TWO Down - Stefanik gloats as Harvard President steps down

 

Two Down - Stefanik gloats as Harvard President steps down

 

The claim of the elite universities is that merit rules.  700 SAT, LSAT, or GRE scores prove that only the best of the best qualify for the ivies.  Of course, it’s never been true.  At varying times neither Irish, nor Jews, Chinese, or African Americans were seen or welcomed into their ranks.  But the College Board standardized tests promised to put an end to the reign of the St. Grottlesex schools, and the legacy admittees. In truth it never really worked out as advertised.

 

The successful assault on Harvard College admissions showed that there was ethnic engineering still at work under the guise of compensatory affirmative action programs.  Some like Christopher Rufo have waged a persistent campaign to cleanse the elite schools of a perceived liberal bias.  Approving the University leadership’s decision “to sacrifice its plagiarist president”, Harvard College grad and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sees in conservative criticism “an entirely reasonable response to academia’s own internal transformation in the past 10 years or so: the ideological ferment of the Great Awokening, the swift expansion of the diversity-equity-inclusion complex”.  So much for worrying about the legacy of the three hundred years of unapologetic racial academic steering and empire building that formally ended only with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But the advantages of race and lineage that were so long tolerated could not be tolerated when a flawed academic record and a stumbling response to a belligerent Member of Congress combined to create a firestorm that forced from office Harvard’s first African American, and second female President – the African American Studies and Political Science Professor Claudine Gay.  She had held the post only three months when she resigned under pressure – acknowledging some errors in citations in her published work.

But more importantly she declared - in an essay in the New York Times - her pride that as “a Black woman (I was) selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”

“TWO DOWN," Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) wrote on social media, referring to the resignations of Gay and former University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill, who stepped down last month.

"Harvard knows that this long-overdue forced resignation of the antisemitic plagiarist president is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history," Stefanik added.

It is an alarming prospect – that the assault on our most prestigious universities is in fact just beginning, with not just a stumble but a fall the objective.

-        George Conk   1/5/2024