E-Pluribus | January 23, 2024
What goes around comes around; conservative education reforms through progressive eyes; and Hooven on Harvard.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
James Piereson: DEI boomerang
Claudine Gay may be gone as president of Harvard, but James Piereson at the New Criterion says the battle over diversity, equity, and inclusion is far from over. While plagiarism ultimately cost Gay her job, Piereson writes that the incident’s role in exposing DEI ideology was the larger victory.
Critics have said that, in their zeal to appoint Ms. Gay, the members of [Harvard’s] governing board failed to look closely at her research. They conducted only a brief candidate hunt (Harvard’s shortest in the post-war era) and passed over many highly qualified candidates in the process. A few outside critics cautioned against elevating Ms. Gay for reasons that became apparent later. Harvard ignored them; and so, those critics say, it is little surprise that the plagiarism charges were not investigated prior to her appointment. It was the plagiarism charge, not the bungled testimony before Congress, that ultimately led to her resignation.
Nevertheless, Ms. Gay possessed the required scholarly credentials (leaving aside the plagiarism) for the job, with a graduate degree from Harvard, a plausible record of publications, and promotions through the faculty ranks. In her defense, and Harvard’s, those credentials hold up reasonably well against those possessed by other college and university leaders across the country, most of whom abandoned research interests early in their careers in order to move up the administrative ladder. The time is long past when a distinguished scientist like James Bryant Conant or a legal scholar like Derek Bok might be elevated to Harvard’s presidency, or to the presidency of any other major institution. Other factors are more important today—in particular, fealty to the diversity ideology. It is no longer possible for college presidents to govern their institutions absent wholesale endorsement of the diversity enterprise. (Yes, it is an odd development that the university should have been taken over by diversity, but that is a subject for another occasion.)
That is one reason why Ms. Gay’s research credentials were judged by Harvard’s leaders as secondary in importance to her standing as a representative of the diversity regime. It should not take much to govern the university, they reasoned, with its $50 billion endowment, a pipeline to wealthy alumni and federal funding agencies, and a faculty that every scholar in the country would like to join. They were able for these reasons to elevate the ideological factor above other considerations in selecting a new president. By all accounts, Ms. Gay was a stern enforcer of diversity standards during her previous tenure as dean of Harvard’s faculty of arts and sciences. She monitored appointments and promotions, along with disciplinary situations, in a manner consistent with diversity principles, elevating those who agreed and elbowing aside those who did not. That was an important factor behind her appointment: the diversity groups on campus would not have otherwise supported her appointment as president.
[. . .]
The Harvard scandal has brought out the diversity regime into the open where Americans can see it in full—and what they see is a quasi-totalitarian operation that promotes propaganda and thought control in place of open inquiry and robust debate. It is thus no surprise that conservatives and Republicans have finally decided to fight back against that regime by defunding dei programs and bureaucracies in public universities in several states. A Republican president elected next year, possibly Donald Trump, could take the controversy into Congress and the executive departments that control higher education’s funding streams. This would pit the two parties against one another, with the American university system caught in the middle. That might turn into an edifying spectacle, and a potentially consequential one as well.
Read it all.
Melissa Hellmann: ‘Code words and dog whistling’: why the conservative attack on higher education is so efficient
Melissa Hellmann, writing at The Guardian, takes a dim view of conservative efforts to reform higher education. But it’s instructive to see how far Hellmann and other critics are willing to go to undermine their foes. Reaching back into the late 1980s, John Tilghman, a critic of Christopher Rufo whom Hellman quotes in her piece, actually invokes Willie Horton to describe Rufo’s strategy.
When Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president in early January, pundits credited her departure to a successful removal campaign led by conservative activists.
[. . .]
Sustained and coordinated pressure through media coverage helped kick off the campaign against Gay. Critics, mainly conservative activists, used social media and news outlets to claim that she responded inadequately to congressional questioning about antisemitism on campus. Soon thereafter, they levied allegations that she plagiarized some of her work.
Weeks prior to Gay’s resignation, the rightwing activist Christopher Rufo publicized the plan to remove her from office: “We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.” In an interview with Politico after Gay vacated her post, Rufo described his successful strategy as a three-pronged approach of “narrative, financial and political pressure”.
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an associate professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, noted the effectiveness of the plan, and warned of what it could portend considering that these actors have “seen the impact that they can have when they are able to marshal pressure from the media, donors and others”.
[. . .]
The specific language used to characterize Gay was one of the most important tools in the conservative plan, according to John Tilghman, an associate professor and interim department chair of history and political science at Tuskegee University. Rufo’s allegations that Gay plagiarized throughout her career gave the impression “that she practiced academic dishonesty over a period of time”, Tilghman said. (In December, Gay added several new citations to articles that didn’t have proper attribution, and a Harvard review found no violation of the university’s standards.)
Tilghman sees parallels in Rufo’s strategy with those used by the late Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who helped George HW Bush win the 1988 presidential election against then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.
Dukakis had supported a prison weekend release program during which Willie Horton, a Black man, raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend. Atwater used rhetoric to sow fear and racial animus among white voters by creating a campaign that focused on Horton and portrayed Dukakis as being lenient on crime.
“It was all part of Bush’s campaign of tough on crime, by using racial code words and dog whistling language to do that,” Tilghman said. “Christopher Rufo is mostly using that same playbook, but he’s applied it to higher education and high school education.”
[. . .]
“We’re seeing a more emboldened and expressed approach to eradicating spaces for Bipoc people,” the ACLU’s Watson said. “Racist ideology isn’t new; extreme rightwing conservatives are using the same tools repeatedly, and publicizing their playbook so it can be used to attack anything from evidence-based public health advice to election results, and equal opportunity and access.”
Read it all here.
Carole Hooven: Why I Left Harvard
Professor and author Carole Hooven, forced out at Harvard over her views on biology, tells her story at The Free Press. Unlike Claudine Gay, Hooven enjoyed the support of neither the school nor the wider scholarly community, as she details in these excerpts below.
After earning my PhD in 2004, I was fortunate enough to get an appointment as a lecturer in my department [at Harvard], Human Evolutionary Biology (HEB). This allowed me to indulge two of my passions: teaching undergraduates, and behavioral endocrinology—the study of connections between hormones and behavior.
[. . .]
In 2019, I took an unpaid year off to write my book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. It received excellent reviews from the popular press and academic journals.
[. . .]
In the brief segment on Fox [in 2021], my troubles began when I described how biologists define male and female, and argued that these are invaluable terms that science educators in particular should not relinquish in response to pressure from ideologues. I emphasized that “understanding the facts about biology doesn’t prevent us from treating people with respect.” We can, I said, “respect their gender identities and use their preferred pronouns.”
I also mentioned that educators are increasingly self-censoring, for fear that using the “wrong” language can result in being shunned or even fired.
Some of this censorship comes as a result of the growing DEI complex that has a strong foothold in so many institutions. At Harvard, there are “central” DEI offices run by professional staff, headed up by the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer (CDIO), whose mission is to create “a campus climate that is welcoming, inclusive, respectful, and free from bias and harassment.” There are also many departmental DEI “committees” or “task forces” that are typically staffed by faculty, staff, and grad students.
These committees have a profound influence on department culture, and on matters ranging from who should give a talk, what is taught, and even who is hired. All this reaches into daily academic life and gives enormous power to graduate students.
The director of our task force was a graduate student; I’ll just use her first name, Laura. Shortly after my appearance on Fox, I learned of a tweet from her that read, “As the Director of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force for my dept @HarvardHEB, I am appalled and frustrated by the transphobic and harmful remarks made by a member of my dept in this interview with Fox and Friends.” Attached to the tweet was a clip of my Fox and Friends appearance.
I was shocked and distressed to see this public attack on my character, especially from someone representing herself as speaking on behalf of the university and my department. In response, I quote-tweeted her tweet: “I appreciate your concerns. Could you let me (and the Twitterverse) know exactly what I said that you consider transphobic or harmful to undergrads? I think you know that I care deeply about all of my students, and I also care about science. How about a discussion? @HarvardHEB.”
[. . .]
Eventually I was diagnosed with severe major depression, which included intrusive, persistent, and unwanted suicidal thoughts. I began seeing a therapist and was prescribed medication.
[. . .]
As of January 2023, although I assumed I’d remain in my job until some ripe old age (I’m 57), I retired from Harvard. When I made it clear to the powers that be in my department that I felt I had no choice but to leave due to the lack of public support, nobody stepped up to provide it. People were behaving in ways that were invited by the culture of DEI. (This was particularly true of Laura, the graduate student immersed in that culture, and I do not blame her.) Even if they knew the right thing to do, especially for those at the top, there was just too much to lose.
Read the whole thing.
Editor’s Note: Check out a new Pluribus original today: Editing Joe Biden.
Around Twitter (X)
Via Free Black Thought: part of a longer thread of author Dylan F. Morgan’s comments on how black authors can be unfairly pigeon-holed into writing “social justice stories,” instead of just good stories:
Here’s Yair Rosenberg with a few excerpts from his Atlantic article exposing the media’s embarrassing record of mischaracterizing Israel’s public statements since October 7th:
And finally, via Colin Wright, a remarkable graph showing the stunning rise of “sex assigned at birth” in scientific literature in a little more than a decade: