The New Neo

Commenter “Mike K” writes:

The sad and infuriating thing about what was done to Roland Fryer is that he was a genuine academic star. No need for that thumb on the scale or affirmative action. The book “The Bell Curve” shows that there is a right “tail” on the distribution of IQ and these DEI zealots are determined to control black scholars, even if they themselves are a cluster of losers like Gay.

True. For example, although Thomas Sowell – another black academic star – came to prominence prior to DEI zealots, he nevertheless has been deprived of the honors he should have been given. It’s even the case that – at least as far as I can tell – Sowell’s not in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.. Many and probably most black people today have never heard of him (although I’ve noticed that there’s a tiny cottage industry on YouTube of young black “reactors” to some of Thomas Sowell’s interviews and writings). Nor is Sowell included in the recent AP African American Studies course which nevertheless had room for “academic writers on critical theory, queerness, and reparations.”

It’s about politics. If Sowell had been a leftist, he would have become far more generally famous and not just on the right, where he’s very well-known and highly respected. And of course, white scholars who are on the conservative side also have been finding it hard to get jobs in academia in the last decade or two, and to a lesser extent even in the decade or two prior to that. But the left and the DEI crowd are especially determined to diminish the voices of brilliant black scholars who are insufficiently leftist – and even to cancel them.

However, I don’t think of someone like Gay as a “loser.” Although she has indeed lost her prominent and previously-respected and powerful position as Harvard president, she still has her teaching job and her nearly-million-dollar salary. She is now lauded by many as a victim of right-wing racism, a role she has embraced.

I don’t think Mike K meant “loser” in that sense, however. My guess would be that he meant that, were the criteria objective, she would not have risen to academic prominence at all – unlike Fryer and Sowell, just to take two examples. I wouldn’t call her a “loser,” however, or unintelligent. I would instead call her a devoted apparatchik or maybe even a member of the nomenklatura. She is a party hack rather than an independent thinker, but that’s exactly what is wanted today in university administration and also in academia as a whole.

Gay’s problem was that events occurred which thrust her out of her element and into the glare of Congressional testimony on a subject – anti-Semitism on campus – on which she’s long toed the party line. The awful remarks she made in Congress would have been completely unremarkable and acceptable had she made them only to a Harvard faculty or administrative audience, for example. The American public was shocked, however. And it was only then that the thinness of her academic resume, as well as the fact that she’d plagiarized, came into prominence and together with those remarks precipitated the end of her presidency.

Gay isn’t brilliant, but she never needed to be and I doubt that most professors – even at Harvard, of any race, and especially in the humanities – are brilliant these days. That’s not what’s wanted. What’s wanted is leftist political conformity, and that tends to be antithetical to brilliance – which is always a rare commodity anyway.

Another aspect of Claudine Gay’s illustrious career as a Harvard administrator:

…[I]n the face of numerous mounting scandals, many are defending Gay by claiming that the attacks against her are racial in nature.

They are not. They are all well deserved.

The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books — an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773? …

Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?

As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.

What was Professor Sullivan’s offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein — an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system.

… Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.

Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer’s research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay’s crusade of discharge but Fryer’s lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.

The author of the piece is a black male, a former law professor and a graduate of Harvard Law School.

It is worth mentioning that the mechanism by which Roland Fryer was semi-canceled was the accusation of sexual harassment. You can find the story in this documentary made long before Gay’s current travails: