Lady DEI quits

Harvard learns the content of one's character does matter

NBC reported, “Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday after facing intense scrutiny for equivocal testimony she gave at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism as well as allegations of plagiarism in her academic work.”

Unlike the Flintstones, Harvard won’t have a Gay old time.

What do you know? I was wrong. I figured her sex and color made her invulnerable but it turns out that years of plagiarism and her tolerance for anti-Semitism caught up with her.

I delight in knowing that Gay is now the poster child of affirmative action in which an unqualified person gets the job over a qualified person because of race or sex — or in her case, both.

How’d she get the job in the first place?

Glenn Reynolds wrote, “Not-so-great people tend to choose not-so-great people. In this, Harvard is like so many of our institutions, in and out of academia. If the best people aren’t getting to the top — if, in fact, the people at the top are often the worst people and are consistently mediocre — then your selection process is at fault. And if you don’t want to change the selection process, then you’re happy having your institutions run by bad leaders, with the inevitable results. That’s where we are all across America today.”

That’s not BS. I had a boss I didn’t like (which narrows it down to every other boss I ever had) who said the secret to his success was hiring smart people. Well, he was a dummy but his executive editor and his managing editor went on to become corporate CEOs and his editorial page editor went on to become a publisher of a paper twice the circulation of the Daily Mail.

Gay’s departure comes months after the Supreme Court told Harvard to quit discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

Her resignation letter, which I hope she did not plagiarize, ended, “As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity—and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education. I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for—and to our capacity to serve the world.”

I hope it is, as she said, “a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity,” because we need to rid ourselves of the fallacy that women and minorities need a leg up. If after 50 years of affirmative action, women and black people are not equal, then maybe they were never meant to be equal.

But I don’t buy that because I do believe we are equal now. Gay proved herself to be as incompetent and phony as any white man. What did her in was not her tolerance for anti-Semitism and calls for killing Jews from the river to the sea, but her stealing the work of others and claiming it as her own. Harvard cannot impose an honor code on students about plagiarism while having a plagiarist as its president.

When I need a doctor, I don’t care what sex or color the doctor is. No one should. As Dr. Joseph Giordano assured President Reagan as they wheeled him in to take the bullet out in March 30, 1981, “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”

After the surgery was over, Giordano went back to being a Democrat.

Given that doctors are more important than anyone else, why should I care what color or sex anyone else is?

But the racists out there in TV land howled because the last thing they want is racial equality, which would cancel their meal ticket.

Al Sharpton said, “President Gay’s resignation is about more than a person or a single incident. This is an attack on every black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.”

Another race-baiter, CUNY Professor Marc Lamont Hill, tweeted, “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.”

One reply was, “But as long as we're on the topic, maybe they should hire the person who actually WROTE all of Claudine Gay's alleged scholarship.”

That would be Carol Swain, a retired professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University who did her own work, which Gay copied. Hiring Swain might not be a bad choice which could show contrition and commitment at the same time — and most importantly, get donors to open their wallets again. After all, that is the main duty of a modern college president.

She does not seem to want the job, as she tweeted, “I found Harvard University’s statement about Claudine Gay’s resignation as woefully inadequate as the one Gay issued. What we have here is an effort to avoid accountability.”

Christopher F. Rufo pointed out Gay’s departure takes Harvard’s reputation with her, tweeting:

The regime tried to save Claudine Gay through the deployment of euphemisms:

“Duplicative language”

“Quotations without quotation marks”

“Not all plagiarism is equal”

And we broke them.

Our man in the White House press box from Cameroon, Simon Ateba, tweeted, “BREAKING: Outrage in the black community over Claudine Gay's resignation. Prominent black intellectuals and activists are expressing indignation over what they perceive as racism. But remember, Liz Magill, who is white, also resigned as the University of Pennsylvania’s president amid pressure from donors and criticism over alleged antisemitism.

“MY TAKE: This is not about white people forcing a black woman to resign because of the color of her skin, calls for resignation started after her testimony in Congress over alleged anti-Semitism on campus. This was quickly followed by accusations of plagiarism.”

By black community, he means black socialists. I doubt many people outside the liberal elitists support her — not even the Hamassholes.

Gay did this to herself. She plagiarized. She also refused to condemn calls to kill Jews from the river to the sea.

Lest we forget, her resignation began when she appeared at a congressional hearing with Penn President Liz Magill and MIT President Sally Kornbluth. Their performance was so bad that even the New York Times gave them a bad review.

NYT said, “Support for the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. eroded quickly on Wednesday, after they seemed to evade what seemed like a rather simple question during a contentious congressional hearing: Would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews?

“Their lawyerly replies to that question and others during a four-hour hearing drew incredulous responses.”

A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, said, “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: Calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country.”

That was a month ago. Penn dumped Magill, who politely resigned and went back to teaching law at Penn. Gay’s departure means Kornbluth is the lone survivor.

This makes me happy because Gay’s departure may very well sound the death toll for the racist and sexist Diversity, Equity and Inclusion movement — DEI — that uses race and sex to promote division, exclusion and intolerance in the workplace.

Harvard thought it had reached a milestone in hiring her but she quickly proved to be a millstone on its institutional collar because she was not vetted properly. The corporate board acted too quickly in hiring her. The result was firing her after six months and two days, the shortest tenure as Harvard president in its 387 year history.

How does that saying go again? Measure twice, cut once?

That she could be fired (or in this case, allowed to resign) surprised me and is the real moral of this story. Just as hiring someone simply because he is a white male is foolish, hiring someone simply because she is not a white male is foolish.

Gay broke a glass ceiling and then crashed to Earth when her incompetence showed on the world stage. I hope that her failure killed a bad idea called DEI.