Claudine Gay’s Defenders Have It All Backwards

I have spent a good amount of time this week thinking about why Harvard failed in its attempt to keep Claudine Gay as its president, and I have come to the view that it ultimately happened because the arguments that were made in its defense were a load of old bollocks. Here’s Tressie McMillan Cottom, in the New York Times, to substantiate my conclusion:

The specter of D.E.I. made her presidency sound like a voucher program for a welfare recipient and not the internal promotion of a long-term employee to leadership. When you hear someone from the reactionary crowd talk about D.E.I.’s undue influence over an institution like Harvard, he sounds like a royal who finds himself forced to go to the D.M.V. for the first time. Subjected to rules designed for hoi polloi, forced into lines with people who need the government and unable to buy his way out of it. It is not genius. It is a powerful rhetorical strategy because it merged the political craftsmanship of the 1988 Willie Horton ad with the moralism of federalism.

It plays on the latent but powerful idea that government — big government — unfairly helps undeserving people, many of them women and people of color, who drain the pool of opportunity for deserving people. D.E.I. is “bad” because it supplants merit for diversity and it empowers the racialized federal government to stick its hands into an institution that produces the cultural elite. That made Harvard a public problem. The public proved all too willing to weigh in on whether a tenured professor deserved her job, with its role, status and ranking. Once this link was secured, every other charge became stickier.

None of this is true. One cannot contend with one’s critics if one does not know what one’s critics believe, and Cottom — whose piece runs for 1,750 words but never includes the term “plagiarism” — does not know what her critics believe. Let’s take the above claims one by one:

The specter of D.E.I. made her presidency sound like a voucher program for a welfare recipient and not the internal promotion of a long-term employee to leadership.

Cottom mentions “D.E.I.” here, but what she’s really objecting to in this sentence is criticisms of affirmative action, which is a much older sin than “D.E.I.” It is true that Claudine Gay has been described by some as an “affirmative action hire.” But, as enemies of that practice have noted for decades now, the responsibility for that lies with those who promote affirmative action, not those who oppose it. The title of Cottom’s piece is “The Claudine Gay Debacle Was Never About Merit.” Actually, it was — which is presumably why Cottom feels obliged to dismiss that objection right out of the gate and then never revisit it in any detail. Invariably, advocates of affirmative action try to have it both ways. When arguing for its continuation, they insist condescendingly that the practice is necessary because, without it, minorities will never reach positions of power and influence; and then, once they have got their own way, they deny that anyone identifiable has ever benefited from the preferential treatment that they just contended was imperative.

Having no connection to Harvard, I do not know whether Claudine Gay was an affirmative action hire, but I do know why some people have assumed that she was: They have assumed that she was because Harvard and its apologists have made it sound as if she was. When Gay ascended to the role, the main thing that was said about her was that she is a black woman. When she was criticized in that role, the main thing that was said about her was that she is a black woman. Now that she is out of the role, prominent progressives are insisting that she was only targeted because she was a black woman, and some are urging that “Harvard’s Next President MUST Be a Black Woman.” Since this affair first began, I have heard precisely nobody contend in the detail that Gay was actually good at her job; the whole thing has been about rank identity politics. It ought to come as no surprise that some of those listening have drawn the conclusions that they have, or that, by enormous margins, Americans find the dance in which Harvard has been engaged so distasteful.

Next, Cottom writes:

When you hear someone from the reactionary crowd talk about D.E.I.’s undue influence over an institution like Harvard, he sounds like a royal who finds himself forced to go to the D.M.V. for the first time. Subjected to rules designed for hoi polloi, forced into lines with people who need the government and unable to buy his way out of it.

This is perfectly backwards. It is the DEI “crowd” that is “reactionary”; the advocates of DEI who sound like “royals”; and the critics of DEI who object to the disparity between the rules that are applied to “hoi polloi” and the rules that are applied to the clique.

Affirmative action and DEI are both predicated upon brazen racial discrimination. One can dress this up, euphemize it, or engage in special pleading in its defense, but one will not change that elementary fact. In one corner, we have clasically liberal ideas such as equality, merit, universalism, and objective truth, and in the other we have regressive, authoritarian ideas such as identitarianism, censorship, collective guilt, and epistemic solipsism. Like many evil institutions — say, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — DEI cloaks itself in ostensibly liberal terms, but they represent nothing more than a carapace over what is, at heart, a viciously bigoted and anti-intellectual worldview that seeks to take us back to the bad old days of group hatreds and empower a tiny clerisy to determine every last detail of our national life.

Cottom proposes that DEI’s detractors are irritated by their inability to “buy [their] way out” of the system. But this, too, is upside-down. What Claudine Gay’s critics were demanding was that she be treated like anyone else. And, clearly, anyone else who plagiarized on the scale that she did — including students at Harvard — would have been removed from their position post haste. In this context, it is utterly preposterous to cast Gay — who comes from great “privilege” — as one of the “people who need the government.” At Harvard, Gay was at the very head of the “government” — a “government” that hired her despite her obvious mediocrity, paid her $900,000 per year, and then tried to cover up her academic sins in the hope that they would go away. What eventually happened at Harvard was not an example of royalty’s prevailing over hoi polloi, but of hoi polloi’s insisting that the royals’ rules be applied to them, too. With power comes responsibility. Gay had the power; she was forced to accept the responsibility.

Back to Cottom:

It is not genius. It is a powerful rhetorical strategy because it merged the political craftsmanship of the 1988 Willie Horton ad with the moralism of federalism.

This doesn’t mean anything comprehensible, and can thus be ignored.

Next:

It plays on the latent but powerful idea that government — big government — unfairly helps undeserving people, many of them women and people of color, who drain the pool of opportunity for deserving people.

Wrong. What opposition to DEI “plays on” is that DEI is antithetical to the ideals that Americans are taught from birth. As exercised, DEI is hostile to equality, indifferent toward merit, dismissive of free speech, and desperate to divide people up by their immutable characteristics in ways that the United States has spent centuries trying to avoid. There is a reasonable debate to be had about the extent to which the government should help engender equality of opportunity, but that debate pre-existed DEI, and it will survive it. DEI is not a continuation of age-old questions about government aid; it is something else altogether. That something else must be met on its own terms, and it will be.

Cottom continues:

D.E.I. is “bad” because it supplants merit for diversity and it empowers the racialized federal government to stick its hands into an institution that produces the cultural elite.

Yes, that’s correct. But it’s not “bad”; it’s bad. Bad, even. Supplanting merit for diversity — which is a nicer way of saying “judging people not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin” — is Bad. It’s Bad everywhere, but it’s especially pernicious when it is adopted at places that “produce the cultural elite,” because, by definition, that cultural elite has a great deal of power.

Cottom finishes her summary with a familiar canard:

That made Harvard a public problem. The public proved all too willing to weigh in on whether a tenured professor deserved her job, with its role, status and ranking. Once this link was secured, every other charge became stickier.

Harvard is a “public problem” because Harvard accepts billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and is bound by federal law. I understand that it would be nice for Harvard if, instead of proving “all too willing to weigh in,” “the public” was content to send its cash to Claudine Gay and never think much about how the institution was being run, but that’s not actually how things work in a free country, and nor should it be. As it happens, there’s a well-known word for an arrangement in which the people are obliged to throw their money at a small group of people but enjoy no say in how it’s spent, and it’s a word with which Tressie McMillan Cottom seems to be familiar. What was it? “Roy-,” “Ray-,” “Ri-”? Ah, yes, that’s it: Royalty.