DEI just flunked out

Plagiarism and critical race theory are both scams!

The resignation of the president of Harvard University was overdue, a progressive scold admits in The Atlantic magazine. But not for her moral equivalence over anti-semitism! Claudine Gay’s only sin was plagiarism — what The Nation magazine pooh poohs as “minor academic pilferage” — not her school’s reverse racism, according to the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols.  

“Her accusers acted in bad faith, but they’re not wrong. … In the real world, truth sometimes comes from terrible people with dishonorable motives,” Nichols equivocates.

Those terrible people are the likes of U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik and Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute. Except that  Nichols never explores what might be their “terrible motives.” Stefanik in her congressional hearing famously exposed the moral squishiness of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT to the harsh glare of daylight. Rufo — more than any one — has exposed critical race theory as the three-card monte game it really is. 

“Some of Gay’s defenders, especially in academia, have nevertheless taken the bait from right-wingers who always wanted to make Gay’s very existence as Harvard’s president into a larger debate about diversity and race on campus.”

Give SOME credit to the lady herself, Tom! DEI is the very reason for her hire a mere six months ago “after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history,” Bret Stephens reports in the New York Times.   

“How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?”

The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.

— “Claudine Gay and the limits of social engineering”

Vigorous REPRESSION of ideas

Vigorous contest of ideas! Not at elite institutions like Harvard! Harvard gets the worst score ever in the College Free Speech Rankings conducted by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. How worst? Try zero out of a possible 100.

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Problem with Jews? They’re white!

“The trouble started in the mid-1970s, when the reality became clear that the liberal answer to racial inequality — the modern welfare state inaugurated by the Great Society — wasn’t working. … The black poverty rate declined dramatically from 1940 to 1960, less dramatically but still significantly from 1960 to 1970, and hardly at all after 1970. Yet decade after decade, the prescription from right-thinking liberals … remains the same: Double down on ’60s-style social-welfare policy, liberalize crime laws, and vilify whites other than themselves. …

“In the 2010s, “equity” and “inclusion” joined “diversity” to form an entire industry of consultants and corporate officers whose stated purpose is to foster equality in the workplace but who go about encouraging everyone to think constantly about racial identity.” — Barton Swaim, “How anti-racism becomes anti-semitism.” 

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We would say DEI is as dumb as a rock but that would be an insult to the UW-Madison's Chamberlin Rock.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Harvard drafted Jennifer Cheatham out of the Madison Metropolitan School District. Jen is the superintendent who defenestrated a positive behavior coach at Whitehorse middle school BEFORE a police inquiry could exonerate the poor man. Mr. Rob made the mistake of being white while trying to restrain an unruly black student.

If DEI / CRT is a scam,
why should it surprise that it is practiced by scammers?

As if more evidence is needed, Al Sharpton plans to picket Harvard.