I remember how it was -- JR
A Failing Grade for Harvard’s Claudine Gay
It says a lot about the unending Leftist obsession with race that they could put such a mediocrity into such a senior position
Anyone who listened to the college presidents defending calls for the genocide of Jews with condescending smirks in their Dec. 5 congressional testimony could see they were insufferably smug. But then we got evidence that Ivy League universities may not have selected the best and brightest to lead them.
Consider Harvard President Claudine Gay, who evinced no ability to think on her feet or even adjust wording undoubtedly scripted for her by lawyers. Yet despite her brilliant display of dullness, Gay grinned as though she were the cleverest in the room.
This was, perhaps, understandable. Gay is, after all, president of Harvard University. Typically, you get to be president of Harvard only if everyone knows that you are very, very smart. After her shameful performance, however, it should come as no surprise that Gay rose to this post despite a shockingly unimpressive scholarly record.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo has since produced convincing evidence that Gay plagiarized parts of her dissertation. Failing to properly quote source material either can be a sign of carelessness or a symptom of struggling to generate original ideas. Her academic output since then suggests it was the latter.
Over about two decades, Gay has written 10 journal articles and no books. This is about half the average rate for a political science professor, even at a middling university. By comparison, Amy Gutmann—who, like Gay, is a political scientist and until early last year served as president of the University of Pennsylvania—has published more than a dozen books and well over 100 articles.
Some academics make their name by developing one profound insight into an important question. Others make their reputation by offering consistently interesting insights on a range of questions. Gay has done neither. She has authored only a handful of articles offering uninteresting insights on the narrow question of African-American political opinion and representation.
In her last article, published six years ago, titled “A Room for One’s Own?,” Gay found that Democratic governors direct federal housing subsidies to supportive constituencies when they have the discretion to do so. Amazing!
In “Knowledge Matters,” Gay found that political ignorance is a key reason why African Americans support Democrats despite policy disagreements. Who knew?
In “Seeing Difference,” Gay found that African Americans resent economically successful Hispanic neighbors. Wow!
How did Gay rise so far despite such a mediocre academic record? You already know how, or at least part of how. Gay is a woman of color, and within the liberal ivory tower of Harvard, it’s impermissible for a white professor to accuse a woman of color of being intellectually mediocre. Only a black professor could possibly do that.
It’s interesting, then, that Gay’s institutional rise was marked by a pattern of destroying the careers of genuinely brilliant black scholar who had the stature to point out her mediocrity.
Harvard economist Roland Fryer, for example, has published more in a single year than Gay has in her entire career. But while serving as the dean of faculty, Gay led the charge to strip Fryer of almost all of his academic privileges on trumped-up charges of having run an office with a hostile work environment.
As documentary filmmaker Rob Muntz put it, “Fryer was the victim of a coordinated professional assassination. And … the chief architect of that assassination was none other than Claudine Gay.”
Another target of Gay’s character assassination was Ronald Sullivan, a black professor at Harvard Law School. In addition to being an accomplished law professor, Sullivan was dean of Winthrop House, one of Harvard’s residence halls. After Sullivan agreed to serve as an attorney to help defend Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein against rape charges, several Winthrop House students complained that they no longer “felt safe.”
When she realized that it would be impossible to remove Sullivan for providing legal representation, Gay launched a witch hunt to find a pretext for his removal. Despite a decade of leading Winthrop House without incident, Gay insisted that he had presided over a hostile environment.
Gay’s appointment as Harvard president felt like an “emperor has no clothes” moment. If academics can’t admit or even think that someone is an affirmative action pick, then Harvard just pretended that she was robed in the finest scholarly garb. What harm could come to Harvard from picking Gay as its president? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Although one doubts that Harvard’s newfound institutional commitment to free speech would extend so far as to permit speaking obvious truths, the truth is now abundantly clear not only on campus but also across the country. Everyone paying attention knows that Harvard picked its president because of her immutable characteristics, despite her lack of scholarly accomplishment.
The country also can reasonably suspect that Harvard is refusing to fire its president despite her manifest failure to respond properly to the current wave of antisemitism on campus and despite credible allegations of plagiarism because of her immutable characteristics. Perhaps the Harvard board of trustees will act with integrity, but we rather doubt it.
It seems more likely that Harvard will be stuck being led by an academic whose alleged early plagiarism could not plausibly be redeemed by the merit of her later scholarship. Play DEI games, win DEI prizes.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/22/a-failing-grade-for-harvards-claudine-gay/
*********************************************Saying ‘Gender Is Binary and Cannot Be Changed’ Got an Award-Winning California Teacher Fired
A gay fifth grade teacher in Glendale, California, is suing the Glendale Unified School District after he was suspended and then fired for condemning transgender ideology at a school board meeting in April.
Ray Shelton, a 25-year veteran teacher, spoke at a Glendale Unified school board meeting amid concerns over the district’s promotion of LGBTQ+ curriculums to elementary students, including by an administrator stating that all children were naturally “socialist” and “queer,” The Daily Signal reported.
Parents also have alleged that the school district allows boys who claim to be transgender to share locker rooms with girls.
Glendale, a city in the San Fernando Valley, is part of Los Angeles County. Its school system has 32 schools and 25,000 students, according to the district’s website.
Shelton, who taught at Mark Keppel Elementary School, was named the Glendale school district’s “Teacher of the Year” twice, and earlier this year won the PTA’s Golden Oak Award. He attended the April school board meeting wearing a T-shirt that said “Make Biology Great Again.”
He told The Daily Signal that he was supposed to have been given three-to-five minutes to speak at the board meeting, though he was only given 60 seconds before he was cut off.
Two plus two equals four. The world is not flat. Boys have penises; girls have vaginas. Gender is binary and cannot be changed. Biology is not bigotry. Heterosexuality is not hate. Gender confusion and gender delusion are deep psychological disorders.
No caring professional or loving parent would ever support the chemical poisoning or surgical mutilation of a child’s genitalia.
Transgender ideology is anti-gay, it is anti-woman, and it is anti-human. It wants to take away women’s sports, women’s rights, women’s achievements. It is misogyny writ large.
And I can also say this as a gay man, the gay people …
At that point, Shelton’s microphone was muted and a board member informed him that his time was up. Shelton sat down amid applause from the audience.
Glendale Unified prevented Shelton from returning to his classroom afterward. The next day, April 19, Shelton was visited in his classroom at 8 a.m. by Keppel Elementary Principal Kristine Tonoli and a Glendale district administrator.
Shelton told The Daily Signal that he was given a letter informing him that he was being placed on paid leave pending investigation after “several complaints” were lodged against him. He was subsequently fired.
But, the teacher said, all of the emailed complaints shown to him by the Glendale school district were made after he had been put on leave, not before, suggesting either that Glendale didn’t provide Shelton with earlier complaints or that Tonoli lied to him about why he was being suspended.
All of the emailed complaints provided to The Daily Signal originally were sent after the meeting, at 8 a.m. April 19, according to time stamps.
After that classroom confrontation on April 19, Shelton was escorted to the edge of school property and told not to return unless accompanied by someone from the Glendale Unified human resources office.
Since those events, Shelton has been attacked by liberal activist groups. Media Matters on June 13 called Shelton a “swastika-wielding teacher” in a misleading headline for an article slamming Fox News and Shelton for what it called a “hate-filled tirade.” Media Matters writer Jane Lee didn’t cite Shelton’s comments to the school board or what role the swastika played in the situation.
Shelton’s “swastika,” seen in a photo in the tweet, is an internet meme combining four Pride/Progress flags into a swastika, mocking the transgenderism and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” movement as authoritarian, discriminatory, and dangerous, he explained to The Daily Signal in a Tuesday interview.
Applying Nazi imagery to political opponents, such as by drawing a Hitler mustache on photos, has been a popular method of demonizing and discrediting the Left’s opponents for decades.
But now, a law firm is suing on Shelton’s behalf for what it claims was retaliation against his First Amendment rights. The lawsuit states:
As a result of Defendants’ retaliatory, unconstitutional actions against Mr. Shelton, he was never allowed to return to his classroom or watch his students graduate, something he looked forward to every year.
Mr. Shelton suffered personally and professionally because of the damage inflicted on him by Defendants’ punitive actions.
He filed this action to restore his name and to vindicate not only his rights, but the right of all Americans, to speak freely without being burdened by the oppressive yoke of government censorship.
Asked what he hoped to gain through the lawsuit, Shelton said he hoped a legal victory would help strengthen free speech precedents.
“Once the principle [of free speech] is broken,” he said, “people can be silenced through fear—then that’s the end of our civilization.”
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DEFUNDING DEI: Wisconsin Lawmaker’s Tactics Show Way to Kill Radical University Programs
Napoleon said that to master the art of war, you must “read over and over again” the campaigns of history’s most successful generals.
The same advice applies if you want to master the art of legislating: You must study the strategies of the most successful legislators.
To that end, any lawmaker that wants to thwart diversity, equity, and inclusion programs needs to study the skillful maneuvers of Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly. As National Review reports, Vos has succeeded—in a divided government, where Republicans control the Legislature, while a Democrat holds the governor’s mansion—in destroying DEI programs throughout the University of Wisconsin system, which includes 13 campuses.
Here’s how he did it.
First, he surveyed the battlefield. Behind him and the Republican-controlled Legislature was a supportive electorate that wanted him to abolish DEI on college campuses. In front of him were university administrators and a governor who were deeply entrenched in their support for DEI programs.
A frontal assault—a bill simply abolishing or defunding DEI programs—would go nowhere unless Vos could shift them out of their entrenchments.
Like a smart general, Vos knew that to do that he’d have to threaten something even more valuable to them than their DEI programs. But campus zealots seem to love nothing more than to put students into identity boxes and then segregate and discriminate on that basis. They want to do these things with an almost religious zeal.
Yet Vos figured out that they love something even more; namely, money.
He knew that campus zealots would never willingly destroy their own DEI apparatus. But he also knew that they would never say no to giving themselves a pay raise. So, he pitted those two interests against each other.
He passed a budget that included pay raises for university employees and funding for new buildings. The budget also eliminated all DEI positions and cut $32 million from the university system’s budget—the amount that the system spent on DEI programs.
The governor, Tony Evers, howled about the bill, but Vos had outflanked him. Evers couldn’t sacrifice raises for everyone in the system to save DEI programs, even as much as he cherished them. So, Evers surrendered and signed the bill.
He did, however, line-item veto the part of the bill that eliminated the DEI positions. That meant that the university system could redeploy $32 million from other programs to keep its beloved DEI staffers paid.
But Vos had anticipated that move.
Before the pay raises could take effect, a committee in the Legislature had to approve them. Vos told the University of Wisconsin that the pay raises would be approved once the system voluntarily abandoned its DEI programs.
As he had done to Evers, Vos had outflanked University of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman. Despite Rothman’s support for DEI, he knew that his position was untenable, so he, too, surrendered and agreed to cut the DEI programs.
Specifically, he agreed that the university system would freeze all DEI hiring, move all DEI staffers to other positions, stop using diversity statements in student applications, and stop discriminating based on race, sexuality, and other identity characteristics in faculty hiring.
Vos got even more.
Rothman agreed that the Madison campus would create a professorship for the study of conservative thought and that all campuses would offer a course on free speech for undergraduates. Finally, the university system would elevate academic merit by automatically giving admission to all Wisconsin students who graduated in the top 5% of their high school classes, regardless of his or her race.
Despite Rothman’s agreement, the deal still had to make it through the liberal-controlled university board of regents, which rejected it. The regents thought that Vos’ attack was just a feint, and that he wasn’t serious about blocking the pay raises and building funds.
But Vos’ attack was serious.
“We are not changing one thing in this deal,” Vos said, before inviting the regents to walk away from it. They surrendered four days later and approved the whole deal.
Their love of money trumped their commitment to DEI. Vos saw this, and like an expert general, exploited it to secure an astonishing victory. It was a victory all the more astonishing, given that Vos’ Republican Party does not have complete control of the state government.
That was the art of legislating at its finest. Opponents of DEI in other statehouses should take note and—like Napoleon did of history’s greatest commanders—study and emulate it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/19/how-a-deft-wisconsin-lawmaker-beat-dei/
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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