How Harvard became a DEI hell hole

 Zoe Stimpel:

I grew up in the Boston area, and Harvard was always a source of ambivalence: on one hand, a powerhouse par excellence to which anyone would be eternally thrilled to send their child, and on the other, an institution of profound arrogance and self-regard.

Awash with billions from a vast endowment and donations, and from a different universe to European or British universities, its professoriate seemed immensely posh, living in huge houses in Central and Harvard Square, hosting lavish dinner parties and holidaying in the Swiss Alps and Tuscany. But, despite standard Ivy League cronyism and nepotism, snootiness and noisy virtue-signalling, the overall sense of the institution was one of true excellence. Professors like legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, who wrote the definitive The Case for Israel, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roy Glauber, and dozens more of their ilk were just part of the local landscape.

It’s true that too many undergraduates were there because of family legacy, sporting prowess or donations from a relative. And some ethnic minority students had gained admission helped by affirmative action policies. But most students were at Harvard because they were just absolutely excellent: incredibly smart, talented polymaths who really were the best, whatever school they’d come from.

Since then, Harvard has become a very different place. What used to be mere undercurrents – cronyism and arrogance, and the pursuit of social justice through double standards – have become dominant, ideological and defining.

In the past decade, affirmative action policies – a complex and long-standing part of America’s attempts to right some of the wrongs of the past – have morphed into Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). DEI is an authoritarian regime that groups people according to hierarchies of perceived oppression, with those considered most victimised (Black and trans people) pitted against the allegedly privileged – white people, and scholastically over-achieving groups like Indians, East Asians and Jews.

DEI has been embraced as the foundation of all teaching, hiring and socially acceptable behaviour by American universities. The stifling effects of DEI policies on free speech have been well documented, including at Harvard, where students are subjected to mandatory DEI training, which includes vows of fealty to the new laws of subjective gender pronouns and exhaustive lists of disallowed language, such as the question: “Where are you from?”

In June, the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard, finding that it had discriminated against Asian-American applicants. In September, the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) ranked Harvard 254th out of 254 universities and colleges for freedom of speech.

Things got a whole lot worse after the Oct 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Harvard’s disdain for freedom of speech was grotesquely inverted for all to see, with the attacks proving a starting gun for student mobs – ostensibly protesting Israel’s robust response in Gaza to Hamas’s attack – to attack and insult Jews. Some called for Jewish genocide. As has been widely noted in the firestorm since, Harvard is now a place where you can be put on notice for using the wrong gender pronouns, where undergraduates can be chucked out if years-old social media posts deemed racist are unearthed – and where there are absolutely no consequences for calling for a second Jewish Holocaust, nor for the the mass disruption of classes with megaphones to chant pro-Palestinian slogans.

At the centre of this spectacle of double standards, anti-Semitism, freewheeling vandalism, disruption of learning and the celebration of terrorism is Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University. Gay – a quantitative political scientist of Haitian heritage – has shown exacting commitment to the DEI agenda. But when it came to the maelstrom of anti-Semitic disruption that followed Oct 7, Gay was cold, quiet and apparently unconcerned. When congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked her, during the most watched congressional hearings in history, whether a hypothetical call for the genocide of Jewish people would qualify as a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay answered that it “depend[ed] on the context”.

Instead of being sacked or resigning, Gay has stayed put. To the disbelief of most of the world, the Harvard board – appearing wildly out of touch and craven – voted to stand by her.
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Putting DEI ahead of merit is a good way to ruin anything and especially a university.   Can you imagine an NBA or NFL team that selected players based on DEI instead of merit?  The team would quickly become mediocre.  That is what is happening to places like Harvard.