We begin this four part series with a look at the rot of the academy through the prism of the Claudine Gay scandal.
We begin this four part series with a look at the rot of the academy through the prism of the Claudine Gay scandal.
The Rot of Institutions Part One: The Academy
January 2024
Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.
Victor Davis Hanson
Definition of Oppression: prolonged cruel or unjust treatment or control.
This is the first in a series of four podcasts to illustrate our key institutions’ rot. I will begin with the Academy by featuring the Claudine Gay scandal. For my second piece, I will provide correctives to fix what ails our university system. I will then comment on associations dominating much of the workforce and providing essential services, focusing on the American Medical Association, where I worked for their marketing department. My concluding piece will focus on government institutions ranging from the FBI to the military.
I will make two key arguments: progressivism and its spawn, ESG and DEI, have caused rot in these critical institutions, and secondly, the necessity of these organizations. I am not an advocate of elimination but of fundamental reform. As conservatives, we need these institutions to form a bulwark against statist power and the formation and dominance of an oligarchic style of government.
And now to the Academy.
What is the role of the Academy? I am turning to Sowell to get closer to this in his Inside American Education, “The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.”
Probably better than anything I could write. I think of it though in four ways:
1. Train for a future job/career – the most obvious
2. Expose students to thoughts and experiences foreign to their lives – probably the one that many progressives’ would cling, though as we shall see, they define the experience
3. A midway point between childhood and adult hood. One is no longer living under their parents thumbs (for the most part) but nor are they completely on their own
4. Sowell’s definition and the one that I, attending a small liberal arts college in WI received something like this.
And in this I have to differentiate 1 from 4. The concept of training for a career with specific learnings is really more STEM than humanities. And four? Is there objective truths about an appendix in the same way as let’s say, socialism? My point is that some schools, Harvard Med or MIT are still pretty good at one, not really good at two. Coddling with trigger warnings and micro aggressions is exactly the opposite of creating self sustaining adults. And I would say the academy pretty much sucks at number 4, Sowell’s dream. So what are they teaching our young adults? Let me digress into a personal story.
When I started the Conservative Historian in 2012, I aimed to bring a conservative sensibility back to our educational institutions. At that time, the professor ratio in the Academy seemed, at the time, an incredible 5 to 1. It has only gotten worse. Much worse.
Every time I look at these stats, the situation grows more dire with the passing years. In 2012, I used the following survey, produced by Gross and Simmons called The Social and Political Views of American Professors, which found professors were 44% liberal, 46% moderate, and 9% conservative. Since then, Walter Williams had learned that of the 66 top-rated liberal arts colleges, 39 percent did not have a single registered Republican professor. In 2018, in a piece entitled “The disappearing Conservative Professor,” Jon A Shields, writing for National Affairs, noted that:
By most accounts, 1969 was not a banner year for conservatism, at least not on America’s college campuses. Looking back, however, it is striking how well-represented conservatives were in the ranks of the American professoriate. In that turbulent year, about one in four professors were at least moderately conservative, according to survey data collected by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education. Abrams estimated that the ratio of liberal to conservative professors has increased by about 350% since 1984…. According by some prominent measures, Republicans make up 4% of historians, 3% of sociologists, and a mere 2% of literature professors. And because conservatives tend to cluster in certain kinds of institutions — especially religious and military colleges, as well as those located outside of New England — many of America’s best colleges and universities have become one-party campuses. This problem is especially acute on the campuses of elite liberal arts colleges. According to a recent study on faculty party affiliation by the National Association of Scholars, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans at Williams College is 132:1; at Swarthmore, it is 120:1; and at Bryn Mawr, it is 72:0. At many of America’s best research universities, the ratios are only moderately better.
Again, in 2012, my concerns were that these liberal professors were teaching progressive views, especially those akin to the works of Howard Zinn, who took a reductionist view of American history. The story of our nation was nothing but a classist, sexist, and racist narrative. But in the intervening 12 years, the racist narrative has come to drown out even the classist and gender positions. Beginning in 2014 with the false narrative around the Michael Brown death (Brown was not shot with his hands up but instead, after robbing a convenience store, wrestled a police officer for his weapon when he was killed), the emergence of DEI dominated the campus. This trend was not just in the faculty but with DEI departments coming to dictate administrative practices and classroom content.
When people learn of my passion for history, I am often labeled as a buff and, definitely not having anything to do with physical appearance. Buff is defined formally as an expert on or devotee of a given subject. A history buff really likes history but is not a professional. I am a sports buff but have never competed at anything at the college level, much less something at the professional level. My term for a person who not only loves history but writes history and would, in some form or fashion, monetize this work is a historian.
Because of this devotion, decades ago, I considered joining the Academy or trying to become part of the hallowed Ivory Tower. Three things prevented me from achieving the necessary Ph.D. The first was my student debt from my undergraduate work. We were tapped out between my father, my grandma, and myself. At some point, it was incumbent on me to enter a profession to help eliminate the existing debt, not add to it. One of the reasons I am so vociferously against Joe Biden’s debt forgiveness schemes is the blatant lack of fairness in paying my debts and others getting theirs, to use the repugnant term “forgiven” as if Biden could put his anointed hands on the debt and make it go away.
The second was coming out of college; I adhered to conservative beliefs. Even in the Academy of the 1990s, that would have been problematic. Third, my lack of initial preparation for a career meant I had no additional language or experience and no edge over other candidates. Avenues might have opened up if I could read and write in Spanish, French, German Latin, or ancient Greek.
Most scholars focus on American history, a crowded field then as now. Remember that this was before women’s studies or the now ubiquitous African American programs in the humanities. Yet even then, decades ago, if one were a conservative white male, one would need to be a combination of Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, and Aristotle to get a position in the 1990s Academy. And that was before DEI.
The conservative part, though, is still the critical aspect. Let’s say I tried today; it would not happen now because they want young scholars, but my only hope would be to write something on a particular, narrow group of topics. It would have to be something either directly out of the DEI canon or, barring that, akin to a socialistic view of the nation, which brings us to Claudine Gay and plagiarism. The narrowness is the key to understanding Gay’s work, or rather the use of other people’s efforts represented as her own.
There are over 200 biographies of Abraham Lincoln. Historians, notably Doris Kearns Goodwin, have tried to provide fresh perspectives on the 16th president by, in her case, focusing on his cabinet. Others, such as Michael Burlingame and Jean Baker, wrote about those around him, such as Mary Todd Lincoln. There is even a book called Lincoln’s Ladies, which sounds more like a steamy romance than Emancipation.
How does a historian write a Lincoln bio and find a fresh perspective today? Assuming one finds that elusive subject, there needs to be a careful citation of all of those 200 previous books, not to mention hundreds of articles, essays, and journal entries already written. Let’s say I wrote the line, “Lincoln was especially effective because of his compassion. He was also remarkably self-aware and humble.” Then, compare this to a quote from Kearns Goodwin, “The best answer can be found in Lincoln’s compassion, self-awareness, and humility.” It’s probably not plagiarism, but it’s a bit close for comfort. The point is that I am not adding something that another historian has already provided. A historian who likes biography, such as Ron Chernow, probably has to move off someone like Lincoln because of replication, or as my favorite new Orwellian academic term would suggest, “duplicative language.”
But what if that was not possible? What if my success and employment were based on writing about Lincoln and little else? Add in that you need to portray Lincoln in a certain way. What if the scholarship was so narrow, and the expectations of a position or promotion depended on particular perspectives?
In today’s scholarship, for a black or even white Historian or political scientist to achieve success in their work, especially in the Academy but also as a contributor to journals, newspapers, or blogs, it, with very few exceptions, needs to be through the prism of a specific ideology which can be summed up in a single word: oppression.
But it must be said that a scholar who began her work in 1998 and, in the intervening 22 years, until she was named president of Harvard, to have produced a paltry 17 total works is anemic. For example, one of those pieces was 7,000 words. Though I am not academically reviewing my work nor completing bibliographies and notes, I still produce over 10,000 words of researched content every month and attribute my work that I still need to create. I completed a book as well. The Conservative Historian, Collected Works, of over 100,000 words, was produced in 2019-20 while working a full-time business job.
There is only one way that Gay got away with that mediocre level of production. It helped that she is the daughter of immigrants and a woman of Haitian descent. But more importantly, her work fits the narratives currently demanded by the progressive overlords of the Academy. And before the inevitable charge of racism occurs, consider this: in 2002-04, she completed two articles. During that time, Thomas Sowell completed four books. Her race and gender mattered, but what was more important was the nature of the content she produced. And yet, her low level of work is not what got her fired. It was plagiarism.
So many scholars not only focus exclusively on the black experience in America but start with a series of pre-set premises: oppression and grievance, as I have noted, and its progenitors: racism, sexism, and colonialism. That is it. If I, a white male, were to write about these topics from a progressive point of view, often, if not exclusively, castigating the United States for its role in these narratives, I might have a chance to enter the Academy.
Frequent listeners and viewers to my work note that I decry the nature of progressive, or in this case, DEI studies, because instead of assembling facts and finding a narrative, they start with an intended opinion. They then cherry-pick the facts or make them up to fit that story.
Now imagine a scholar who wishes to write a history of African American music in the 1920s.
Instead of discovering facts around that music and writing the work, letting the story proceed, acceptance of the piece and career advancement are predicated on starting with an oppression narrative. This history will not be comprehensive or open but rather how white oppression drove the development of African American 1920s music. Any other organic developments would be omitted. The powers that be who award positions in African American history or especially a DEI council would be explicitly looking for such examples. And I should add that I, as a white man, would not be well thought of to write about something that would be seen out of my purview. I am qualified to write a biography of Ida B Wells, but that would undoubtedly be frowned upon.
Consider the works that Gay plagiarized. According to Aaron Sibarium, writing for the Washington Free Beacon, “In a 2001 article, Gay lifted nearly half a page of material verbatim from another scholar, David Canon, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.” One of Canon’s works, “Race, Redistricting, and Representation,” is right in the DEI wheelhouse. Canon later came to Gay’s defense, “I am not at all concerned about the passages,” said the Washington Free Beacon. “This isn’t even close to an example of academic plagiarism.” Of course, he did. Canon, who happens to be white, would face ostracism or even the loss of his job if he had remained neutral or, worse, condemned Gay for what should be a scholarly taboo.
Sibarium adds, “New examples (of Gay’s plagiarism) center on a 1996 paper by Frank Gilliam, “Exploring Minority Empowerment: Symbolic Politics, Governing Coalitions and Traces of Political Style in Los Angeles,” that Gay repeatedly quotes without attribution, changing just a few words here or there.” Gilliam, now the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is lauded for growing its “equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts and outcomes.” His works include “Farther to Go: Readings and Cases in African-American Politics.”
Yet another example of plagiarism was from this work, “Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation,” by Harvard political scientist Jennifer L. Hochschild. Other works by Hochschild include Creating a New Racial Order and Facing Up to the American Dream, in which the author argues, “We have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos.” No other central belief system? Not capitalism, individual liberty, personal agency, or celebration of the family? But that is an argument for another day, not one that is taking place in today’s Academy.
I could go on to catalog all of the replications of Gay’s works (eight examples out of seventeen pieces), but let’s widen the lens. If you take a dart and fling it at a map of the US, then choose a college, any college, based on that location, you will see a DEI or African American program. If one of our darts hits Southern California, let’s look at UCLA. Forget the entire catalog of courses; we will look at their “MUST reads,” clearly the highlighted, most essential works they wish their students to consider. There is “Rebel Speak, a social justice mixed tape.” We have The Afro-Indigenous History of the United States, whose descriptor could be applied to dozens, if not hundreds of DEI works, including The 1619 Project, “The foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present.” Note the word foundations. Not the foundations of racism, slavery, or Jim Crow, but everything about America. My favorite from UCLA’s Must Read list is Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Yes, Google and Bing are racist.
Okay, UCLA is a California university subject to the moirés of that state’s leftist dogma. So, how about a purple state such as Virginia? The University of Virginia bookshelf offers Trafficking in Antiblackness, Modern-Day Slavery, White Indemnity, Racial Justice, Black Patience Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation.
So, let’s pick a red state, Missouri, home to the likes of Senator Josh Hawley, who is no DEI proponent. The University of Missouri’s Black Studies program features the following: “Burying The Sins of Our Collective Past: Why Rewriting and Covering Up Difficult History Doesn’t Work.” Burying and covering? Given what we now know of the Ivy universities such as Harvard or Penn, or that every prominent university and college (over 3,700) features African American studies, and let’s say their writers average out to three per program, would yield some 11,000 content producers. Then, let’s say each writes ten pieces or 1 per year over a decade. One hundred ten thousand pieces of content in the last ten years. When this number is added to the columns, posts, and articles written outside the Academy, for example, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michelle Alexander are not part of the Academy proper, the number becomes a bit staggering. Add to this publishing torrent at the high school level, The 1619 Project is taught in over 4,000 districts. And finally, my own experience in teaching high school social studies 30 years ago shows that slavery, Jim Crow, and black inequities. If there is burying, it is that students are more likely to be buried in works around grievance and oppression narratives.
I realize how proponents of DEI might see this piece. AD does not want black studies! That tactic was used against Ron DeSantis and his educational reforms in Florida. Nothing could be further from the truth. What scholarship would I like to see? It works on slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movements. But we already have that, tons of it. How about a biography on how Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire? How about an article on DeGrasse Tyson’s path to becoming America’s most prominent Astro Physicist? How about the charisma and box office success study featuring Will Smith, Kevin Hart, and Dwayne Johnson? And in none of these curriculums have I seen the names of Sowell, Steele, Williams, or Reilly. I have seen John McWhorter, but an atheistic man who voted for Barack Obama twice is hardly the diversity of thought so obviously missing in African American studies. Nor will we see a piece on the impact of public teacher’s unions and their effects on black education.
I would be the first to applaud and appreciate the effort if the scholarship were on all aspects of the black experience, including adding some positive ones, over the past 400 years. That is not what is happening. The work almost entirely comes down to grievance and oppression. My contention is there is so much ideological conformity that a writer today could not possibly write about any aspect of the black experience, whether it be politics, science, music, sports, entertainment, and especially history, without this narrative.
The University of South Carolina’s African American Studies program is one of the few countermodels. Consider this descriptor, which is how these studies should be:
In the Department of African American Studies, you will learn to evaluate historical, cultural, social, economic, and political influences surrounding African American culture and history in South Carolina, the South, and beyond.
South Carolina does not omit slavery, and Jim Crow lectures from an African American studies major, but rather those are aspects, albeit sad elements, of the greater experience. But in the Academy today, that greater experience does not obtain greater rewards. Before assuming Harvard’s presidency, Gay was the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and one of her key priorities, in her own words, was increasing diversity among the faculty. It is not enough to be a talented African American and bring that talent to today’s Academy. An aspiring scholar must write the correct content and be a proponent of the correct view.
Given this environment in which the majority of scholars only see the African American experience through the prism of racism, colonialism, and oppression, the surprise is not that Gay plagiarized the work of many in her field. Instead, it would be that every new piece does not contain the duplicative language that ended Gay’s presidency at Harvard.
There is a movie out now called American Fiction starring the always-compelling Jeffry Wright. The film follows a frustrated novelist-professor who specializes in parodies of Greek tragedies. He gets little recognition and small compensation for these works. In a drunken pique, he writes an outlandishly stereotypical “black” book as satire, only for the book to be published to high sales and praise. That premise is correct. I have noted we could have studied the emerging black middle class or Thomas Sowell compared to How to be An Anti-Racist, but we do not. It is most of the latter, none of the former.
And no wonder that despite her anemic output of essentially a single paper every two years and no book-length works, Gay would be given increasing positions of power. Some have castigated the naming of Gay as a diversity hire. Still, if you trumpet your DEI council as Harvard does and brag about Gay being the first woman of color to lead Harvard, then you cannot later complain about button-holing her as a diversity hire. Gay gave the game away in her transparent goodbye letter (well, not wholly goodbye; she will continue as a professor earning a $900,000 per year salary). She stated that it was “Frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
In a more optimistic time, baseball aficionado and political commentator George Will noted that hiring Frank Robinson as the first black Major League Baseball manager was a key milestone. But then Will said that it was also a key event when Robinson was fired three years later. Robinson suffered the same fates as Leo Durocher, Casey Stengel, and Billy Martin. That was what equality looked like. Not anymore. Today, the dismissal of a black Harvard president has nothing to do with failure to uphold the values of her campus, to protect Jewish students, to produce decent work, and not cheat. Nope. It is because she was black.
Victor Davis Hanson, in his December 2023 piece “How Universities Were Lost, writes:
Such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them. “Gender, black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental, and green”-studies courses demand far less from students and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors”. The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and anti-Semitic behavior without consequences. Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut-courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively, and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based-knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.
It was not racism that accounted for Gay’s plagiarism. Nor was the anemic writing that put Gay under scrutiny that the Harvard Corporations, in charge of the president search, did not provide. It was her exchange with Representative Elise Stefanick.
In December, Gay sat before the House Committee on Education and the workforce to discuss antisemitism and threats against Jewish students on Harvard’s campus. During an exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Gay was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews on campus violates the university’s codes of conduct related to bullying and harassment. Gay said it would depend on the “context” of the incident.
When asked to give a yes-or-no answer, Gay said antisemitic speech could warrant action from Harvard if the conduct crosses into bullying, harassment, and intimidation. Stefanik again pressed Gay to provide a simple yes-or-no response. “Again, it depends on the context,” Gay said.
Given a very similar answer to the same question, the University of Pennsylvania President, Liz McGill, a white woman, resigned her position shortly after the congressional hearing. The terrible irony is that historically, it is difficult to match the 3,000-year experience of occupation and oppression experienced by the Jews since the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel in the 700s BCE. And bullying, harassment, and intimidation? From the Babylonians to the Romans to the Europeans during the black death, the Russians with the pogroms in the 1800s, and the Nazis with their gas chambers in the 20th, the Jews know something of those terms. But the Jews are the bad guys on today’s campus to the point where Gay would not unequivocally express support for them.
Victor Hanson also has a succinct explanation for the antisemitism that Gay did not really confront. The bias against admitting too many Jewish students, coupled with freely admitting Muslims from abroad, led to this new zeitgeist on the campus. I will explore this in a future podcast.
21st-century American Jews do not quite fit the oppression narrative so well as seemingly, and I emphasize that word intentionally, do the Palestinians.
In the Academy, there is a phrase called “my truth.” Speaking about “my truth” or “your truth” suggests that truth is relative to an individual. Philosophers call this view “truth relativism”. It says that when someone makes a claim, it is made true or false by what they believe or how they feel rather than by how the world actually is. If truth is relative, if it is in context, then it is not truth. Calling for the genocide of the Jews is abhorrent. For a supporter of Hamas, it is necessary for the freedom of the Palestinians. Two truths. And the second is the one not condemned by the Academy.
Which brings us back to Sowell and my question. So, all of this brings us to a simple question. What is the role of the Academy? I am turning to Sowell to get closer to this in his Inside American Education, “The purpose of education is to give the student the intellectual tools to analyze, whether verbally or numerically, and to reach conclusions based on logic and evidence.” Does this square with Gay’s career?
The basic argument of DEI is that it improves the experience of the oppressed on campus and thus creates a better society. And has there been improvement? As Sowell notes, “There is no a priori reason to believe such claims, especially in the face of multiple evidences of declining educational quality during the period when multiculturalism and other non-academic preoccupations have taken up more and more of the curriculum.”
One of the first formal universities, that of Bologna, is the ‘Nourishing Mother of the Studies’ according to its Latin motto. The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 and, having never been out of operation holds the title of the oldest university in the world. Note the “continuous,” though. The University of Al-Karaouine (considered by the Guinness World Records as the oldest or first university in the world) was established in 859 CE in Fez, Morocco. Though the university boasts an incredible library, it also has a Mosque at its center, forbidden to non-Muslims. If one were to seek a truth that would be at odds with Islam, this University would not be a place to find that. Yet that is pretty clear.
My point is that many universities are not necessarily about the unvarnished pursuit of learning but rather a center of specific philosophies, and that is certainly true of the American academy today. My frustration is that our universities are not necessarily so biased; instead, they must be forthright to say the truth. They are progressive lesson institutions, not drivers of learning, debate, and true scholarship. Suppose the purpose of a university is to pursue life into adulthood. Was there anything in the works I have cited above, or any content written by someone who was to lead the world’s most prestigious university, the least bit instructive? Unless that is to get a job in said Academy. Even in STEM courses, we increasingly see the injection of progressive teachings to the detriment of learning.
So how do we fix this now broken system? Victor Davis Hanson, in a 2019 piece entitled “Can Universities Be Fixed,” illustrates the problems:
On the one hand, higher education’s professional schools in medicine and business, as well as graduate and undergraduate programs in math, science, and engineering, are the world’s best. America dominates the lists of the top universities compiled in global surveys conducted from the United Kingdom to Japan. On the other hand, the liberal arts and social sciences have long ago mostly lost their reputations. Go online to Amazon or the local Barnes and Noble bookstore, and the books on literature, art, and history are often different from the products of university professors and presses. Few believe any more that current liberal arts programs have prepared graduates to write persuasively and elegantly, to read critically, and to think inductively while drawing on a wide body of literary, linguistic, historical, artistic, and philosophical knowledge.
In the next podcast, I will provide a list of solutions to fix our broken system. And if I have borrowed, replicated, or duplicated anyone’s language in these prescriptions, hopefully, unlike others, I will provide the proper notation.