Conservatives can prevail in the culture wars by understanding how power works—and using it.
The left has spent decades consolidating power across the institutions of American academic life. The crowning achievement of that effort was the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy—constructed to perpetuate progressive dominance of higher education by keeping conservatives out of the professoriate. Claudine Gay was in some respects the apotheosis of this process. Last year, Ms. Gay, an African-American political scientist with a thin publishing history, became Harvard University’s 30th president. On Monday, following a sequence of scandals involving antisemitism and plagiarism, she resigned.
Many observers on both left and right had assumed that Ms. Gay was untouchable. Harvard, they thought, couldn’t possibly transgress a core tenet of modern progressive politics—the idea that a leader’s immutable qualities, such as race or sex, should matter more than character, merit and academic achievement.
What changed? First, public support for DEI has cratered. Following the outpouring of sympathy on elite campuses for Hamas’s war of “decolonization” against Israel, many Americans—including many center-left liberals—became aware of the ideological rot within academic institutions. They began to question the sweet-sounding euphemisms of DEI and examine what they mean in practice.
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Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He is the author of the new book, America's Cultural Revolution.
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