Harvard’s New President Embodies Everything Wrong with Higher-EdRob Montz
Jan 25, 2023
In its last issue of 2022, The Crimson, Harvard University’s undergraduate newspaper, ran a column from one of its editors containing the following sentences:
“Like superheroes, Black women are supposed to be reliable and resilient. When buildings are burning and people need to save the day, we are often called on to put the fire out… We run into each crisis with the weight of the world on our shoulders.”
This was a column of celebration. Harvard had just announced that Claudine Gay, the current Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, would be its next president. Gay is the superhero; Harvard is the burning building. When she officially takes over in June, Gay will be the first-ever black president of Harvard.
The Crimson column accidentally captures the scandal in this announcement. Think of everything wrong with higher education: the fetish for diversity at the expense of merit; the rapid expansion of anti-intellectual administrative bloat; the censorship of dissident voices; the popularity of a progressive politics that prefers performing victimhood over making substantive improvements in the lives of real people.
All these trends find their purest manifestation in Claudine Gay.
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Chief Justice John Roberts openly wondered if Harvard’s existing admissions practices effectively lump all black applicants into a homogeneous category of “disadvantaged” and blindly provide them with plus points regardless of personal biography. The existing composition of Harvard’s undergraduate student body certainly seems to substantiate that suspicion.
Roughly 70 percent of black Harvard students come from affluent families. And in the Ivy League overall, fully 41 percent of black students are actually first- and second-generation African immigrants. Affirmative action, originally conceived as a systematic counterbalance to the effects of institutional racism on the descendants of American slaves, is now being used to aid the offspring of, say, a Nigerian orthopedic surgeon or a Dominican senior partner at McKinsey.
Or the daughter of a Haitian engineer, like Gay. Her father came to the United States for college, worked in the Army Corps of Engineers and raised her in upper middle class comfort. After graduating from Exeter, Gay went to Stanford, first as an undergrad then as faculty, and then took a tenured job in the Harvard political science department.
And yet, Gay’s official CV barely breaks three pages, boasts just a handful of poorly cited articles, and is devoid of even a single published book–a bare minimum requirement for a tenured position at most major universities. But, she is “diverse,” a black woman in an academic job market that puts a premium on that particular identity.
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Source:
https://townhall.com/columnists/rob-montz/2023/01/25/harvards-new-president-embodies-everything-wrong-with-higher-ed-n2618720
