This Claudine Gay story isn’t going away and the left yesterday nearly in unison denounced her detractors of being racists. Meanwhile, Ms. Gay – followed up on her pouty resignation letter on Wednesday – has taken to the pages of the New York Times op-ed page today doubling down on her victimhood narrative. She snivels that because of the attacks from conservatives, “my character and my intelligence have been impugned.”
Oh, Claudine, you’re far too modest: you did a pretty good job of doing that to yourself.
Let’s be perfectly honest here: if the president of Harvard had been a white man named Claude Gay, instead of a black woman named Claudine Gay, he would have been kicked to the curb by the time her plane touched ground back in Boston after the disastrous and antisemitic testimony – and even before her serial plagiarism was revealed.
Just ask Larry Summers – who was dismissed from the Harvard job for much less inflammatory statements.
One of the open questions about Ms. Gay is WHY she was appointed president of Harvard in the first place. Based on her academic achievements, she is best described as ordinary. Certainly, there were scores of candidates who would have been more qualified.
The left rages at the mere suggestion that she was selected by a university that sits at the apex of modern-day identity politics because she was a black woman. But based on her thin credentials, it is natural to wonder whether that’s exactly what landed her the job.
But let’s assume race and gender weren’t factors at all. Perhaps she really was judged by Harvard’s board to be a very highly qualified candidate, and she was selected due to special attributes that she keeps hidden away from the public. Harvard’s board may have seen something truly special in her.
It’s quite possible.
But this is EXACTLY why racial quotas are so evil. How could anyone know whether it was her talent or her skin color that was the deciding factor?
Here we have fully exposed a towering hypocrisy of the left: They have set up a lower bar for blacks to leap over in the job market and then they attack anyone who thinks that the lower bar is how the minority candidate got the job.
The multitude of truly talented and deserving minorities are the victims of quotas and preferences. Our hero, Thomas Sowell, has made this point about quotas and preferences repeatedly for many, many years.
This is why we should adopt colorblind selection in academia and the job market. But oops, we can’t say that because “colorblind” is now a racist term.
And if you really want to feel your blood boil, this is how AP covered the Harvard story, making clear that conservatives are the real villains:
