The Price Paid for DIE

by

So serial plagiarist and Professional Womyn of Color (Academic Division) Claudine Gay has been turfed from the comfy corner office at Hah-vaard, to the tune of much lamenting from The Usual Suspects. Frankly, I’m long past caring very much about what goes on in the hallowed halls of an increasingly overrated, intellectually debased institute of so-called higher learning. I was never in a position to be an Ivy student/alum, contribute monetarily to an Ivy, or in a position to hire a graduate from one of them, so the matter to me would be moot. Except…

Unfortunately, the ruling class, intellectual elite of this increasingly bedraggled nation have been overimpressed for decades with Hah-vaard and other enormous hedge funds with a finishing school of storied history attached, so willy-nilly, we must pay attention to the place. Apparently, MS Gay achieved her exalted position through the magical combination of possessing a vagina, a melanin-enhanced epidermis, and an expertise at vicious academic infighting, but no great intellectual shakes, literary skills, or any but the most banal insights into the human condition in evidence. Nice work, if you can get it, I suppose. A triumph of the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity industry, or as we like to abbreviate it around here, DIE.

Like all ‘brilliant’ progressive notions for reordering society in a manner more pleasing (to them) it sounds very good straight off the bat. You know fair, humane… and what kind of awful person could be against such a reasonable effort to better conditions for those poor folks previously disadvantaged and discriminated against … the exact definition of groups held to be disfavored previously by things like color of skin, ethnic background, economic status, religion, or national origin tends to be somewhat elastic. Some humans, apparently, are simply more equal/disadvantaged than others, as Orwell noted in another context, and are more worthy of having advantages, scholarships, promotions and high offices bestowed upon them, regardless of actual talent and fitness for them.

But one does wonder are the monetary and status benefits all that worth it to the designated recipients of such favors in the long run? Do those beneficiaries of corporate/governmental affirmative action and DIE programs look around from the eminence of their GS-whatever office, the C-level suites or the university chair and know in the depths of their souls that they got there because of color, ethnic identity and sex, and not ability? Do such people ever wonder if the perks and paychecks are worth the realization that everyone looking at them knows not just suspects but knows that they are an incompetent, and relatively useless tokens, secretly held in contempt and derision by peers, underlings and supervisors. Competence or lack of it is a quality that just cannot be hidden for very long in an organization. Word does get around. I suspect that only the supremely and delusionally self-confident escape having such doubts at all and such knowledge must be absolutely crushing.

Discuss as you see fit.

20 thoughts on “The Price Paid for DIE”

  1. No Sarge, they are absolutely certain of the rightness of their actions.
    They are the moral inheritors of the cool kid’s tables in the Jr High School lunchroom.

  2. Perhaps they put the brave, competent face on it all, before the world, Ed – but they have to know. In the dark midnight of the soul – they have to know, those who work out in the corporate and military world. And that knowledge has to eat at them … though they likely would never admit it, even to themselves. They have to be aware of that sting of cold contempt from peers and underlings.
    I am absolutely certain that it is happened already – that people are looking at a POC or a woman-boss-type, assuming that they got to where they are just because of color/sex – not competence/fitness for the job.
    It is such a pity, really. When I was first in the military, I noted that all the really STRAC, straight-up, amazing First/Top Sergeants that I encountered – were black. It was such a thing, I wondered if it were a cliché, like cops being Irish. The two best commanding officers I ever worked for – one was black, the other was a former-enlisted Japanese-American. They were amazing-good; they were where they were because they were good at leadership, getting the best from their troops. It was an honor and an absolute joy to work for them, and to say to anyone else that I worked for Major So-And-So. But now … one look at any of them, and one would think – Yeah, they checked the right ethnic box.
    It’s horrible that it’s come to this.

  3. Claudine Gay is no longer Harvard President, not because of a pathetic recitation of talking points before Congress, but because she was a serial plagiarizer. The Harvard Board could forgive her performance before Congress, because she merely recited what she had been told to recite. As Pravda would have said, it was no accident that all three Presidents talked of the “context” involved. Sounds as if they had the same coach. :)

    The Harvard Board could not countenance the uproar over the plagiarism charges, as they brought forth an unpleasant truth: Harvard, the Best of the Best, had a leader whose publishing record was worthy of a community college instructor. Had she been a Harvard undergrad, she would have been expelled for such plagiarism.

    The unpleasant truth behind the unpleasant truth of Claudine Gay’s mediocre, fraudulent record is that her dissertation and publications had already been vetted. It was the responsibility of her dissertation advisors and of those refereeing journal publications to catch those errors. They did not.

    It is possible and even probable that some of those whose job it was to catch those errors were aware of those errors, but decided they would give her a break. Had they instead decided to NOT give her a break and make her aware of those errors, she would have become a much better academic than she has been.

    If they were not aware of her errors, as the Oxford dissertation advisors of Naomi Wolf were not aware of her mistaken interpretation of 19th century legal phrasing, they are incompetent and should face some negative consequences for not catching those errors.

    Claudine Gay is a fraud, but so are those academics who informed the world that her work met academic standards.

    I

  4. well Claudine’s mentor is another character of dubious nature, I think the Free Press has described him, as such, a fraud of his own design,

  7. What DEI efforts accomplish is to create a situation of dependency whereby its client groups remain indebted to it for their position. In fact even where a member of a favored group advanced on their own merits, suspicion will forever remain that they achieved their position (instead of others) because of their immutable characteristics thus creating isolation and division in the larger group. In many ways DEI is the mirrored twin to “white supremacy” in that once adopted, one cannot ever dismiss that they were treated unfairly because of the way they were born.

    For people like Claudine Gay, DEI is a Faustian bargain because they can gain position and prestige at the cost of losing their agency. As SGM noted, she and others knew that they got their position through no fault of their own and that’s a burden that produces toxic effects

  8. We often look at DEI as a phenomena but we should also consider it as a bureaucracy. One of the many lessons from COVID was the problems inherent in bureaucracies, public or private. Of course they are staffed by people who as Madison would remind us by definition are not angels, but they are part of an organization tasked with a particular mission and not with a view of the larger picture. There are people attached to it, given functions and a mission statement, scored on KPI… in other words there is every incentive to not look beyond the boundaries of their unit. Our health bureaucracies saw COVID, at best, as a health issue, and created policies that treated it as such irregardless of the larger social and economic ramifications.

    So it is with DEI which looks at fulfilling certain HR policies whether or not they further the interests of the larger organization or business. What J.P. Morgan said about lawyers (“Well, I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do”) also applies to HR/DEI; a C-Level person must always be on guard in allowing support personnel to dictate strategy.

    In a past job, the local HR directors were actually scored based on the number of “diverse” candidates they offered for promotion; I remember one such director entering a room before a meeting talking on her phone in an ecstatic mood because a black woman told her that she wanted to be promoted into management. I knew the woman in question, knew her to be totally unfit for the job, and so did everyone else… but that didn’t stop her from being placed at the head of the promotion pool. Btw… she was never promoted, though a lot of effort was expended on her behalf, she was just awful. This is what happens when you get people paid and tasked to accomplish certain things and

    It also doesn’t help that both HR and DEI are largely staffed with mediocrities and fanatics.

    I see in the news that reparations has reared its ugly head with Chicago Mayor Johnson saying something about it. So I had a promotion (at a company I no longer work for) held up for about a year largely because of DEI/HR policies. I figured that delay cost me about $50,000 in lost compensation, so when it comes to reparations can I just get that amount credited to my billing statement?

  9. “Competence or lack of it is a quality that just cannot be hidden for very long in an organization. “

    I suspect that is exactly what is happening; people base attitudes on experiences, and when an organization increasingly fails in its basic function, be it grocery store, automobile manufacturer, military branch, or computer service, people do notice. When those individuals who perform, or are expected to perform, the “front and center” core duties clients, customers and investors expect fail at their duties and assigned tasks, not only does it not go unnoticed, the impression of degradation extends to all aspects of the organization – “failure of trust” is the term – and it is incredibly difficult to overcome once it becomes intrenched in the public’s mind. One example that comes to mind is how long, and how much effort, it took the U.S. military to achieve a turnaround from Vietnam and regain respect; there are few businesses that could remain in operation that long while they attempted to regain public confidence.

    That a number of law firms not only withdrew hiring committments they had put forth for Harvard Law School graduates, a number stated they would no longer be hiring anyone from Harvard Law, and a few non-legal businesses have stated they would not be hiring anyone from Harvard University as well. It would not surprise me were it to become known that other organizations declined hiring opportunities from several other universities as well; that’s probably concentrated in “the Ivys” – Yale, Princeton, Columbia, et al – but there’s plenty of evidence “wokeness” has spread far beyond the Ivy borders.

    If, faced with no other choice, businesses import the Woke and SJW attitudes into their business via the hiring of infected employees, leading to operational incompetence from poor employee attitude, performance and mismanagement, never mind the collapse of individual companies, it bodes very dire consequences for America in total.

  10. Mike @ 9Jan24 6:14 a.m. & 7:20 a.m.

    DIE, not DEI.

    Mom even said so in her OP…. (Kudos plus, Mom.)

    I’ll admit this is/has been a hobby horse of mine, and plead with you, Mike, to accept my comment in good fun. Yet I simultaneously think practicing this bit of snark exactly what needs to happen in every commo in which DIE comes up. It’s simple confrontaton demands the Woke/Marxist face reality in that you will have no conversation that permits ambiguous terminology power to define the assumptions for that conversation.

  11. Roy,

    I will accept your snark for the good humor it was intended but I cannot agree with the logic.

    Switching around letters and the like is good for morale and all of that but if you want to do justice to the scale of the battle we face you don’t play such games. The Left engages our Symbols straight up and doesn’t mock them; they desecrate them through reinterpretation and vandalism, making them something worthy of scorn and shame.

    Just as they are deadly serious, so should we. Engage them on their terms and crush them in their stronghold by explicitly making DEI the mark of the racist fascism and hatred that it truly is. These are people who do not deserve your mockery, but rather your hate and your wrath because this is only one front in a long war. You want to make DEI, not DIE, the proverbial mark of Cain for its supporters

    You want anyone who has ever espoused DEI

  12. Given the human tendency to double down on stupid if you get their backs up, I think that you want a face-saving escape that lets people pretend “I never supported that,” and “That’s what my job description said, but actually I was…”

    We, of course, need to keep an eye on the ball, and remember that Gay’s plagiarism is the lesser offense; why they hired her in the first place is the real problem. This isn’t a stiff enough rebuke to Harvard et al to get them to try hiring on merit again instead of DEI–the incident has been spun as being about plagiarism.

  13. Back in the day when I hired people, I quickly learned that the only person that would never cause me trouble was the one I didn’t hire. Sooner or later, usually sooner, almost everyone I hired cause some sort of chaos. If I was lucky, it was nothing worse than not showing up when I needed them.

    I can’t imagine willingly hiring one of these loons.

    I imagine Gay got the job because she had just enough self awareness to understand what a sweet deal it was and how quickly it would go away if she displeased the people that gave it to her. As is, she goes back to being just another professor at $900K a year. I would love to see someone try to justify that on a value for money basis. Anybody that hires a Harvard grad has had fair warning and they’ll deserve the the hell they’ll get.

  15. Don’t usually bother to correct mistakes, figure you are smart enough to get it anyway but the above should be $$$$$$$$

  19. > Frankly, I’m long past caring very much about what goes on in the hallowed halls of an increasingly overrated, intellectually debased institute of so-called higher learning.
    Is there a reason to assume anything changed there, except decreasing quality of brains?
    Harvard used to be a theological institution. It still is one, running Protestantism of mostly Quaker flavor (increasingly garbled forms, sure, but recognizable in theology and even some traditions, from paper-thin pacifism to Testimony of Equality to Right Ordering) under a fig leaf of pseudoscience. So, is there any evidence that Brother Jonathan ever left “the hallowed halls” of said building? His self-righteous hubris certainly did not.
    For a while Harvard managed to pretend that it was a scientific institution ”” when this could make it more fashionable”¦ and even allowed some actual science, as it helped with the arms races. However, it did not become an actual scientific institution, but instead remade the real things in its own image. Once the academia was ill-suited to do the jobs it claimed, the slide into quackery was inevitable.
    The effect separation of Church and State had on the kind of people who made this seem the only way out of a bloodbath was that harnessing power of the State for their cause did not become impossible, but required false pretenses, which they learned very quickly. As pointed out by Chesterton (“What’s Wrong with the World”): «It is a fight of creeds masquerading as policies. I think these reverend gentlemen do themselves wrong; I think they are more pious than they will admit. Theology is not (as some suppose) expunged as an error. It is merely concealed, like a sin.» Worse, applying this principle un-rigorously created selection pressure favoring the more dishonest sects. Then, of course, some clowns (like Dawkins) did not get the joke and doubled down on it in full seriousness.
    If you view all this commotion as merely an intrinsically illegitimate and duplicitous variant of theocracy, most of it makes perfect sense. Of course, the ways people reacted to different forms of the same ugly mess centuries ago also suddenly make more sense.

  20. Coincidentally, I recently re-watched the 2007 film ‘Michael Clayton’, a legal drama starring George Clooney in the title role.

    Supporting actress Tilda Swinton portrays the general counsel of a ag-chem firm being sued for selling carcinogenic fertilizer. Swinton’s character is unqualified for her leadership position. And she knows it. Poised and confident in the board room, she’s nervous, uncertain, frail, and indecisive while alone in front of her mirror. Swinton, the actress, portraying an actress, portraying a corporate legal officer.

    I suspect a lot of DEI hires are like that. Acting a role. Perhaps not Gay individually, but a lot.

    BTW, Swinton was awarded an Oscar for her performance in the film.

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