Don’t Stop With Plagiarist Claudine Gay. Remove Every Useless, Overpaid University Administrator
Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned from her position as head of America’s most well-known university on Tuesday, one day after a complaint was filed with Harvard accusing her of six additional instances of plagiarism. So far, there are nearly 50 accusations of plagiarism against the former university president.
Gay’s plagiarism scandal is a damning indictment of the deceptively-titled dogma of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). DEI is the cultural Marxist doctrine responsible for the unfair promotion and protection of people based on qualities like race, sex, and sexual orientation rather than merit.
Indeed, Gay’s career is a testament to the fact that affirmative action is present in all aspects of academia, not just in the admissions process. Following a thoroughly unremarkable academic career, Gay was promoted to university president. As evidence of Gay’s plagiarism piled up in recent weeks, Harvard refused to fire her.
Instead of subjecting Gay to an embarrassing and deserved public termination, the university opted to let Gay resign on her own terms and will allow her to return to campus as a tenured professor. Meanwhile, a chorus of left-wing journalists, academics, and even former President Barack Obama have all come to her defense. Gay further declared herself a victim of “racial animus” in her resignation letter, cries which her defenders amplified. Notably, nowhere in her letter does she express contrition toward the scholars whose work she plagiarized.
Gay’s career is typical for identity politics, but it’s also typical for the growing administrator class that pollutes all American universities. At the average institution, there are more administrators than faculty. According to an analysis conducted by The College Fix, “there are 2,600 more administrators” than undergraduates at Harvard.
University executives often make six- or seven-figure salaries, playing a significant role in the increasing cost of higher education. In 2021, Gay, for example, earned a whopping $879,079 in 2021, while she was a dean.
Administrators also make the lives of students and professors far more difficult by implementing pointless red tape around day-to-day activities. Things like dual enrollments or independent studies that could probably be worked out between students and faculty instead require approval from multiple administrators.
More importantly, administrators are often responsible for fueling and even mandating leftist orthodoxy on campus. Studies show that university bureaucrats are even more left-wing than professors, with leftist staff outnumbering conservative administrators 12 to 1.
This partisanship is reflected in how administrators run campuses. Every school year, freshmen at American universities are forced to participate in sensitivity trainings run by full-time DEI coordinators. These seminars make it clear to students that woke ideology is endorsed by the school — and that those who dare disagree are bigots.
Another example of how administrations erode intellectual diversity on campus was on display in their handling of the 2020 race riots. After the death of criminal George Floyd, droves of university administrators sent out officious pro-Black Lives Matter statements on behalf of their respective universities. They would often make declarations saying George Floyd was “murdered” before the case was decided in a court of law or claiming the United States is a systematically racist country.
These statements also sent a message to university students: Declare support for the BLM narrative and the supposedly “righteous” destruction of American cities, or you’re a racist.
Likewise, during Covid, university administrators denied students their bodily autonomy by forcing them to take the experimental Covid vaccine and subsequent boosters. Administrators implemented anti-science mask mandates and shut down exercise facilities.
Administrators at my alma mater, the University of Chicago, even compelled students to participate in an authoritarian Covid violation reporting system. They also forced students to sign a document agreeing to statements like “COVID-19 poses a serious public health risk,” or else students would be barred from attending classes. These administrators acted as taxpayer-funded thought police who required students to adhere to one viewpoint on Covid or be banished from class.
Claudine Gay is a typical university administrator. She’s neither a brilliant academic nor is she committed to pioneering research and honest truth-seeking. Gay is a partisan who climbed the academic ladder through plagiarism and skin tone credentialism. It’s fitting that her field of study, African American studies, is a subject that, like gender studies, queer theory, fat studies, and feminist media studies, is not a legitimate field of study at all but political ideology — Marxism — masquerading as an academic field.
Gay ascended to the Harvard presidency because she checked the correct racial and political boxes. There are thousands of administrators just like her across the country. This army of overpaid pencil pushers is poisoning the university system by raising the price of education, complicating the lives of students and professors, and ensuring that radical leftism exists as dogma, not an opinion, on campuses.
Parents, students, and alumni must demand change if we even want to stand a chance at reforming American higher education. Alumni, in particular, can do so by withholding financial support in the form of donations. Hedge fund billionaire and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman, for example, has come out in opposition to Gay and the concept of DEI. He has also refused to hire Harvard students who signed their names to a document excusing Hamas’ radical islamic terrorism.
Targeting students, however, will not treat the root of the problem, which is a combination of many things, such as the leftist teachers colleges, the removal of Christianity from universities’ core mission, and, of course, massive bureaucratic bloat. Alumni must demand that partisan hacks who hold essential roles, like university president, be replaced with qualified candidates committed to free speech and academic excellence. Moreover, those who occupy nonessential roles, which is the vast majority of administrators, should be fired, and universities should abolish their positions forever.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
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