DEI and Claudine Gay

John McWhorter thinks before he writes, and he usually chooses his words carefully. So it is worth paying attention to his piece in the New York Times, “Why Claudine Gay should go” (21 December 2023).

McWhorter points to Gay’s feeble academic credentials — a mere 11 published articles and a jointly edited book; and Gay’s apparent ignoring of standard practices about citation that give the appearance, if not conclusively the proof, of a great deal of plagiarism. Such a record would not be of much help to an humanities PhD seeking an academic position, let alone tenure at an elite university.

“That Dr. Gay is Black gives this an especially bad look. If she stays in her job, the optics will be that a middling publication record and chronically lackadaisical attention to crediting sources is somehow OK for a university president if she is Black. This implication will be based on a fact sad but impossible to ignore: that it is difficult to identify a white university president with a similar background. Are we to let pass a tacit idea that for Black scholars and administrators, the symbolism of our Blackness, our ‘diverseness,’ is what matters most about us? I am unclear where the Black pride (or antiracism) is in this.”

Exactly. As many others have also frequently pointed out, even the best qualified women and blacks who attain prominence bear the burden of perhaps unspoken but commonly present doubts as to whether their status reflects genuine talent and achievement or merely unearned “affirmative action”.

It could have been presented even more brutally in the case of Claudine Gay: Would a white male with those credentials — that lack of credentials — have been appointed to anything remotely like the presidency of Harvard?

There is no shortage of confirmed bigots, as well as of unintended and even unconscious bigotry. Every individual instance like that of Claudine Gay is seized upon by the bigoted viewpoint and referred to repeatedly as claimed support, and as proof of absurd excesses of “affirmative action”.

Perhaps, however, such occasions are inevitable in societies that aim for the most viable democratic conditions.

At the time when Civil Rights legislation was finally adopted, society was not yet ready for the ultimately best arrangements — for those to be possible, racial bigotry would have had to be entirely a thing of the past. Our society would also have had to be governed by legislators capable of agreeing on innumerable ways of enhancing the public good, say by providing universally affordable universal health care; and so on and so forth.

The struggles to “muddle through” characterize well-meaning societies composed of imperfect and fallible human beings. They have no other way to progress than in fits and starts, some steps forward and some steps back, progress for some entailing unfairness to others. Progress often has to be initiated, as George Bernard Shore pointed out, by unreasonable people making unreasonable and impossible demands. After a time, then, a pendulum swings a little back, but some progress has been made.

 Pundits and bystanders can always point to ideal solutions; but what actually happens in relatively free, relatively decentralized, relatively democratic societies is likely, for the foreseeable future, to consist of compromises, half-measures, times of progress and times of regress.

Affirmative action was needed; but it was also almost inevitable that its realization would be muddled, imperfect, and contain the seeds of the DEI pandemic, as described in an earlier post.