There are so many lessons to be learned from the case of ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay. Perhaps the crux of which is that the application of the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) dogma will inevitably lead to mediocrity. We will have a hard time getting rid of this – a ‘mediocranny’ if you will.

Gay’s resignation from her prestigious post at Harvard, cementing her as the shortest-serving President in Harvard’s history, has led to a lot of wailing and mewing from left-wing commentators. In their view, this is, predictably, clearly a racist right-wing attack on a high-profile black woman. Gay also stated that ‘racial animus’ is a factor in her ousting. They all conveniently ignored many facts.

Firstly, in my opinion, Gay has quite an astonishing lack of credentials to be the President of one of the world’s preeminent universities in the first place. Having reached the post of President, her academic output appears to have been 11 peer-reviewed papers. To put it in context, as an academic for just over 6 years (10 years in academia when you include my PhD training), I have published over 30 papers.

Secondly, her meagre academic contribution is mired with reports of plagiarism that dates back to her 1997 PhD thesis. Accusations alleged instances of plagiarism across over half of her works. Gay was forced to make numerous corrections but strongly denies the allegations of plagiarism.

Chaperoned by her skin pigmentation, gender, and a Harvard Corporation mired in DEI, Gay’s Waterloo came at a Congressional hearing on antisemitism, as a response to Hamas’s terror attack of Israel that killed more than 1,200 civilians. Gay’s embarrassing refusal to say that it is against Harvard rules to call for the genocide of Jews, à la the Nazis, her lack of condemnation of 33 brainwashed Harvard student groups who blamed Israel as solely responsible for Hamas’ terrorism, and her use of free speech to defend her lack of denunciation of antisemitism at Harvard (despite a history of squashing it) unleashed public fury. Harvard apparently lost more than a billion dollars in endowments as a response to Gay’s public dishonour. Applications to Harvard dropped by nearly 20 per cent.

It is little wonder why she had to resign – though ironically, the President of UPenn, Liz Magill, resigned for only expressing similar things regarding antisemitism in the congressional hearings. Magill, who was white, didn’t even plagiarise, so much for her white privilege… On the other hand, Gay is still employed by Harvard, and gets to keep her nearly $900K annual salary.

F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has a chapter titled, Why the Worst Get on Top. In it, he warned those who ‘think that it is not the system which we need fear, but the danger that it might be run by bad men’. People who think this way are naïve Utopians. Indeed, it is often systems of thought, like DEI, which pave the way for the worst, the unscrupulous, and the power-hungry, to get to the top, and society inevitably suffers the consequences.

Harvard will suffer its Bud Light moment. While it is sad that such an institution is ruined by mediocrities like Gay, it is a much much better result than having generations made more stupid by such ‘educational’ institutions.