Well, 2024 seems to be off to a great start: Claudine Gay is resigning as president of Harvard. It had to kill the Harvard establishment to take this step, since they had framed the possibility as “giving in to the right.”
Of course the problem is that Gay’s resignation will change little at Harvard, or any other elite university. It is a certainty that Harvard will find someone equally committed to “progressive” values—racial diversity chief among them—to replace Gay. They’ll just be more careful in reviewing the next president’s record. (Heck, they might quietly hire Chris Rufo to vet the field.)
By coincidence, last night for grins I dusted off Randall Jarrell’s classic 1952 satire of higher education, Pictures From an Institution. Its description of the cliche-driven president of the fictional Benton College, Derek Robbins, reads exactly like what every college president today sounds like. This passage is one of the highlights of the novel, parts of which sound not unlike Claudine Gay’s resignation letter today:
President Robbins made as speech that—that—as Gertrude said, you had to hear it not to believe it. When he finished (and not a minute too late; the audience wolfed that speech down the way the Afghans ate their horsemeat) he finished by thanking the students, parents, and faculty of Benton for the experience of working with, or learning from, and growing to . . . love . . . such . . . generous and intelligent, such tolerant and understanding, such—and here he paused quite a long time—such . . . good . . . people. As he said . . . good . . . there was in his voice so radiant a freshness, so yearning a transfiguration of all created things—how chromatic it was!—that the audience rose from their seats and sang, like Sieglinde: Thou art the Spring! No, they didn’t actually, insensate things, but they wanted to: you could look at them as see they were Changed…
If it were not for men like President Robbins, how could this world go on? Everything would be different.
And so we can update the query: If it were not for brave diversity hires like Claudine Gay, how can this world go on? Fortunately, Jarrell provides the answer in his next classic sentence:
And yet one must admit that such men are in long supply.
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