The resignation of Claudine Gay is not a blow to DEI. She wasn’t made to resign over DEI. Her resignation is a blow to plagiarism and yay. But nobody dared to openly criticize her DEI beliefs and policies. To the contrary, the fear of saying a word against DEI is such that the protestations of how this is all solely about plagiarism became quite shrill.
DEI is this country’s sacred cow. If at least some of the effort that went into tracing Gay’s plagiarism has gone into tracking her DEI policies, we’d uncover some interesting information. The only analysis of Gay’s connections with the Pritzker family and how they used her DEI sloganeering to cover for their corruption that I saw came from a mega-woke guy who was upset that Gay is too conservative.
Actual conservatives, though, dropped the ball. They got rid of an individual but made not a dent to the edifice of lies and oppression that is DEI. The anti-Gay battle helped me and you not a whit. My school is still as DEI as ever. And so is every school. And a growing number of workplaces.
Do you know what system of beliefs posits that every problem stems from personal failures of specific individuals?
Exactly.
We’ve been stuck on Gay’s personal failures – and they are big, absolutely – and completely lost sight of the actual problem. It’s constantly “if only we get rid of Trump / Biden / Putin, etc”. And it’s all a soothing fantasy because none of what really ails us is about any specific person. The overinflated importance of Trump who didn’t really do much, either good or bad. The overinflated importance of Putin who’s a scared old man trying to not be killed by his enraged population. The overinflated importance of Biden who is repeating Trump’s policies on a loop because he can’t come up with anything new.
We have solvable problems. It’s all very solvable. But we can’t solve them from the mentality that caused them to begin with. We had a great opportunity with these university presidents, and instead it was turned into a personal vendetta over one boring, unimportant individual.
Let this at least be a lesson for the future.
Clarissa's Blog 
“resignation of Claudine Gay is not a blow to DEI”
Yes and no. On the one hand the proximate cause was the plagiarism but that never would have almost certainly never have come to light if not for the DEI-inspired tolerance of eliminationist rhetoric regarding jews.
Lots of things start off seeming to be about one thing but then turn into something else…
And many people do have the idea that it was DEI policies that allowed a serial plagiarist to rise so high in the first place and DEI-ists have not helped their cause by claiming that the need for proper attribution in scholarly work is racism.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep, this was not necessarily about DEI, but Claudine was the most public face of DEI in academia.
The most important thing that was exposed was the utter hypocrisy and nobody believed her when she was spouting how pro free speech she and Harvard were. That was central to her outing because nobody outside academic ideologues fell for that lie. This is huge.
LikeLike
Ibram Kendi and Kimberle Crenshaw are the most famous people in DEI in academia. I never heard Claudine Gay’s name until 2 months ago. She’s an unimportant bean counter.
LikeLike
It turned into a plagiarism story because nobody dared to argue that her rhetoric on Jews was unacceptable.
LikeLike
I think this may be a partial victory.
I think the plagiarism is just a kill-switch. They chose to ignore it when they hired her, and kept it on standby for situations like this. This is strategic– that way when she gets embarrassing for being a public antisemite (or underage lesbian sexual harassment, or embezzlement, or any of a hundred other things the college doesn’t want to talk about in a public forum), she can be quietly discarded on academic grounds, which gets rid of the problem and saves them having to address the real issue. No, we didn’t get to have any direct victory against DEI– but the institution did get forced to use the emergency escape chute in a very obvious way.
LikeLike
“nobody dared to argue that her rhetoric on Jews was unacceptable”
Because it’s completely acceptable in her environment and increasingly in American public life in general. Her plagiarism does help expose just how rotten through and through that environment has become.
There’s also the idea of saying what you can when you can. The social discontent in Poland that ultimately led to 1989 was not about active repression and the edifice of lies that communism was built upon at all…. it began with protests about increases in food prices in 1976 (because that was, just barely, something people could complain about in public). Obviously the issues were a lot deeper but they couldn’t begin by protesting about the falsification of history (for example).
It’s important to not lose focus and pound home the message that DEI policies produce terrible results.
LikeLike
This is how regime changes usually go, isn’t it? I mean, we kicked off a successful real live revolution over import taxes. Yeah, it was about a whole lot of other high-falutin’ stuff in the end (liberty and justice for all, etc), but taxes were the uniting thing everyone found it acceptable to complain about in public, at the beginning.
LikeLike
Billionaire and former Harvard donor Bill Ackman just published an article in the Free Press explicitly identifying DEI as the real source of the problems at Harvard and elsewhere.
If a few billionaires who were previously blissfully unaware the DEI rot start to take a real interest in opposing it, I’d call that a win. Compared to most of us, who can complain in blog comment sections and occasionally vote in faculty assemblies, billionaires have a lot more ability to make things happen.
LikeLike
Do you happen to have a link to that analysis?
LikeLike
I lost the actual guy but I found the one he quoted:
LikeLike
Do you reckon they hire bigwigs at Harvard the same way the major parties screen politicians? Like, maybe being a serial plagiarist, or having a really questionable affair with a student or something is a selling point– so that if and when you become in any way inconvenient to the institution, they have a kill switch to let them swap you out for somebody else?
The last thing they’d want is someone with a squeaky-clean record, no?
LikeLike