Advice | What Harvard Should Learn from Claudine Gay’s Resignation
I had written and submitted a column about Harvard and its president, Claudine Gay, when news of her resignation broke Tuesday afternoon. new accusations of plagiarism in her published work. I would like to put on record what I wrote: “Cancel culture is always ugly and usually a mistake. If Gay must go, let it happen after more deliberation, with more decorum, and when experts like me don’t write about her.” Oh yeah.
The point may be moot now, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should resign. That was why she was appointed in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in recent Harvard history. How did someone with a scientific track record as poor as hers – she has not yet written a single book – do that? published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and has made no groundbreaking contributions to her field – reaching the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: where there used to be a high point, there is now a crater. It emerged when the social justice model of higher education, which currently focuses on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts – and invested heavily in the administrative side of the university – blew up the excellence model, which focused on the ideal of intellectual merit and was especially concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous struggle of ideas.
Why did that change happen? I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to 1978 Bakke’s decisionwhen the Supreme Court actually greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.
But the problem with Bakke is not that diversity was allowed to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It is that university administrators have made a stipend a requirement, so that a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates almost every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been applied with a lighter hand – more of a push than a mandate – it might have survived the court’s investigation last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that regularly hindered the higher goals of universities, especially the open exchange of ideas.
In announcing Gay’s appointment, Harvard praised her leadership and scholarship. The job of a university president is also that of director, fundraiser, and cheerleader for the institution, and perhaps the Harvard Corporation thought she would be good at that. But skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noticed in his story about her her taking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work, gave ammunition to opponents who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.
This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, admirers and detractors alike assume she is a political symbol whose achievements represent more than who she is as a person. The weight of expectations on her must have been crushing. But dehumanization is the price every institution pays when considerations of social engineering supersede those of individual performance.
After the end of affirmative action, it may take a generation before someone like Gay gets the chance to be judged on her own merits, regardless of the color of her skin. But it will take longer to repair the damage the social justice model has done to higher education. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup poll. By last year, that number had dropped to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of anti-Semitic outbursts on campus. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.
The school next to Boston will likely recover. But Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher education – and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success was not just the caliber of America’s universities. It was the respect they inspired among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.
That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason. People admire excellence and will strive for it – both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a quickly wasting asset, especially if it comes at an exorbitant price. That is the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in being an anti-racist.
No one should doubt that there is still plenty of excellence in today’s academia and that there are plenty of good reasons to send your children to college. But no one should doubt that the intellectual rot is pervasive and will not stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify, nurture and liberate the best minds, not to create social utopias .