#President Claudine Gay

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik had a sharp response to the news that University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill was stepping down from her position over the weekend: “One down. Two to go.”

It was Stefanik’s line of questioning at a hearing last week before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce that attracted the most attention from the roughly five hours of testimony. A series of exchanges went viral when Magill and other university presidents at Harvard and MIT failed to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews as explicitly against campus rules on harassment and bullying. The answers from such high-profile leaders in higher education sparked bipartisan backlash and condemnation, which led to Magill’s departure and increasing pressure to oust both Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth.

Stefanik, a Harvard graduate herself, has been leading the charge since the hearing to highlight and investigate campus antisemitism, and her efforts have attracted supporters from across the aisle as well as former President Donald Trump.

In a new statement Monday, Stefanik again called out MIT and Harvard, saying, “The leadership at these universities is totally unfit and untenable.”

“As clear evidence of the vastness of the moral rot at every level of these schools, this earthquake has revealed that Harvard and MIT are totally unable to grasp this grave question of moral clarity at this historic moment as the world is watching in horror and disgust,” Stefanik said in the statement. “It is pathetic and abhorrent.”

Stefanik announced late last week the committee was launching an investigation into Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. While the investigation became public before news of Magill’s resignation broke, the New York congresswoman’s statements since then have made clear she’s not finished with the issue.

“This forced resignation of the President of Penn is the bare minimum of what is required,” Stefanik said in a statement over the weekend. “These universities can anticipate a robust and comprehensive Congressional investigation of all facets of their institutions’ negligent perpetration of antisemitism including administrative, faculty, and overall leadership and governance.”

Former Penn board chair Scott Bok also resigned Saturday.

Trump praised Stefanik as “very smart” over the weekend.

“I guess they’re all gonna be losing their jobs within the next day or two, but one down, two to go,” Trump said in a speech hosted by the New York Young Republican Club late Saturday night – repeating Stefanik’s line hours after she put her statement out.

Stefanik has a polarizing reputation on Capitol Hill as a staunch supporter of Trump. But the congresswoman has managed to amass Democratic support for pushing for the ouster of university presidents. She co-wrote a letter dated Friday with Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz of Florida demanding those presidents’ removal. The letter was also signed by Democrats Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Joe Courtney of Connecticut.

“I am proud to lead a bipartisan letter with @RepMoskowitz and 72 of our colleagues to the members of the Governing Boards of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn demanding that their presidents be removed after this week’s @EdWorkforceCmte hearing,” Stefanik tweeted Friday.

Gay has since apologized for her remarks, in an interview with The Harvard Crimson on Thursday.

“I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures,” Gay told the student newspaper. “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “Words matter.”

The Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board, issued a statement last week saying President Sally Kornbluth has their “full and unreserved support.”

Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014, replaced then-Rep. Liz Cheney as GOP conference chairwoman in May 2021. While she voted against one of Trump signature legislative victories – his 2017 tax plan – she attracted significant attention for her impassioned defense of Trump around the former president’s first impeachment investigation in 2019.

While she’s been one of the most visible messengers for the House GOP Conference, she was not one of the many Republicans to throw themselves in for nomination to be the next House Speaker, after Kevin McCarthy was ousted earlier this fall.

Since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, the Department of Education has opened an unprecedented number of investigations into alleged incidents of hate on college campuses.

Both Harvard and Penn, along with 11 other colleges and five K-12 school districts, have come under investigation since that time. The Department of Education has told CNN that the situation is becoming untenable for the Office for Civil Rights, and that it doesn’t have the investigative staff to match the influx of cases, shining a light on where the investigation Stefanik announced last week may be able to fill in those gaps.

[cyarskaren52]

Ditto! You read it right & I agree with you!

[ausetkmt]

Watch "Harvard president Claudine Gay rejects punishing students behind anti-Israel letter" on YouTube

[gamer2002]

Claudine Gay got the honor to be the first Black Harvard Presidents, and she represents all Black people with her:

Laziness, in form of her entire Academic publication being 11 articles and one book she has co-edited.

Thievery, in form of her plagiarism.

Stupidity, in form of her getting easily caught for the above under the slightest scrutiny.

Perhaps Black people would be better off without being represented by her and with patiently waiting for the first Black Harvard President to emerge through a color-blinded meritocracy.

I recommend to rethink the circling wagons around her and choosing to be represented by her. She is a gift for racists.

[erik-powery-for-america]

Claudine Gay Resigns as Harvard President: Live Updates - The New York Times

Racism white supremacy Harvard circus 🎪🤡

[feedbaylenny]

House condemns university presidents for tolerating antisemitism on campuses, votes by party differed

(As originally published with additional photos and video, Wed, December 13th 2023, 7:19 PM EST) WASHINGTON (TND) — The House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the presidents of three of the nation’s most prestigious universities for their testimony on antisemitism on their campuses. Late Wednesday afternoon, more than two-thirds of representatives — 303 — voted for the…

[nakeddeparture]

Celebrating Claudine Gay.

https://youtu.be/VGdOcmRQGWM

Naked!!

[eretzyisrael]

by Dov Fischer

Yes, like that hapless car dealer, many university directors and trustees have no grasp of the entirety of responsibilities they have accepted and assumed when they became directors and trustees, but they bear those fiduciary duties nonetheless.

What fiduciary duties do they have to the federal (and state) government? The Feds allocate millions of dollars to the universities for research. They allocate millions in Pell Grants and other federal financial grants to students so that the kids get a full unhindered education. They extend loans at advantaged interest rates and often end up writing off those loans, at the expense of the national budget and American taxpayer, when it becomes clear that the students cannot or will not pay the loans back. They grant the universities tax exemptions that waive millions in federal tax revenue so that donors will give more to the colleges and universities. Any single federal expenditure for a college entitles the federal government to subject matter jurisdiction and standing in any lawsuit brought over Director or Trustee malfeasance, misfeasance, or non-feasance in the conduct of fiduciary duties. (READ MORE: Catching Up on More Infuriating Things in the Past Month’s News)

Most students’ parents also would have legal standing to sue. If their kids pay all the tuition and dorm rent, or borrow it all, then such parents may not have standing. But if a parent has paid even one dollar, not to mention tens of thousands, or borrowed tens of thousands in Parent PLUS loans, toward paying tuition or dorm fees, then they have paid for their child to receive a full, unhindered education on a safe and peaceful campus. Any extended rioting or other insurrection on campus distorts the very purpose for which that money has been spent. It comprises, at the very least, a breach of contract. The failure of the directors or trustees to impose solutions, fire ineffective university presidents, demand the removal of toxic professors, and implement all steps necessary to secure the campus for reasoned and calm learning legally exposes them to great individual liability. And what a fabulous class action that lawsuit would be! One thousand parents suing Columbia University for $60,000 apiece, a winning class action for $60 million. I am almost tempted to return to practicing law.

All that is needed is a federal law like FIRREA and similar state laws, since states also finance educational institutions within their borders. Overnight, you will see one Claudine Gay after another, like that evil woman now at the helm of Columbia University, fired; students expelled and a great many deported back to the dirt holes whence they came, and a return to proper, reasoned, and respectful learning.

[matan4il]

Daily update post:

A recent study (sorry, some stuff I can only find in Hebrew, this is one of those articles) shows 83% of Israeli kids are experiencing psychological distress since Oct 7. Among the kids of the south, (the area which was hit the worst, and where even communities that were not massacred by Hamas, were evacuated following this massive invasion), the percentage is even higher, 93%. An important note is that the study sampled both Jewish and Arab kids based on the size of these populations (Arabs make up 21% of Israeli citizens).

The IDF published aerial footage of Hamas stealing humanitarian aid from regular Gazans, and beating them up. If there's a blog that claims to be sharing pro-Palestinian info, but doesn't share this kind of news, they're not really pro-Palestinian, they're just exploiting Palestinians as an excuse to be anti-Israel.

The leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, is believed to have escaped from the northern Gaza City to the south, to Khan Younis, in a medical convoy. Just take in the cynical use of medical and humanitarian protections, to do anything which would prolong the fighting, no matter how many Palestinian lives it would cost. I'm trying hard to remember any other (real) liberation movement that was directly responsible for the deaths of so many of the people it seeked to liberate...

Five Israeli soldiers were pronounced dead yesterday, four were killed in Gaza, while one was badly wounded on Oct 7, and after over two months in hospital, passed away. The number of Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting in Gaza so far is 97. Up until number, the bloodiest battle Israel has had to wage in Gaza since withdrawing from it, was operation Protective Edge in 2014, with 70 Israeli soldiers killed.

The Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister said, when discussing plans for Gaza after the end of the war, that Hamas is an integral part of the Palestinian mosaic, and that dismantling Hamas is unacceptable to the Palestinian Authority.

Yesterday, an American base in Iraq was attacked by Hezbollah forces. You absolutely should ask yourself why the terrorist organization calling itself the "defender of Lebanon" has units in Iraq, and how is attacking American forces there helping Lebanon. Just a side note, Iran funds Hezbollah.

Also yesterday, the Yemenite terrorist group known as the Houthis announced that instead of going after Israeli ships only, they will target any ship that is headed for Israel through one of the most important naval routes in the world, and which is Israel's only connection to the far east. Essentially, it means they're placing Israel under a naval blockade. I'm looking forward to people condemning Yemen for occupying Israel. Just a side note, Iran funds the Houthis.

Today, it was published that in Cyprus, two Iranian political refugees, who entered the country with a fake passport, were arrested for collecting intel to carry out a terrorist attack against Israelis there. Just a side note, these refugees were in touch with Iran's political militarized force, IRGC. Stop me when you notice a theme here...

On the first even of Hanukkah, 138 hanukkiot were lit at the Kotel (the Western wall), one for each hostage. Since then, two of the hostages have been confirmed as murdered.

Following the Congress hearing where three presidents of prestigious universities couldn't explicitly say that a call for the genocide of the Jewish people constitutes bullying and harassment, UPenn's president resigned. That's good, but I wanna point out that, as their answers were obviously coordinated, down to repeating the exact same terms, there is no difference between UPenn's president and the ones of Harvard and MIT. They all need to go home. And the universities still have the burden of proof that this will be more than a cosmetic change in leadership.

I watched a TV interview with two married Israeli Harvard professors, who recounted how they went out and celebrated when Claudine Gay was elected as their university's president, and now they've chosen to leave Harvard and the US, to return to Israel, because the campus has become an environment that's just too toxic. I think if the amount of Jews who are moving to Israel, while the country is in a state of war, isn't a wake up call for the west, then nothing will be.

On the left is 25 years old Gal Eizenkott, the son of Israel's former Chief of Staff, and current minister, who is a part of the war cabinet, Gadi Eizenkott. I wrote about Gal in previous daily updates. Something I can add is that his father happened to be in an IDF command center, when they got the news of the incident in which Gal was killed. It took several minutes for the info to arrive at the command center, that one of those soldiers injured mortally was Gadi's son.

On the right is 19 years old Maor Cohen Eizenkott. Maor is Gal's cousin, and was a soccer player. He was killed a day after Gal, when an explosive device planted in a Gaza mosque blew up. Maor was buried today. May his memory be a blessing.

This is 53 years old Eitan Levi.

He was a taxi driver, who on Oct 7 took a lady to one of the kibbutzim on the border of Gaza. On his way back, he called his sister, telling her about the rocket barrages into Israel, and that he was scared. She stayed with him on the line as he was driving back from the south of Israel, but then he was stopped, his sister heard Arabic, shouts of "Allahu Akbar" and shots. Later, his phone was detected in Gaza, and he was considered kidnapped. Then Hamas released a video of its terrorists abusing a body. It was beyond recognition, but based on some accessories, the army finally determined it was Eitan, that he had been murdered on Oct 7, and it was his body that was kidnapped to Gaza. His sister watched the vid, but as the body is unrecognizable, she said in an interview, "He's the only family I have in this world. We don't even have a body to sit Shiva for. Until such time, I'm going to keep hoping he's alive, kidnapped and just injured."

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[jewish-sideblog]

The thing that bugs me the most about the Context debacle is that Claudine Gay’s “walkback” statement on Twitter still didn’t say that a call for Jewish genocide violated Harvard code of conduct. She said calls for Jewish genocide were vile, and that they had no place at Harvard. But she didn’t say that they violated Harvard policy. She had time to work out a written statement and she still didn’t say it.

She said that those who make threats against Jews would be “held to account”. But direct threats of violence against individuals are illegal in the US. Is it Harvard who will be holding threateners to account? The police? Society? And what “account” will they be held to? The President of Harvard University, of all people, knows how to avoid a passive voice issue. But she didn’t.

It is not enough to say that Jewish genocide is bad. Action must be taken to prevent it. She is refusing to acknowledge her responsibility over her institution and it’s role in propagating antisemitism. She made a fool of herself and an Ivy League University in front of both congress and national television. She was given the opportunity to correct herself. And she chose a vague tweet. She made it clear to the world that Jews have no place at Harvard anymore.

[lesbianchemicalplant]

Harvard University students and over 30 organisations that signed a statement holding Israel “entirely responsible” for “all unfolding violence” in Israel and Palestine are facing a wave of criticism. On 8 October, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine published a statement emphasising the role of Israeli “colonial occupation in creating these conditions of violence”. They wrote, “We hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence. Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. "Palestinians in Gaza have no shelter for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.” They called on the Harvard community to take action to “stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians”. The statement originally included a list of 30 organisations at Harvard that had signed on, but the names were later removed to protect the safety of the students.  On Wednesday, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman called on Harvard to release the names of the students who signed the statement so that he and other CEOs don’t “inadvertently hire any of their members”, Fortune reported. He said he is 100 percent in favour of free speech but he objects to “students putting out a statement holding Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for terrorists’ heinous and despicable acts, but doing so anonymously under a corporate veil while leveraging the Harvard brand”.

Ackman emphasised that people should be ready to defend their beliefs and take responsibility for them. He said that while there is nothing wrong with criticising Israel, students shouldn’t hide behind “a Harvard-branded corporation while doing so anonymously”. On 10 October, Harvard president Claudine Gay put out a statement saying that she condemns the “terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas”. “Let me also state, on this matter as on others, that while our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group - not even 30 student groups- speaks for Harvard University or its leadership.”

Students challenge leadership On Wednesday, the Harvard Club of Israel issued a statement addressed to the Harvard leadership in response to the “back-pedalling statement issued [by Gay]”. “In the face of evil, Harvard must proclaim that pro-terrorism statements like those published by the student groups on Sunday have no place in civil discourse at Harvard or elsewhere,” the statement said. “If Harvard wishes to be a moral leader for the world, its administration must speak out immediately and forcefully. Anything less than full support for Israel’s right to defend itself and its citizens and unequivocal denunciation of this terrorism is unacceptable and is wholly inadequate for an institution of Harvard’s caliber.” Students across college campuses in the US have been speaking out in support of Palestine. On Tuesday, an NYU Law School student’s job offer with an international law firm was rescinded after they published a pro-Palestine message in the Student Bar Association newsletter.  At Columbia University, the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine contended that the blame for the conflict and resulting casualties squarely rests with the Israeli government and their western allies. Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, said she “was devastated by the horrific attack on Israel this weekend and the ensuing violence that is affecting so many people. Unfortunately, at this moment, little is certain except that the fighting and human suffering are not likely to end soon.” On Tuesday, Students for Justice in Palestine at Stanford University penned an opinion piece asserting the legal entitlement of Palestinians to resist occupation. 

Numerous California branches of the pro-Palestinian organisation endorsed a declaration characterising Hamas' assault as a pivotal event in modern Palestinian defiance, Politico reported. Students for Justice in Palestine groups at multiple City University of New York campuses will hold rallies for Palestine on Thursday and Friday. 

(11 October 2023)

unfortunately this is nothing new for colleges (especially in the US). e.g. Hillel, the world's largest “Jewish campus organization”, is a Zionist org that routinely harasses Palestinians and their supporters

or the entire existence of the Canary Mission, a project specifically to stalk and doxx students and professors who are Palestinian or anti-Zionist

[cyarskaren52]

The anti-cancel culture folks are predictably quiet about what’s happened to Claudine Gay. Of course.

[infiniteglitterfall]

"...All of the punditry about diversity and free speech and criticism of Israel has extravagantly missed the point.

"The problem was not that Jewish students on American university campuses didn’t want free speech, or that they didn’t want to hear criticism of Israel."

(The problem is also not that Jewish students didn't support Palestinians or want a free independent Palestinian state. One of the biggest problems, in fact, is that the pro-Palestinian movement consistently implies that the only way to support Palestine is by calling for the destruction of Israel.

While activists in Gaza protest Hamas, activists outside of it follow Hamas's lead: framing this as a battle between all Palestinians and the existence of Israel.

This has effectively excluded activists in Palestine from the movement to support them. Which is a neat trick. /s)

"Instead, they didn’t want people vandalizing Jewish student organizations’ buildings, or breaking or urinating on the buildings’ windows.

"They didn’t want people tearing their mezuzahs down from their dorm-room doors.

They didn’t want their college instructors spouting anti-Semitic lies and humiliating them in class.

They didn’t want their posters defaced with Hitler caricatures, or their dorm windows plastered with Fuck Jews.

They didn’t want people punching them in the face, or beating them with a stick, or threatening them with death for being Jewish.

"At world-class American colleges and universities, all of this happened and more."

(I've added links to each of these examples. I couldn't find an incident of "fuck Jews" plastered all over dorm windows, but I did find it written on a chalkboard, left in a note by someone robbing a Jewish student, and graffitied in a music building bathroom.

That last one was at UCLA, where there was also an incident in which Students for Justice in Palestine held a public beating of a Netanyahu piñata while an organizer with a bullhorn led everyone in a chant of "beat that fucking Jew!")

"I was not merely an observer of this spectacle. I’d been serving on now–former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s anti-Semitism advisory committee, convened after the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel and amid student responses to it.

"I was asked to participate because I am a Harvard alumna who wrote a book about anti-Semitism called People Love Dead Jews.

"As soon as my participation became public, I was inundated with messages from Jewish students seeking help. They approached me with their stories after having already tried many other avenues—bewildered not only by what they’d experienced, but also by how many people dismissed or denied those experiences."

Dara Horn says "the foundational big lie," in one version after another throughout the centuries, has been "that anti-Semitism itself is a righteous act of resistance against evil, because Jews are collectively evil and have no right to exist."

"In 2013, David Nirenberg published an astonishing book titled Anti-Judaism.

"Nirenberg’s argument, rigorously laid out in nearly 500 pages of dense scholarship and more than 100 pages of footnotes, is that Western cultures—including ancient civilizations, Christianity, Islam (which Nirenberg considers Western in its relationship with Judaism), and post-religious societies—have often defined themselves through their opposition to what they consider 'Judaism.' This has little to do with actual Judaism, and a lot to do with whatever evil these non-Jewish cultures aspire to overcome.

"Nirenberg is a diligent historian who resists generalizations and avoids connecting the past to contemporary events. But when one reads through his carefully assembled record of 23 centuries’ worth of intellectual leaders articulating their societies’ ideals by loudly rejecting whatever they consider 'Jewish,' this deep neural groove in Western thought becomes difficult to dismiss, its patterns unmistakable.

"If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists.

"If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists.

"If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. 'Anti-Judaism' thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice."

(This second piece is a rip-off of Brazilian artist Carlos Latuff's 2008 comic celebrating a Communist event in Brazil.

It's also a particularly excellent example of how both "Jews are capitalists" and "Jews are communists" represent the core antisemitic trope of "Jews morally corrupt society.")

"This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist."

Dara Horn's piece has some super-fun examples.

"Around 38 C.E., after rioters in Alexandria destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes and burned Jews alive, the Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Philo and the non-Jewish Alexandrian intellectual Apion both sailed to Rome for a 'debate' before Emperor Caligula about whether Jews deserved citizenship.

"Apion believed that Jews held an annual ritual in which they kidnapped a non-Jew, fattened him up, and ate him. Caligula delayed Philo’s rebuttal for five months, and then listened to him only while consulting with designers on palace decor.

"Alexandrian Jews lost their citizenship rights, though it took until 66 C.E. for 50,000 more of them to be slaughtered.

"In medieval Europe, Jews were forced into disputations with Christian priests that placed Jewish texts and traditions on public trial, resulting in Jewish books being burned and Jewish disputants exiled. Later legal trials expanded on this concept, requiring Jews to defend themselves against the absurd charge known as the blood libel, in which Jews are accused of murdering and consuming non-Jewish children—a claim that has echoes in current lies about Israelis harvesting Palestinians’ organs."

fucking exhausting is what it is

I want to share more of this essay, and talk about it more. But this is more than enough for right now. This is way more than enough.

[socialjusticeinamerica]

Ted Cruz, at the behest of Nazi oligarchs of course, is a leading purveyor of the attacks on Harvard and institutions of higher learning. Even though he is an alumni of Harvard he calls it a bastion of “cultural Marxism.” He likely couldn’t even explain that and street level MAGAts have no idea what he is talking about but they’ll regurgitate it. Ted and friends could never tolerate a black woman running Harvard. It must have been like sandpaper rubbing their reptilian skin.

The central pillar of Republikkkan culture wars is a rejection of authority and basic social structure. Respect for education, science, medicine, common decency, and anything progressive or compassionate is being ground into dust by 24/7/365 Republikkkan propaganda spewing across news media, social media, print media, and through relentless conservative talk radio.

Republican propaganda and the political think tanks behind it have been doing this in a coordinated manner since the 1960’s. They have nearly unlimited dark money from neo-Nazi fascist oligarchs like Koch, Walton, Crow, DeVos, Murdoch, Muskrat, etc.

The Democrats have literally nothing in place to counter this and still relies on crossing their fingers and hoping that individual charismatic candidates will buy us time before we are lost to corporate fascism. Somebody on the left needs to step up and create a coordinated nationwide resistance network to resist the fascist onslaught from the right before all is lost.

If you think both parties are the same you are too dumb to be allowed access to my content.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

If you are not a close follower of American college campus politics, you are likely to be unfamiliar with a woman who has been making headlines for over a month in the US and increasingly around the world. The lady in question, one Claudine Gay, was President of Harvard, one of the most renowned educational institutions in the world, until earlier this week when she resigned over plagiarism allegations.

Why does or should anyone care about this? Well, Gay’s decision to step down is the culmination of long-running efforts to address the cancer at the heart of Western societies: the idea that the way to fix injustices of the past is to commit injustices today.

Following her resignation, Gay’s defenders were quick to emphasise the racial dimension of this story. Ibram X. Kendi, for example, tweeted that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism”.

And while his claims of this being a racist campaign are absurd, it is true that Gay was not targeted solely for seemingly adopting the personal motto: “I came, I saw, I copied”. She became a focus of major Harvard donor concerns and a media campaign led by Christopher Rufo – a man I would approvingly describe as the diversity industry’s greatest enemy – in the light of her mind-boggling testimony in Congress. Her statements, given alongside the Presidents of MIT and UPenn, revealed the core of the ideology the entire Western education system is based on in all its glory.

The oppressor vs. oppressed mindset which is - no matter how uncomfortable this may make some readers - cultural Marxism, says simply that white people and “over-performing” minorities like Indians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese and Korean Americans should be discriminated against in hiring and student applications in favour of “underprivileged groups”. As a result, college campuses on which regular meltdowns have occurred for a decade over such “hate speech” as dressing in a Mexican costume for Halloween found themselves with nothing to say about pro-Hamas demonstrations and the harassment of Jewish students on their campuses in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

But even that is not painting the full picture. Yes, Gay, a darling of the diversity industry, was targeted for her plagiarism following her complete failure of leadership in recent months. But she was also partially targeted because of the assumption, if not outright conclusion, that the reason she was appointed in the first place was, to put it mildly, not merit alone.

After all, Gay’s primary achievement is not stellar academic work, exemplary managerial skills or even charisma and force of personality. She was appointed President of Harvard following a distinguished career in fields like “improving diversity” and researching “race and identity”. To put it bluntly, many people believe that she is a diversity hire and the reason she pushed the DEI ideology that eventually led to her appalling testimony in Congress is that she is herself a beneficiary of it.

To be clear, she has not been forced out for being black. She has been forced out for being placed in a position for which she had neither the skills nor experience to succeed and then failing in it. This is the rotten legacy of affirmative action, which, as Thomas Sowell explained decades ago in 90 seconds and in many of his books since, hurts the very people it is attempting to help:

If allowing students to enter universities in which they are destined to fail for the sake of diversity harms them, then what might be said about hiring people for leadership roles in major institutions in which they are destined to fail? This harms not only them but also the people who work and study at those institutions.

To be clear, I have no evidence that Claudine Gay was hired ahead of better, more qualified candidates. But it is not hard to imagine that a position holding the prestige, reputation and nearly $1-million-a-year salary the role of Harvard President commands could have been filled by someone with more executive experience, academic achievements and other relevant expertise.

This is the other curse of the counterproductive attempts to artificially increase the presence of “underrepresented” groups in employment and education. Because everyone knows that some people are routinely given unfair preferential treatment, it becomes easier and easier for the rest of us to suspect specific individuals of being there for reasons other than merit.

So here is the truth: we must return to pursuing the goal of a colour-blind society immediately. There is no such thing as positive discrimination. All discrimination is wrong. And because it is wrong, it will create precisely the kind of resentment that Claudine Gay is now facing. She is seen as the standard-bearer of the DEI industry and is being treated as such by people who have had enough.

All of us must be treated on the content of our character. When we refuse to follow this principle, we hurt everyone: white, black, hispanic, Asian, Jewish. A healthy society relies on the equal treatment of all individuals. The fact that we have to say this out loud in 2024 is a sign of how far we’ve fallen.

DEI must be dismantled. This will take years, perhaps decades. But, in recent weeks, for the first time in a long time, we have grounds for optimism.