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| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudine_Gay |
Malik Miah--a longtime and honorable socialist, formerly a comrade of mine in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and now a leader in the Solidarity movement--astonishingly rises to the defense of elite education in an article entitled Targeting Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Higher Education. The piece is a rousing defense of former Harvard president Claudine Gay, and by extension all who supported her: students, faculty and the Harvard Corporation Board.
Harvard (along with a couple dozen other institutions) are tasked with educating elite students. For example, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both attended Harvard, admitted on the basis of their near perfect SAT scores. Educating elite students is, of course, precisely the opposite of championing equity. Equity and Harvard are like oil and water--and that is what makes Mr. Miah's defense of Harvard so mysterious.
It is a conceit among my Trotskyist friends--perhaps not often openly stated--that anybody could excel at Harvard if only they were given a chance. William F. Buckley famously said “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” My former comrades--I think including Malik Miah--will likely agree with that, and insist that there is no intelligence or aptitude difference between Harvard faculty and students, and a random collection of people chosen from the phone book. Further, the latter are more likely to represent the working class.
Of course it's not true, and if Harvard genuinely thought it was, then they would have to go out of business. Nevertheless, in deference to the American public's egalitarian impulse, they pretend it's true, and so they go to great lengths to admit a few lower class students and to hire a Black woman as president.
It's all a virtue-signaling scam. I wish Harvard would stick to educating the elite as measured, eg, by test scores.
Apparently Mr. Miah buys the charade. He truly believes that Claudine Gay represents progress in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in some meaningful way. And this despite Ms. Gay being woefully unqualified to be a college president at all, especially at Harvard. Let me count the ways.
The main job of a college president--especially at a private school--is to raise money. This can be done by soliciting donations, recruiting tuition-paying students, scamming the federal Student Loan program, recruiting students from petrostates who pay full, unsubsidized rates, etc. A president who can't meet fundraising expectations will not be long employed. Ms. Gay has 1) deeply alienated a large group of donors, who have vowed to never give Harvard another penny as long as she's in office, and 2) presided over a 17% drop in applications for early admission.
Any president of any skin color would be gone if they'd failed so miserably. (At my former campus, when the admissions' office failed to recruit enough students for the Fall semester, the president was unceremoniously fired.)
Then she got caught plagiarizing. Personally, I don't think this is such a big deal, and if one fires all college faculty who ever plagiarized anything, you probably wouldn't have many faculty left. Beyond which, with so much written on the web, it's hard to distinguish between purposeful plagiarism and coincidence.
But Harvard, in particular, makes a big, huge deal about plagiarism, and having its president caught in the act is embarrassing. Though I think this is more an excuse to fire her than an actual cause.
Finally, Ms. Gay is not much of a scholar. She has published only 11 papers and not a single book. No white male would get a job at Harvard even as janitor with such a weak publication record. She is not qualified to serve on the Harvard faculty.
Mr. Miah will claim this is just a plot against Black women, or an exercise in "white supremacy." Of course he's wrong. There are plenty of Black college presidents, and many of them successful on the measures I've just outlined. Let me mention Shirley Ann Jackson, first African-American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT, who served as president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 1999 to 2022. "Jackson has helped raise over $1 billion in donations for philanthropic causes." Ms. Jackson was frequently criticized, mostly for being the highest paid college president in the country. But nobody ever accused her of being a diversity hire.
Beyond issues posed by President Gay, there are some issues in higher education generally. In Mr. Miah's telling, these are all the result of perfidious attacks by a certain Christopher Rufo. He writes (quoting Mr. Rufo),
The far right is open about its objectives. Christopher F. Rufo, the leader of the racist mob that chased after Gay, said:
“We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right,” he stated on X — formerly Twitter — on Dec. 19. “The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze.”
This is a replication of his earlier campaigns to turn “critical race theory” (CRT) and “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs (DEI) into dog whistles for the reactionary Republican voting bloc.
Mr. Miah is generous with the insults. In particular, I wonder why everybody who disagrees with him is automatically a "racist?" Surely there are other, more important, issues facing higher ed than "racism," eg, money and mission. I don't know what a "dog whistle" is. Whatever it is, Mr. Miah's ears are much more finely attuned than mine--or any dog's.
Then it's not just Harvard that has a problem with “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The purpose of higher ed is to give its students a leg up on life--to make them better qualified for employment and to earn them more money and a higher status. Thus higher ed is all about maximizing inequity, that is separating their graduates from the hoi polloi. This seems built into the very nature of the enterprise, and not because of anything Mr. Rufo does.
Higher ed is as much or more about status transfer as wealth transfer. Wealth is easy--everybody can get rich at the same time. If Mr. Miah learns how to build a better mousetrap, then not only will he make more money, but I, a consumer, will benefit from having better mousetraps.
Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. My status can't go up without Mr. Miah's status going down, and vice versa. It's ultimately a pecking order. When universities try to transfer status from one group to another, they're definitely gonna get pushback from those whose status is going down. For whatever reason--Mr. Miah probably knows why better than I do--higher ed today is all-in on raising the status of Black and gay people, and then to a much lesser extent, women. People who are not included (blue-collar folks, Asians, Jews) needless to say feel dissed. It's finally reached a boiling point; Blacks and gays have way higher status in higher ed than any other group.
This isn't the fault of Christopher Rufo.
So I don't know why Mr. Miah champions higher ed. It is probably the most reactionary institution in America today. Diversity, equity and inclusion are precisely not on higher education's agenda--and they never can be.
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