When Merit Still Mattered

All fame is fleeting...

It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Claudine Gay (Harvard’s resigned president)

When I read Claudine Gay’s “I was framed” letter of resignation and Times op-ed, Vince Lombardi’s biography (When Pride Still Mattered) immediately came to mind – because she’s now the poster gal for PROMOTED BEYOND MY ABILITY and his name is on the SUPER BOWL TROPHY. Gay’s words invited a 17% drop in Harvard’s early applications, while Lombardi’s words inspired a mixed-race team to five NFL championships. Who’s the great leader?

Harvard was a pride-and-prestige educational brand, which Gay deemed an “idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia” in her inaugural speech. Her re-branding ideas included (1) replacing (published) scholars with an (unpublished) identity-politics activist atop the school, (2) replacing the credo of Veritas with a serial plagiarist to kill the scholastic culture, and (3) embarrassing the school before Congress.

No merit badges for Harvard. Before Gay, they’d selected five presidents who’d published 97 books without a single charge of plagiarism. Along the way, they dumped Veritas for admissions schemes to enroll fewer brilliant Asian kids and department policies to stifle free (conservative) speech.

No merit badges for Claudine Gay – whose family owns the largest concrete plant in Haiti and sent her to prep at Phillips Exeter – who gets to keep her $900,000 annual salary in spite of the shortest and most scandalous presidency in Harvard’s history. Not just for her plagiarism, but for previously presiding over the punishment of heterodox thinkers, being a free-speech hypocrite, and cowering in the face of calls for the genocide of Jews.

No merit badges for the Intersectional Left that’s decided America’s Jews are no longer a “protected” minority (unless some white redneck shoots up a synagogue) and a black president of Harvard is a “protected” minority no matter what. They dumped Dr. King’s “content of character” for DEI hypocrisy that won’t protect Jewish students from racial harassment but calls a well-paid black, who’s still a Harvard employee, a “victim” of racial animus.

No merit badges for the DEI assembly line turning its millions of “aggrieved” adherents into persons with status; a minority student with average test scores AND a Harvard diploma, a transgender bureaucrat with few accomplishments AND a job at the White House, etc. They’ve dumped merit for mediocrity, and future achievers for guarantors of the end of American exceptionalism.

Gone are the great academic villages of the past that turned out persons of stature (a collegial, honorable, rule-abiding student, who was gainfully employable for life). The prep schools and colleges of my youth relied on academic rigor, honor systems, speaking traditions, and students atop rules-based disciplinary bodies – and all my generation did was create disco, personal computing, smart phones, and tolerance of “otherness” in America.

Claudine Gay should be ashamed of herself, and black apologists should let her go quietly into oblivion. If Ms. Gay were meritorious – like Condoleezza Rice – Al Sharpton and Joy Reid would not have to defend her as a victim of racism. Reid looks like a shill, calling Gay the “latest casualty of open war on Black progress, Black history” – when the public record documents 50 incidences where Gay lifted entire sections from other people’s work.

It’s clearly intellectual property theft, but Gay remains unrepentant. She claims she “duplicated other scholars’ language” so that the “substance of my scholarship strengthens our democracy.” Harvard calls Gay’s thievery “missteps” and sees mere “duplicative language” in her 11 plagiarized articles. No joke, and CNN spun Gay’s honor violation as “copying other people’s writings without attribution.”

And – no merit badge for any Jewish American who’s not a registered Republican after observing identity politics in action. Wake up: after assimilating 100% into the USA, Jews are a problem for the DEI crowd. Without Affirmative Action, Jewish immigrants still became the “most financially successful minority” (source: Pew Research). Blocked by WASPs from prestigious clubs and corporate careers, Jews started their own (great) clubs and companies.

In doing so, Jews became Super-Honkies in the eyes of victim-defender Al Sharpton, who rattles on about “blood-sucking Jews…white interlopers” to black audiences. Really? Because Jews got ahead in America only through merit, and were the first whites to champion black civil rights. So – – look how the left treats you.

A merit badge for Bill Ackman, who’s probably read When Pride Still Mattered. A Harvard alum, who gets that merit-based achievement matters, every minority deserves protection from harassment – especially at Harvard – and is willing to fight for truth, justice, and the American way. The guess here is that Coach Lombardi would be proud of Bill.