. Ms Gay rode the DEI express to the front of the line of those seeking Harvard’s presidency. Her DEI qualifications? Her race and her sex, the PhD in a worthless discipline just frosting on the cake.
That scholarship played no part in Gay’s hiring is patently obvious. Her publications in putatively scholarly journals are mostly jargon-filled gobbledygook posing as fact. She would also, using slightly different wordings, copy the works of others in her field, or even copy them verbatim, often “neglecting” to cite her sources, an absolute basic of scholarly writing.
The problem is, and this is where your Tatler parts company with the estimable Instapundit, the academy today is rife with low-grade scholarship, even among those holding high administrative positions in the most august colleges and universities. The majority of members on the Harvard Corporation’s board are no exception, including Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker, a Barack Obama crony who, notwithstanding her billions in wealth, shares much with Claudine Gay. So far she has refused repeated demands to step down. To Pritzker and most Corporation board members, the faux-scholarship of Claudine Gay is status quo, the model of modern scholarship, not to be dismissed, but rewarded.
The Board of the Harvard Corporation did appoint Alan Garber, who is highly qualified, pro-tem president when Gay finally quit (blaming racism, of course, for her plight). Garber, a widely respected scholar of the law, happens to be black. He is however not likely to be considered for Harvard’s presidency. As permanent president he would no doubt feel irrepressible urges to shake things up at Harvard, ridding it of its numerous fraudulent mediocrities and restoring its once formidable reputation. The present board wouldn’t dare allow such heretical acts.
Given the make up the Harvard Corporation’s board, Denise Gay’s replacement will be her academic double, an identical twin. Similar hires will take place at other, once respected, institutions as well. Glenn Reynolds’s new day, alas, is still a long way off.
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The Taos Tatler 