Folks Sure Is Fired Up About This Here Harvard Kerfuffle
Consider what that tells us
There has been way too much coverage of Claudine Gay being forced out as Harvard president. Obviously, the story made right-wing media happier than Quentin Tarantino in a Foot Locker — they got to watch an Ivy League lefty with ironic glasses eat shit. But mainstream media were part of the frenzy, too: The New York Times ran 14 pieces about Gay on Wednesday, which is a level of Times coverage normally only reserved for Pearl Harbor or Hillary Clinton failing to follow best practices for e-mail storage. Gay’s ouster has also been an incandescent topic on Twitter, eclipsing major events like a massive bombing in Iran and the public sacrifice of a sentient breakfast food.
Why are people in such a tizzy? Few people go to Harvard, and fewer still care about college personnel decisions; the country’s best-known college administrator before this episode had to be Dean Wormer from Animal House. For God’s sake: This very week a leader at a different college got fired for posting porn of himself online, and that story — which featured a long-tenured administrator getting his fuck on while providing tips about the best way to cook quinoa — got a fraction of the attention of the Harvard story. Why has this saga gotten so much attention?
The obvious answer is because this is a proxy fight about DEI/affirmative action/wokeness/whatever you want to call it. This is about the worldview that is heavily focused on group identities and advocates different treatment for people based on those identities. Activists like Christopher Rufo wanted to force this conversation, and they succeeded. And why Rufo wanted this conversation and why he got it might tell people — especially liberals — something about the political landscape.