Girrrl Pow-wer

It’s not a good look. Three university presidents were testifying before a Congressional committee. All three refused to condemn calls for violence against Jews. Two of the three were forced to resign their positions. 

According to Kate Zernike the real problem was that they were all women. Good feminist that she is, Zernike asks the correct feminist question: would a man have been treated the same? 

She does not ask whether they were competent leaders. She does not ask whether they were hired to fill a diversity quota. Gazing through her feminist-tinted lenses she sees a conspiracy to diminish women leaders. 

Zernike functions as an ideologue. She says that “there might have been plagiarism in the case of [Harvard President] Dr. Gay….” And then she sloughs it off as though dozens of instances of plagiarism, surely enough to label Dr. Gay’s credentials as fraudulent, did not matter.

She continues, trying to make the cases that these presidents were singled out and mistreated because they were women:

Yes, the presidents sounded so lawyerly, so coached, at the hearing: Why couldn’t they have more passionately declared their opposition to slogans encouraging genocide?

Perhaps, because they were incompetent, because they did not fit the roles that they had been thrust in, because they did not have the strength of character to take a stand against genocide. They did not have the intestinal fortitude to deviate from the script.

This shows that they did not feel that they had earned their jobs and were not up to the challenge. Anyone who occupies an important executive position must command respect. 

As Shelby Steele pointed out more than two decades ago, in relation to anti-racism hires, the insistence that promotion depends on belonging to certain victim groups undermines those who are hired from those groups-- by creating the assumption that they were not hired for merit or because they had earned their positions. 

Zernike joins those who are agonizing over the question of whether a man would have been treated the same way? One might also ask whether a man with the same credentials would have had the same career trajectory. 

If you like, call it the bias of anti-bias.

Of course, good feminists believe that sexist bias holds women back. One thinks of Margaret Thatcher. But, she was the exception, and we ought not to confuse the exception with the rule.

Strangely, Zernike undercuts her own argument by explaining that the advent of the female college president corresponds with the public distrust of academia. She is correct to point out that the presidents in question had not been around long enough to bear responsibility for their schools, but this avoids the more obvious point. Their schools had, in their Humanities and Social Sciences, spent decades admitting students, handing out grades and hiring new faculty in order to fulfill affirmative action and diversity quotas. The more this was tried and the more it did not work, the more these schools decided that they needed more diversity, higher and higher up. If those minority students could not do the work the reason must have been that the school president was a white male. Why would anyone take this to be serious thinking?

Rather than see the whole anti-meritocratic project for the failure that it was, they decided to double and triple down on failure. They got to the point where they made the presidency of their institutions the last diversity hire.

Zernike makes mention of a prior Harvard president, one Lawrence Summers. Now, Summers did have the strength of character to challenge the suppositions behind affirmative action and diversity. 

Zernike notes that Summers had clashed with black scholars. As we expect of her, she fails to address the issue, which involved students admitted on the grounds of affirmative action. 

Summers got into some trouble with members of the African-American Studies program by accusing them of grade inflation. He had discovered that they were handing out A’s promiscuously and called them out. Some department members were horrified at the accusation and decamped for other universities. 

And then, Summers was forced to resign for failing to be sufficiently woke. As Zernike describes the situation:

It’s conventionally recalled that Dr. Summers himself was forced to resign after he mused that the lack of female STEM professors could be attributed to women’s lesser “intrinsic aptitude” in math ….he did not resign until more than a year after his comments on women in science.

One might see this incident as evidence that Summers was treated differently, though one fails to see the difference on the one hand, between refusing to condemn genocide and allowing certain groups of students to harass Jewish students, and on the other hand, making an arguable, but likely true true observation about women doing math. 

Summers was saying that women are not subject to discrimination in science, but that their aptitudes lay elsewhere. In the woke atmosphere of Harvard, such an observation, which can be empirically tested, is disqualifying.

Comparing Gay to Summers is absurd. Summers was an important scholar and a successful public servant. He earned what he had by merit, not by fulfilling a diversity quota. Naturally, he believed in merit and took offense at departments that disparaged it. Moreover, he understood that men and women had different aptitudes and that we cannot judge the one by the same terms as we judge the other.

Claudine Gay was an academic fraud who was promoted to the Harvard presidency on the grounds of her race and gender. She was DEI made flesh. She was fired because she was incompetent and could not do the job. Her presence diminished Harvard’s reputation, but this was a reputation that had been declining for years. Unfortunately, the grandees who chose her as president did not care about the institution’s reputation. They cared about DEI. 

With Claudine Gay DEI became a reductio ad absurdum. It ought to be fired, but it will not. Anyway, hats off to Lawrence Summers for his efforts to save Harvard from itself.

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