Attacks on Diversity in Higher Education Threaten Democracy
The forced resignation of Harvard’s president provides a peek at the blueprint for the war against justice in the U.S., concludes a long-time observer of attacks on academia
Claudine Gay, president of Harvard University, during a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., in Dec. 2023.
Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg via Getty Images
If a time traveler left the U.S. in the summer of 2020, and returned today, they well might conclude they had accidentally gone back in time, so drastically different is today’s national conversation about racism. The murder of George Floyd and the increased visibility of the Black Lives Matter movement had led to corporate and university commitments to “diversity, equity and inclusion.” More white people suddenly publicly recognized white privilege and structural racism. More took to the streets than previous Civil Rights demonstrations. More read and studied systemic racism and white privilege, while learning from diverse writers and educators. More corporations issued statements against racism and pledged to do better.
This racial reckoning threatened the billionaires, politicians and activists intent on protecting extreme free market capitalism and their own economic and political dominance. We can trace December’s House Education Committee hearings—attacking diversity on campuses nationwide—back to those moments three years ago. Three university presidents, all women including Harvard University’s Claudine Gay, a woman of color, were viciously grilled by Republican lawmakers about antisemitism on campus in response to the current war in Gaza. Christopher Rufo, widely recognized as one of the masterminds behind these attacks and many others, proudly proclaimed their real purpose “to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America.” Could this explain why we haven’t witnessed congressional…
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