The Liberal World comes up against the DEI World at Harvard

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After she resigned last week as president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay published an op-ed in The New York Times. I found it to be highly persuasive – just not for Ms. Gay’s side of the argument.

But one part of her op-ed absolutely nails it: the headline. “What Just Happened At Harvard Is Bigger Than Me.”

The big thing that just happened, and not just at Harvard, started with questions about campus antisemitism, and the line between free speech criticizing Israel and hate speech attacking Jews. It quickly grew into a broader fight over the DEI movement.

DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, a system of mantras and methods that over the past decade has come to pervade almost everything at the North American university. As one of Ms. Gay’s leading critics, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, recently explained, he was only dimly aware of DEI last fall, when he started pushing his alma mater to take antisemitism seriously. Then he did his research, and discerned what was beneath the branding.

As he put it last week in a tweet to Mark Cuban: “DEI is not about diversity, equity or inclusion. Trust me. I fell for the same trap you did.”

If you’re older than 40 or 45 and don’t work at a university or a union head office, none of this may make much sense to you. Your mind resides in a place I call Liberal World.

In Liberal World, you believe that we should strive for a society where every person is treated as if they are endowed with equal rights and dignity, regardless of race. You may think of race as merely skin colour, a thin mask covering our shared humanity. You can recall Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, about a “dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character,” and think, yes, that’s it: That’s the opposite of racism.

Liberal World holds to classical liberal values that, when they were lived up to, fought slavery in the 19th century and segregation in the 20th. But expressing such ideas today risks getting you laughed off campus, or chased off.

The new dominant ideology, the one professors and students know they must to some degree pay lip service to, whether they agree or not, is DEI World.

DEI World has a very different conception of race. It does not want to transcend race; it finds the notion absurd, even racist. Instead, it wants to see everything through the lens of race. Its judgments about reward and punishment, merit and demerit, justice and injustice, and even whose speech is protected and to what degree, are filtered through a particular, and particularly American, conception of race. Race is its Rosetta Stone for divining many things, including who is oppressor and who is oppressed.

Why did a fight over universities’ response to antisemitism quickly evolve into an argument over DEI? Because Jews don’t fit into the racial hierarchy of DEI World.

Are Jews a historically discriminated against racial minority, entitled to extra solicitousness and protection? Or are they just, you know, white people?

In Liberal World, which believes in universal rights of universal application, these questions, posed as legal as opposed to historical questions, are somewhere between irrelevant and incomprehensible. It’s a different story in DEI World.

A recent Harvard Caps Harris poll asked Americans: “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?”

The query comes straight from DEI World. Many older people surely found it utterly baffling, and an overwhelming majority of adults called this a “false ideology.” But 67 per cent of Americans between the ages of 18 to 24, who grew up in DEI World, said that Jews are a class of “oppressors.”

Which brings us back to Ms. Gay. What made her position as the head of Harvard untenable were growing revelations of instances of plagiarism in her academic publications. But DEI was front and centre – especially among her defenders, who often suggested that the real reason critics were after Ms. Gay was because of her race and sex.

In her op-ed, Ms. Gay agreed. That may have won over readers from DEI World, but it wasn’t a refutation of the facts (which still matter in Liberal World).

“My hope,” she wrote in what journalists call the nut graph of the piece, “is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

Again, instead of engaging her critics’ best arguments, and hitting back with better arguments – what academic discourse is supposed to be – she disengaged by accusing the other side of pure bad faith.

Ms. Gay’s most prominent critics, such as Mr. Ackman, may not be right about everything to do with DEI or the academy. But they are not gunning for a future in which universities celebrate mediocrity, elevate closed-mindedness, reward scholarly inaptitude and spread falsehood. Here in Liberal World, we can at least see that.