The Fall of Claudine Gay

 

Whatever you may think of Henry Kissinger, and I try to not think of the man too often, he likely had an insight when he said, "The reason academic politics are so vicious is there is so little at stake."

The truth is, presidents of universities can, if they choose, do nothing more than address commencement ceremonies and then disappear for a year. Two college presidents passed the baton while I was in college and if neither of them had ever set foot on campus, it would have made not one iota of difference to my college education. 

Nor would it have mattered much to the college itself, even in the long run, as far as I can see.

Some of the deans made a difference to me, but only because I was a student in their classes.

Ira Magaziner, a classmate, made a difference to the college, because he seized the opportunity presented by the closure of college campuses in 1968 to get a radical "new curriculum" passed in 1969, just before we graduated. This curriculum virtually eliminated grades and requirements for students to major in different departments.

Twenty years later, the owner of the Washingtonian Magazine who also owned a wide newspaper empire, told me he would not hire graduates of my college because he didn't know what their grades meant--it was all fun and games at that college he said. He was on the Board of Trustees of Cornell University.

I replied, accurately I believe, the loss was his, not those alumni he turned away from his enterprises; from the notes in my alumni magazine, I could see graduates were finding plenty of openings at the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. The fact is, ever since the new curriculum went into effect at the college, the competition to get in soared, and the applications soared, the quality of the students flocking to campus improved by any measure,  placing it just behind the big three-Harvard/Yale/Princeton--as a status symbol. 

In fact, for the first time, some students chose the college over acceptances at the big three.

So, when Claudine Gay finally resigned as President of Harvard, I had to shrug. 

So what?

Who cares, apart from Ms. Gay herself, and some members of the Harvard Board of Governors really cares? 

One has to ask, why should anyone on the Harvard Board, or any Harvard alumni actually have any say about who is "running" Harvard?

As an alumnus of a college, I realize I do not really know what is happening on campus in any substantive way, and even if I did know, why should my opinion matter?

Thomas Jefferson wrote about the idea that succeeding generations should not be captive to ideas of his own generation; as times and the needs and issues of the future changed, so too  would the rules and beliefs of new generations have to change. Lincoln picked up that thread, saying that as the issues of his own time were new, his own generation had to be willing to think anew.

The gigantic egotism of the members of the Harvard Board flickers through so many of the articles about their role in President Gay's removal. These are heirs to the Tootsie Roll fortune, investment bankers, hotel fortune heirs, people who, for the most part, started life rich and got richer. More money than brains types, one suspects.

And as for Ms. Gay--well, it's not her fault she was picked for all the wrong reasons, and she could be no better than she could be. Far as I can see, she is not a nasty person, and she values kindness, tolerance and open minded discussion. Nothing wrong with that. 

But she had to navigate an environment where, as Brett Stephens observed, values of "social justice" ousted those of excellence and the words "Equity, diversity and inclusion" appear on banners around campus, where Jewish students were said to no longer "feel safe" on campus.  Where nobody could actually say what "free speech" means or what "hate speech" is. 

Now, I like the idea of "diversity" if it means people from different parts of the country, from different sorts of families, the sons and daughters of coal miners mixing with those of hotel chain heirs, and maybe even some who look different, say Black or Asian are as prevalent as whites. But the Benneton advertisement aspect of different colors all mixing is not a goal, but an outcome, I would hope, of "diversity."  And what does "equity" mean? Does that mean there will be as many kids with low test scores as those who score high? And "inclusion"? Well, I like the idea that any kid on campus can be included in any club, sport, class or dining hall and nobody excluded because of social status or race. But when you have a dormitory for African Americans or a Greek fraternity which is all white, is that "inclusion"?

Young Harvard grads have for decades, spoken about "dropping the H bomb" into conversations, on first dates, or job interviews or simple chats in the country club locker rooms. They meant that as soon as they revealed they had gone to Harvard, the perception of who and what they are changed and simple folk looked on them as some kind of mystical royalty, someone who had drawn the sword from the stone. 

Or, at least, that's what these Harvard grads thought was going on. 

For my part, I knew kids who went to Harvard from my own high school class, and I was not overwhelmed by this nascent royalty. The only thing different about them was they had straight A's, but they were by no means the brightest members of the class. In fact, I felt sorry for them. There were 3 in my class and 4 in the class ahead of me and I knew them all and they all seemed socially stunted, sadly repressed and spiritually dull.

The Harvard grads I met in medical school and as a house officer in my training program in medicine, were uniformly bright and confident, but mediocre performers, uninspired, people who knew how to put number 1 first and who were not the folks I'd want on duty if my sister were admitted, late at night, to their wards.

So, the fact is, Harvard--and in fact--throw in Yale, Princeton and Stanford, are places where a lot of smart people flock and bless them. 

But there are, in absolute numbers, way more equally bright and talented people living, working and contributing to the forward push of progress outside those hallowed halls than in them.

Oh, Those Effete, Impudent Liberals!

 

“Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as ‘The Generation Gap.’ A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” 

No, that's not Ron DeSantis.  Nope, not William F. Loeb. Not, of course, Donald J. Trump--you knew that because there are too many sophisticated words--but it just goes to show that none of these guys are really new, but they continue that long line of anti-intellectuals Richard Hofstadter wrote about in his long forgotten, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." 

Richard Hofstadter

The guy speaking those words is actually Spiro Agnew, who 90% of my fellow citizens in Hampton, NH could not identify if their lives depended on it. He was Vice President under Richard Nixon, and his use of the word effete was especially effective because most people had to go look it up--this was in 1969, before the internet, so they had to get out a book called a "dictionary." 

"Effete" was the perfect word because it carries with it the connotation of "over-refined" and infertile, pallid, exhausted of vigor. It is exactly the sort of quality Teddy Roosevelt would hold in most contempt. 

(I'm reading about Theodore Rex now, but more on that later.)

Tonight, I saw a report on the PBS News Hour which made "effete" pop up before my eyes.

Now, I love PBS News, or rather, I'm spoiled by it. I've watched it since its inception decades ago with Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil and after a few years, I simply wretch whenever I'm fed the commercial news on the broadcast channels. It's like drinking skim milk for years and then you are offered whole milk--yuck.

Anyway,  Amna Nawaz interviews this guy, Tom Lasseter, Reuters newsman who got home from an assignment overseas and was sitting around his house in Washington, DC and came up with this great idea for a story: How many American Congressmen and Presidents have slaveowners in their families? 

Lots, it turns out. Hundreds. And when Lasseter started pushing a microphone in their faces to ask about this shameful skeleton in the closet, they reacted dismissively.  

Well, it's not exactly like finding out your father was in the Gestapo, but still, not pleasant.

But many seemed to say, "Yep, doesn't surprise me to find out my great grandfather owned slaves: We're from South Carolina, for Chrissake."

But Amna, in her softest, most whimpering tone, asked Mr. Lasseter how it made him feel to learn his own family had own slaves, and he told about how he went out and found some descendant of some of those slaves and they bonded or something. I'm not sure if the word, "forgiveness" came up, but "reparations" sure did. 

And I am sitting there in oculogyric crisis trying to bring my eyes down from inside my head, groaning: "For Chrissake!"

It did make me recall two things, however:

1. On a tour of Fort Sumter some years ago, I got off the boat with a guy dressed in the typical green and gray outfit with the Smokey the Bear hat of a Park Ranger and followed this man around the fort, as the crowd from the boat shuttle split into smaller groups of a dozen tourists to a guide and listened as he extolled Robert E. Lee as a  gentleman, the best general ever not to mention the soul of the Lost Cause. I finally could contain myself no longer and said, "You know, I understand history is one long argument, but Robert E. Lee was as vicious a slaver as the South ever produced." 

The tour ended shortly thereafter as we were now free to wander around the fort, but from about 10 yards a way, our tour guide had obviously had time to think and he called out to me: "There was only one slave owner at Appomattox Court House and he was wearing blue, not gray."

(He turned out not to be a real Park Ranger, but a volunteer docent and when I emailed the Park Service, they got on him poste haste.)

Definite Vicious Slaver

Of course, this canard is one of those historical strictly speaking might be true but in essence is a deep lie: Grant, it is true owned a slave given him by his wife's slave owning father, but Grant could not stand "owning" anyone and set him free in less than a year. Lee did not, technically own the 189 slaves under his control--they were inherited by his wife, Mary Cutis Lee, but Lee whipped them when they tried to escape and then "sold them South" to even more brutal chattel slavery as punishment for trying to escape. Lee was a piece of work.  In fact, the slaves who tried to escape did so because they knew that upon the death of their real owner, Mary's father, his will said his slaves would be set free, but Robert E. Lee chose to ignore that and kept them in bondage. 

Not a Slaver

That's history for you.

2. Teddy Roosevelt

I had read plenty about Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother from from the South, and Teddy had plenty to say about inferior races, and he thought unrestricted immigration was "racial suicide" and he was thick as thieves with all those Harvard professors who founded the Immigration Restriction League and those guys in Boston and New York who were all into "eugenics" which was devoted to breeding a superior race and who read books like "The Passing of A Great Race" and Teddy was all for conquering the Filipinos who were called "niggers" by the American troops and Teddy thought the natives would take years, centuries maybe before they, as a race, would progress enough to be able to rule themselves.

Theodore Rex

But Teddy Roosevelt also appointed a Black woman as the customs official in Charleston, South Carolina and set off a storm of indignation because no Negro should be a federal government employee in the South.

And he had Booker Washington to dinner at the White House which provoked a storm of revulsion in the South, with editorials speculating that Mr. Washington might have been rubbing thighs under the dinner table with Teddy's very attractive daughter, Alice, and those Southerners always leapt right to the Negro man ravaging the pure White woman sexually.

Roosevelt said the Negroes did not choose to be brought here and we have to allow them to become part of the country and while he was chastened and retreated a little, he did not apologize for his "nigger loving" acts and he showed the strange mix of a man who believed in domination of lesser races by the superior master race, but also believed in fair play and recognizing individual virtue in particular individuals and so demonstrated the contradictory currents which can exist in the mind of White people.

He was not effete.

He jousted with wooden clubs in the White House, and he rode his stallion through Rock Creek Park in all weather and he swam naked in the Potomac, which is no tame river and he admired manly men and distained effete men.

He would have roared at Mr. Lasseter and Ms. Nawaz and grabbed the channel changer and likely switched to Fox News.

Not Effete