A number of issues might be true. Former Harvard president Claudine Homosexual was not probably the most certified candidate for the job, however her race, gender and devotion to DEI trumped the standard and amount of her scholarship. The concentrating on of Homosexual and the scrutiny of her scholarship following her poor and flagrantly hypocritical response below questioning by Rep. Elise Stefanik have been a results of her devotion to DEI, which implicates, to a big extent, her race and gender. It’s not essentially false to say she didn’t deserve the publish and was a critical serial plagiarist, but it surely’s additionally not essentially false to say that she was focused for her DEI positions.
When she refused to resign like Penn President Liz Magill, she basically informed her detractors, “make me.” They did.
Not too way back, this might not have occurred. Not solely was DEI beloved by the progressive elites of Harvard, et al., however you may not assault a lady, a black individual and particularly a black lady, no matter what she did and whether or not it was deserved. There was a cloak of immunity that protected them from criticism and problem merely due to their traits. Keep in mind when you couldn’t use the phrase “unhinged” in reference to a lady as a result of males traditionally referred to as ladies loopy to dominate them. It wasn’t as a result of ladies couldn’t be unhinged, however that there was a brand new immunity that dominated the pseudo-intellectuals.
Maybe probably the most attention-grabbing factor popping out of the Tragedy of Darth Plagiarist is that Claudine Homosexual, a black lady, might be taken to job for her actions. No extra will her race or gender immunize her from penalties, a lot as Ibram Kendi insists in any other case.
Claudine Homosexual is now the shortest-serving Harvard College president in historical past. To recap: after hesitating to sentence Hamas freedom fighters after October 7, she then stumbled throughout a congressional listening to when Rep. Elise Stefanik requested her if calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s scholar conduct guidelines. As The New York Occasions put it: “she fell into one thing of a prosecutorial lure”! Ah, it was so intelligent, the query so sophisticated. Then somebody thought to learn her previous work, and it seems she plagiarized dozens of occasions, fairly egregiously (my favourite was plagiarizing another person’s acknowledgements part). Nonetheless, Harvard’s board stood behind her. They’d already sicced high-powered legal professionals on journalists, threatening to sue The New York Submit for reporting on the plagiarism. (Harvard’s legal professionals superior an odd idea to the Submit that it was all made up by ChatGPT.) However the drumbeat was too loud. And in what’s and can ceaselessly be the largest information of 2024, irrespective of what number of world wars begin: Claudine Homosexual resigned.
Homosexual, for her half, refused to apologize. Her resignation letter blamed all of it on “racial animus.” Her inevitable Occasions op-ed repeated the concept that she had fallen into “a well-laid lure” and doubled down on her personal “broadly revered analysis.” No notes, Mrs. President. By no means clarify, by no means apologize!
As earlier than, I demur on the query of whether or not and to what extent her scholarship was problematic. However it’s worthy of be aware that what occurred with, and to, Claudine Homosexual is that she is going to not be shielded from the results of her phrases and deeds primarily based upon the irrelevant traits of race and gender. She is being handled like an individual, like several individual, for higher or worse.
Sure, ladies might be unhinged and black ladies can plagiarize. So can males and white males. And brown, taupe and purple, with or with out genitalia. Wasn’t that all the time the purpose of ending discrimination, that we have been all to be judged by the identical metric and to not be cloaked in immunity for our pores and skin coloration, whether or not white, black or brown, or our gender (the record right here is way too lengthy to say)?
The resignation of Claudine Homosexual might be a kind of moments within the historical past of discrimination the place we overcame the simplistic notion that some races and genders received a free go for his or her actions primarily based upon the colour of their pores and skin relatively than the content material of their scholarship. If we’re to progress past our racist historical past and our racist “repair” of our racist historical past, then it is a critically necessary step in reaching a society the place race and gender are behind us.
