If conservatives could mount Claudine Gay’s head like a game hunting trophy, they’d clear a place on the wall — because that is how they view the former Harvard president.
The minute — no, the very second — the Harvard president refused at a congressional hearing to simply say “yes” when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate the university’s rules of bullying and harassment, she was targeted for cancellation.
That would almost seem fair — if Gay had been targeted only on charges of antisemitism and for her failure to publicly protect Jewish students, faculty and staff at the most prestigious university in America.
She gave a lousy and insulting answer to a very simple question.
But the hunt for Gay’s head wasn’t just about antisemitism. It was about three things that many conservatives find equally deplorable — diversity, equity and inclusion.
“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution,” Gay said in a New York Times op-ed after her resignation last week.
“Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”
Even before Gay’s tenure became clouded in a smokescreen of plagiarism charges, she was derided as a DEI hire by conservatives led by hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.
The insulting notion that Harvard would let just anybody run the school is almost as ridiculous as the backlash President Biden received when he announced his commitment to finally put a Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Critics acted like his nominee had just stepped off the set of TV’s “Divorce Court.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t keep the court’s majority from overturning affirmative action in higher education.
But for crusaders like Ackman, the court’s 6-3 ruling last summer dismantling affirmative action at colleges and universities isn’t enough. Neither is Gay’s resignation.
Now Ackman wants resignations from the university board that hired Gay and backed her through the controversy.
“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),” Ackman said in a Twitter post that stooped low enough to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Angry white men — and women — who have nothing to be angry about like to gripe about “reverse racism.” But there is no such thing.
Something is either racist or it’s not. The opposite of racism is tolerance.
Gay, 53, can attest to that.
“For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack,” Gay wrote in her op-ed. “My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.”
Gay, who denied the plagiarism charges, is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony. Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned on Dec. 9.
Despite the attack on women, Black women and academic freedom, Gay may still get the last laugh.
She remains a tenured professor. At Harvard. Making nearly $900,000 a year.
Take that, Bill Ackman.
Conservatives who pushed Harvard’s Claudine Gay to quit hate anti-semitism — but not as much as diversity, equity and inclusion: LEONARD GREENE
6
0
07.01.2024
If conservatives could mount Claudine Gay’s head like a game hunting trophy, they’d clear a place on the wall — because that is how they view the former Harvard president.
The minute — no, the very second — the Harvard president refused at a congressional hearing to simply say “yes” when asked whether calls for the genocide of Jews violate the university’s rules of bullying and harassment, she was targeted for cancellation.
That would almost seem fair — if Gay had been targeted only on charges of antisemitism and for her failure to publicly protect Jewish students, faculty and staff at the most prestigious university in America.
She gave a lousy and insulting answer to a very simple question.
But the hunt for Gay’s head wasn’t just about antisemitism. It was about three things that many conservatives find equally deplorable — diversity, equity and inclusion.
“It is not lost on me that I........
© NY Daily News
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
