OPINION:
People are asking the wrong question about Claudine Gay. The media are fixated on why she resigned as Harvard University’s president. The bigger issue is why she was hired in the first place. The answer gets to the heart of the crisis that is diversity, equity and inclusion ideology, which afflicts virtually all of higher education, the corporate world and government while hurting tens of millions of Americans.
It seems like it was only yesterday that Ms. Gay was elected president of America’s most famous university. Announced just over a year ago, she took office this past July, mere days after the Supreme Court finally ended the racially discriminatory practice of affirmative action.
It seems clear that Harvard’s board chose her as the school’s first Black president to advance the DEI agenda at a time of nationwide pushback against this divisive, race-based ideology.
Harvard’s board never said that explicitly, but anyone who thinks that’s not the case isn’t paying attention to the racially divisive atmosphere dominating Harvard and the rest of higher education. Others get the message loud and clear.
Harvard’s student newspaper gushed over Ms. Gay’s appointment as “the start of a more progressive era at Harvard, one that understands representation, diversity, and inclusion as essential to creating the kind of vibrant intellectual community that can in turn create a better world.” And virtually every profile of the new Harvard president emphasized her DEI-related work.
Did Harvard downplay merit when hiring Ms. Gay? It seems likely. Her predecessor had already served as president of another university, whereas Ms. Gay had comparatively little administrative experience. She also published less frequently than her peers.
And of course, there are the now-infamous concerns about plagiarism, with more than two dozen alleged instances of unattributed copying in her scholarly writing. That’s exactly the sort of thing that Harvard’s board should have identified before hiring Ms. Gay. If the board didn’t vet her thoroughly, it’s quite a statement of DEI’s dominance. If it did and moved forward anyway, that’s even worse.
None of these concerns are meant to downplay Ms. Gay’s intelligence, which is high, or her achievements, which are many. Yet they raise the specter that she was hired because of her race instead of her fitness for the demanding job of Harvard president.
The conservative (and Black) columnist Jason Riley has written, “that universities take race into account to fill job openings might be the worst-kept secret in academia.” It would be shocking if such race-based favoritism didn’t extend all the way up to university presidents.
While Ms. Gay’s defenders assert that saying such things is racist, there’s nothing discriminatory about demanding that merit be the decisive factor in hiring decisions. Besides, what’s truly racist is hiring based primarily or even in part on skin color — the definition of discrimination on the basis of race. You can take the word of Ibram X. Kendi, who supports Ms. Gay while saying that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
This racist ideology — it’s certainly not wisdom — doesn’t just dictate what happens at Harvard University or the rest of higher education. In corporate America, countless companies have fallen prey to the idea that it’s OK — and even ideal — to hire based on race.
No doubt at the urging of DEI departments, the S&P 100 hired 300,000 people within a year of the Black Lives Matter protests, 94% of whom were minorities. As for government, the Biden administration has DEI as a driving factor in federal hiring, while the National Institutes of Health has changed its grant application process to fund more minority researchers.
Ms. Gay’s rise and fall shows where this madness leads. When race trumps merit in hiring and promoting, people are frequently elevated into positions for which they aren’t ready. They may ultimately wash out or be pushed out as their shortcomings become clear.
This is true of students who struggle in the classroom, workers who fall down on the job because they lack the necessary skills, and bureaucrats without the relevant expertise in complex fields. They’re supposed to benefit from race-based hiring, but there’s nothing beneficial about being put in an unwinnable situation.
This is the true crisis of DEI: It insults and injures the people it’s supposed to help. Instead of putting people into positions for which they’re unprepared, we should encourage them to find the roles that match their ambitions and talents and give them a launch pad to greater things. That’s the proven path to success for those who have faced injustice — and it’s not unfair to them or to others.
The alternative is to keep setting people up for failure while claiming to help them flourish. Harvard University did that with Claudine Gay. She’ll land on her feet, but what about everyone else who is being hurt by DEI? They deserve better, and refocusing on merit will help them do better.
• John Tillman is CEO of the American Culture Project.
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