Harvard Let Itself and Gay Be Bullied

It’s telling that the most damning comments during the saga of the fallen ex-Harvard President Dr. Claudine Gay come from rabid fans of the twice-impeached, four-time criminally indicted man who wants to be a president again. That would be Donald Trump.

Emil GuillermoOne of the league of former Trump lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, a former Harvard Law professor, was one of those on cable TV leading the chorus calling Gay a DEI hire. For the uninitiated, DEI is “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the now established catchall phrase for race matters in the academic and corporate worlds. It is the focus of the second coming of the affirmative action battle, which despite the SCOTUS ruling last year, isn’t quite dead enough for some. But then, the anti-civil rights folks never give up trying to stop the arc of justice. And so right-wing opponents of DEI saw Gay, beginning with those her less than fiery Congressional hearing comments, as a gift.

They saw a pushover for attack dogs like Dershowitz to demonize Gay and go after her, not for her milk-toast, depends-on-the-context comments, but for what she stood for. DEI.

“That’s how she became president,” Dershowitz commented one night on cable. “She is the symbol of DEI and the symbol has failed.”

And what of the moral failings of the DEI attackers who back Donald Trump, a man who was so unqualified to lead the United States as president, who had never held public office, who lied or misled in his public statements thousands of times — he made presidential fact checking a cottage industry — and who is now under criminal indictment on 90-plus felony counts. That man is the prohibitive favorite to be the Republican nominee for president, and the only way it can be understood is that he is the extreme beneficiary of white affirmative action.

Keep in mind the thousands of Trump lies made during his first term. Not plagiarism. That is, after all, a common practice among politicians and corporate execs who have ghost writers and speech writers. Saying others’ words and passing it off as your own? In the real world of politics, it’s standard operating procedure. Trump was one better. He didn’t read his scripts after a while.  He just told bold-faced lies.

The plagiarism Gay was accused of was determined to be minor and not to be a violation of research misconduct. She was not an outright liar like Trump. She was allowed to make some minor corrections. But her right-wing critics made it the moral cause for her demise. Really? They allow for the lies of the Republican front-runner, and Gay is a president no more? There’s your damning double standard.