It is with no shortage of amazement — and yes, a dose of amusement — that we sit back and watch the drama unfolding in Cambridge, on the campus of Ivy League institution Harvard University. President Claudine Gay’s historic and truncated rule of the university has been exposed of late, what with her energetic borrowing of intellectual property and her permissive stance towards antisemitism, leading to her stepping down from her roost. But there was another nugget of information that came out, which may have been glossed over amid the tumult and the holiday season.

It's also a bit mystifying to watch as the university leaders, academics in general, and the press industry as a body have all risen to defend President Gay. This is all due to those on the right having exposed Claudine’s scholarly history, and because that side of our culture is looked at with contempt by the learned elitists, they are in a position now of actually defending actions that have long been a third-rail disqualifier in education. 

Suddenly, plagiarism is an acceptable act if you are of the proper countenance. Previously, if you were caught lifting the work of others for a term paper, you would be shown the front gates. “We’ll mail your Keurig and The Smiths posters when we clear out your dorm - see ya!” In journalism, if you were found cribbing from other writers, you would be escorted from your cubicle after being given a brown documents box to carry out your mousepad and potted succulent. But today, copy-pasting the work of others is permissible, so long as you are of the proper ethnicity and promote DEI policies. And therein lies the avalanche field for these elevated minds.

The DEI initiatives that Claudine Gay was pushing were rather pernicious, and Harvard boosted her to the top of the faculty despite some glaring issues. While Dean of Admissions, Ms. Gay conducted an overhaul of the school’s acceptance program and, as a result, ran afoul of no smaller body than the Supreme Court of the US, which ruled it was racist and discriminatory. There was one other program she oversaw that tells the pernicious tale of DEI: the effort to diminish whiteness on campus.

President Gay formed an internal organization to address the issue of white figures seen in common areas, dubbed The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage. Using gussied-up terms and veiled language, Gay was looking to strip away the overabundance of recognition of the monochromatic history of the university, all done in the name of racial justice. What injustice is seen in the history of Harvard need not be mentioned, it is simply assumed. Just some of the nuggets from her tortured syntax in addressing this issue:

We evolve a more inclusive visual culture in FAS spaces…seek to bring our visual culture more fully into the cognitive life of our community…to advance visual renewal projects…I will commit the necessary resources to refresh the visual culture…

It seems clear that Ms. Gay was avoiding saying outright that there is/was too much white and/or problematic historical representation around the campus. However, the university’s Committee to Articulate Principles on Renaming was far less coy about its findings and intentions. According to its report on the findings around campus, there were these observations and goals:

Charged with determining the circumstances under which individuals’ names or representations might be removed from Harvard buildings, spaces, programs, or professorships “in view of their past advocacy or support of activities that many members of our community would today find abhorrent.” 

This is the effort at literally erasing aspects of Harvard’s history, over contemporary sensitivities. In another report, this effort is dressed up as an almost beatific endeavor.

Better signage could accentuate our commitment to learning, show care to our visitors, and hasten feelings of belonging within our diverse community of faculty, students, scholars, and staff.

These methods were not conducted with an eye on the future and expanding opportunity but rather as a denial of past work with a basis in resentment. Some of the names and buildings looking to be altered are of former campus presidents, historical figures, and deans and professors over the nearly 400 years Harvard has been an institution. This follows the findings in the school’s Report on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery, issued in 2022. All of this means that, like nearly all aspects of this nation’s founding, there is a level of connective tissue with slavery.

What is at play here is that a learning institution does not want to address a problematic history intellectually but emotionally. Few, if any, are pretending there was no slavery in our nation’s past, but to approach the subject soberly seems a task far too difficult. Instead, there is this need to eliminate the reality of the past — to, in a way, whitewash the inherent whiteness of the era in which the college was founded. It is an infantile approach rather than an intellectual one.

It also serves to expose the flaw in DEI thinking. While this initiative is always positioned as a chance for growth and opportunity, the result is usually instead a bitter approach to the past and wanting to take punitive action. Look at how, in halls and common spaces, this task force is not adding and broadening representation with new names but stripping away those supposedly hateful souls – who, despite the implied hateful motivations, somehow managed to develop Harvard into the preeminent learning institution that selected a black female to lead its student body.

The irony is that a school that is said to be the nation’s highest bastion of higher learning is not looking to learn from the past but to erase it. They charge that others want to deny this supposedly hateful past, but in these efforts to remove names, statues, and other recognition from the foundation of the school, it is the accusers who are practicing denial of history.