The left had to cast former Harvard President Claudine Gay as a victim.  But it wasn’t because they needed Gay, or even particularly cared about her. No, they did so because they needed to protect the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) process that promoted her to the top post at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.

Just how pervasive, important, and powerful that process has become to the left, especially in academia, has been shown by the recent disclosure of a “privilege” list circulated in January  by Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Health Equity — even as the Gay fiasco was still unraveling.  Thus, Gay became a martyr so that DEI could remain.

Harvard’s former president posed a huge problem, not just for Harvard but for the entire left.  The university’s problem was obvious: by any objective measure, Harvard made a bad pick for president.  The number and magnitude of Gay’s problems, and the accelerated speed (just six months) at which these problems manifested themselves, is simply staggering. 

Clearly, Gay was unqualified for the position.  She was not simply unqualified to be Harvard’s president but, with each passing revelation of her cases of plagiarism, her academic qualifications are also in question. 

She also showed herself to be unqualified as president during her brief performance in the presidency.

First, there were the acts of anti-Semitism on the Harvard campus that should have been addressed.

Second, there was her testimony before Congress regarding those anti-Semitic acts.  It took but a single hearing for Gay to show herself not ready for primetime.

Next came the statement in which she tried to backfill the hole she had dug for herself during her congressional testimony.

Then there was her inability to discern that her position was untenable as she tried to ride out the storm — even as the flood of plagiarism charges rose. 

Finally, when she did decide to leave, Gay managed to do so clumsily, glossing over the acts of anti-Semitism and the plagiarism charges: “…It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am…”  

The very next day came her New York Times opinion piece where she launched into full victim mode: “My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency…”   

So, now Claudine Gay is gone, and Harvard and the left’s problems are over, right?  Wrong.  Both Harvard and the left know there is a far bigger indictment of them in the Gay fiasco.

Gay’s presidency has indeed been “weaponized,” only it has not been by the right, but by the left.  It’s been because the Left are even more exposed in this fiasco than Gay herself. 

The Peter Principle states that people get promoted until they reach a position beyond their competence.  Therefore, the bigger fault in this lies not with the people promoted (after all, who can blame them?), but with those who promoted them.

However, in Gay’s case, yet another layer of fault exists: the process Harvard followed to make her its president. 

As billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman wrote on X on January 3rd after visiting Harvard:

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment. Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.”

Indeed. 

Ackman added: “…DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”

The Left’s real danger is not that Gay was exposed, or even that its flagship Harvard was, but that now their powerful DEI tool is. 

Of course, Harvard’s decisionmakers needed to hide their culpability in the Gay fiasco; they rightfully look like a Hasty Pudding skit.  The left did not; they had not directly picked Gay. True, but their DEI process had.   

The left do not particularly care about Gay, but they care tremendously about protecting DEI.  If you want to know why, just look at the Johns Hopkins Medicine’s DEI office newsletter mentioned above that listed as privileged those “people who have membership in one or more of these social identity groups: White people, able-bodied people, heterosexuals, cisgender people, males, Christians, middle or owning class people, middle-aged people, and English-speaking people.” 

Johns Hopkins Medicine quickly repudiated the newsletter’s language; however, the language and the mindset behind it show DEI’s power for the left.  To fully understand what a weapon “privilege” could be, just read the newsletter’s definition: “Privilege is an unearned benefit given to people who are in a specific social group. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.”

It logically follows that if “privilege” is “unearned,” the left can (and do) feel justified in taking it away.  And if privilege is conferred on so many groups and is so pervasive throughout “personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels,” then the left have complete license to pursue almost anyone, everything, everywhere. 

DEI is everywhere and can be used to attack whomever the left seeks to marginalize.  Never have the left had such a powerful cover for their agenda.  Suddenly with Harvard’s misplay with Gay, the dominoes threaten to fall as surely Gay did: from Gay to the DEI process to the left’s agenda. 

J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.