Wallowing in my aforementioned morass. The most glaring illustration of how racially hypocritical the Progressives have become appeared when the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn appeared before Congress to justify their mishandling of anti-Semitism on campus. The left is now trying to regroup after UPenn President Liz Magill stepped down, as did Harvard’s Claudine Gay, although they remain faculty members. But not before they were thoroughly exposed as incompetent in trying to instill a culture of DEI at their institutions. The left claims that Elise Stefanik “laid a trap” when Gay responded to her question on “whether calls for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment under university policy.” Her answer, no doubt after having been prepped by her attorneys, was “depends on the context.” And there you have it; everything depends on the context, and that context is whether a politically favored minority group is involved. But with that preposterous answer came scrutiny of her academic record. And why not? Wouldn’t you expect the President of one of the world’s most prestigious institutions to have a resume replete with publications and original research? Certainly to a standard demonstrating an intellect sufficient to hold off questioning from a member of Congress, even though Ms. Stefanik is a Harvard graduate herself. But no. Gay’s curriculum vitae was glaringly thin, and most notably, her work, including her doctoral thesis, was found to have over 40 examples of plagiarism. A couple of missed references are forgiven. But 40 examples are indicative of a pattern of intellectual deceit. And let’s definitely not resort to the Biden standard, where serial plagiarist Joe claimed that his plagiarism was so “blatant” that it “had to be accidental.” Sure. But the Harvard Corporation leaped to her defense, reviewing the accusations and dismissing the plagiarism as being merely ”improper citations.” Most leftist academics from whom she pilfered material fell in line and decided that the offenses were insignificant. Even attorney Randall Kennedy, Professor of Law at Harvard University, waved off the improper citations as simply “sloppiness.” Seriously? The president of Harvard is academically sloppy, and that’s something we choose to dismiss. And the WSJ pointed out that Gay chose to go back and correct her citations, somehow suggesting that she was righting the wrong and having the chutzpah to call it “proactive.” Sorry sweetie, but you are even having difficulty with basic definitions. Proactive means you were out in front of the issue rather than waiting until after it happened. The word you were looking for is retroactive. You got caught, then you went back and made the corrections and tried to convince all of us that you did it of your own volition, despite having already reaped the rewards of the subterfuge and becoming ensconced in the president’s office with an $870000 salary. And in truly disappointing fashion, in her own defense, she resorted to the tried and true tactic of calling the scandal an example of “racial animus.” Yet the Harvard Black Student Association and black members of the faculty predictably rallied to her defense as well claiming that “Gay’s ouster reflects a system that wasn’t built for them”. Oh please, cry me a river. This is wrong on so many levels; I don’t know where to start. First off, why is there a Black Student Association anyway? Is there a White Student Association? The entire concept of an association based on race seems just a tad racially divisive at an institution that had, past tense, a president whose scholarly pursuits were in the field of African-American Studies and who was herself a Black female. The whole Martin Luther King concept of colorblindness appears to have been thoroughly abandoned to the extent that seeing color distinctions is now necessary, lest you be called a racist. Recall the “judged not by the color of your skin but by the content of your character” argument. That is apparently passé in this age of racial preference over meritocracy. And the left is remarkably selective with their definitions. I can choose to be one of the aforementioned 100 genders, in complete violation of my biological blueprint, but it appears to be impossible for me to identify as another race. Why is that? It would seem that morphing into another race would be significantly easier and, indeed, far less painful than gender reassignment surgery. I would reference John Howard Griffin, but those blackface shenanigans would not be acceptable in today’s racially charged environment, and more recently, the case of racial appropriation didn’t end well for Rachel Dolezal. But the hypocritical power of the left says no, you can’t do that, which is indeed unfortunate as I would really like to get a piece of this reparations action making its way through legislation in California and New York. Again, I digress. Regarding the statement that the system wasn’t built for them: Bingo. It wasn’t. Nor should it be. It’s not built for the benefit of any racial group unless you ascribe to that nonsense that mathematics, the English language, and virtually any other measure of academic achievement is somehow an example of White Supremacy. The system was built for academic excellence, to nurture intellectual curiosity, and to mold students into the people who will inherit the world from their teachers for the betterment of humankind. At least that’s what it used to say in those pamphlets when you took the college campus tour. And to do that, we reward merit, hard work, and academic achievement. We don’t do what has become vogue in academic circles as of late, most horrifyingly in medical schools and pilot training courses. We don’t banish standardized testing as a yardstick, we don’t dumb down entrance exams, we don’t grade on racial standards, and we most definitely don’t choose our students, our administrators, our faculty, or even the cafeteria lady in our academic institutions based on some arbitrary racial quota. That is the walking definition of racism. Yet Harvard has made a statement. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, the dreaded DEI, are more important to them than merit. And here we are. An unqualified University President resigns in disgrace with lines drawn not on the facts but on race alone. Facts speak for themselves, and to disregard the evidence while viewing the proceedings through “pick-your-race” colored glasses is by definition, racism. An astute WSJ respondent recently referenced conservative columnist George Will, who said, “On Oct. 3, 1974, Frank Robinson was hired by the Cleveland Indians as the major leagues’ first Black manager. But an even more important milestone of progress occurred on June 19, 1977, when the Indians fired him. That was true equality.” In yet another post from 2012, the prescient Mr. Will also wrote: “Perhaps a pleasant paradox defines this political season.” He was talking about Obama’s race as a factor in his re-election bid, but just substituting race in general for “Obama” illustrates a point, as race “may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls with their (at most) one track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up. Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure—thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him [or her in this case] –seems especially reluctant not to give up on the first African-American president. [It] speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.” We would do well to heed his words.
I'm sorry to have subjected you to this purging of my spleen if, indeed, you had waded through this rant in its entirety. 2023’s affront to my sensibilities had to be vented, or it surely would have been injurious to my health. Mea Culpa.
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