DEI Empire by Claudine Gay | louder.news

Harvard President Claudine Gay has been embroiled in controversy for downplaying Hamas terrorism and plagiarizing material in her academic work on race. Both scandals have discredited his presidency, but neither should come as a surprise. Throughout Gay's career at Harvard, as a professor, dean, and president, racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, her administrative priorities, and her rise through the institution.

Over the course of his career, Gay quietly built an empire of “diversity” that influenced every facet of college life. Between 2018 and the summer of 2023, as dean of the largest faculty on campus, Gay oversaw the university's racially discriminatory admissions program, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional. Even after the court issued its decision earlier this year, Gay said it was a “tough day” and defended the university's policies, which were considered discriminatory against Asian and white applicants. Gay promised to abide by the letter of the law, though he remained “firm” in his commitment to produce “diversity,” a not-so-subtle message that Harvard would find a way, as the University of California has done, to 'avoid the right to practice.

While affirmative action has been a longstanding practice at Harvard, other programs Gay led were new. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Gay commissioned a task force on visual culture and signage, which published a series of recommendations the following year to engage in “historical reckoning with racial injustice.” The recommendations included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by a homogenous portrait of white men.” In particular, the report maintained, administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] they represent women, and all but three [which] they represent white men.” Who were these white men and why were they honored in the first place? The report does not say: their race and gender alone provided sufficient justification for their banishment.