“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

I’ll always believe America’s political downfall started with that sentence.

When Bill “Slick Willie” Clinton uttered that phrase while he was being grilled over a particular White House intern, I knew the game changed. I didn’t want to believe it, but it was plain as a pikestaff.

That was the day Clinton signaled to the other elites there’s always a way out. There’s no honor nor outrage. And indeed, no apologies.

Just ponder the meaning of words like “is” and see if a lawyer is clever enough to take apart your argument.

No lawyer is. Because it’s not an argument, it’s a runaround. Really, it’s a steaming pile of bullshit.

And to this day, I pat myself on the back for voting for Bob Dole in 1996.

As I sit here in Italy, watching America’s slow-motion car crash from afar, few instances epitomize how far America has fallen than Claudine Gay’s testimony, plagiarism, and resignation.

Will DEI DIE in 2024?

When it was first introduced at large companies, the new “wing” of Human Resources departments was called “Diversity and Inclusion.” Then, “equity” became the next big buzzword. However, the initials of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were DIE, which is what most people wanted it to do.

So they changed it to “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” or DEI.

Like all flawed ideas, there was a kernel of goodness in affirmative action. The idea was to get the right people in the right places, even if they didn’t have the “right” upbringing, connections, or education.

The idea was to increase merit, not to decrease it. We wanted equality of opportunity, not outcome.

Of course, the message of affirmative action got distorted over time. Now, it means “anyone non-white, except Asian-Americans, get ridiculously preferential treatment.”

And as Thomas Sowell once said, "When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination."

There is nothing more unAmerican than preferential treatment.

Credit: @paulg

Harvard and Hiring

I should’ve known something was up when I returned to New York to teach in 2022.

I had been teaching in Asia for thirteen years and hadn’t seen the changes since 2009 when I left for Singapore.

In 2007 and 2008, I used to shake before walking into a classroom. These kids, from schools like Harvard, Penn, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, University of Tokyo, Stanford, and MIT - the world’s finest - were incredibly bright, enthusiastic, and switched on.

They knew finance theory inside out. Our classes were sometimes too basic for them.

Fast forward to 2022, and the banks were no longer recruiting out of many of these schools. 

First, many of these kids left their mundane banking jobs after a year to go into tech, and the banks knew it.

Second, the quality of the students dropped quite precipitously. Sure, I’d have a couple of superstars in the classroom, but not a classroom full of superstars.

Very quietly, schools like Harvard not so much lost their cache but weren’t the places to find high-quality, long-term hires.

And as the Generation X affirmative action kids grew up and got on television, it was easy to see why.

We Know, Joy. We Know.

Luckily, I had left the States before Joy Reid got famous.

I knew she was a Harvard grad who talked nonsense on MSNBC. That’s all. Yawn.

But then SCOTUS ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

From Reid herself:

I got into Harvard only because of affirmative action.

I went to a school no one had ever heard of in Denver, Colorado, in a small suburb. I didn’t go to a prestigious high school like Exeter or Andover. I didn’t have college test prep. I just happened to be really nerdy and smart and have really good grades and good SAT scores.

But someone came to Denver to look for me. A Harvard recruiter flew in, met me at a restaurant, and did a pre-interview to pull me into Harvard. I was pulled in — affirmatively.

This was not the recruiter saying, "We’re going to take an unqualified person and put them in Harvard." Rather, they were saying, "We’re going to take a very qualified person who we would never know existed and put them in Harvard."

My first reaction is that this is how the system was meant to work. Finding talent, wherever it is, and allowing it to flourish in the best possible places.

Of course, the internet reaction was, “Yes, Joy, we know.” And that’s because Joy Reid hasn’t done anything but spout gibberish on MSNBC. 

In other words, the game is up. The Peter Principle is kicking in. Perhaps we’ve always known that a “Harvard education” isn’t the same for all Harvard students.

Keep The Cash. We’ve Got Plenty!

This brings us to Claudine Gay, the now-former President of Harvard.

To catch you up, courtesy of Breitbart:

Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned on Tuesday, following antisemitism scandals at the Ivy League university, a disastrous congressional testimony, and scores of plagiarism allegations being unearthed in recent months. Her six month tenure marks the shortest tenure in Harvard’s history.

Gay’s resignation — just six months and two days into her presidency — makes her tenure as president the shortest in Harvard’s history, according to a report by the Harvard Crimson.

One question: how can advocating the extermination of Jews not be a violation of a university’s Code of Conduct?

A simple “yes” would have saved her and everyone looking through her scandalous academic resumé, which shows she plagiarized nearly fifty(!) times in the only eleven papers she ever published.

Fine, she thinks Israel is committing a humanitarian catastrophe. But as an educator, how can you not commit to protecting all of your students? This alone warrants her firing.

But her subpar output and her demonstrated serial plagiarism in a subject (African-American Studies) that doesn’t exactly tax the intellect, still got her the Harvard presidency.

Still, Harvard has let her keep her job and salary, too, according to The New York Post.

From The Post:

House GOP Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik — a Harvard graduate who emerged as Gay’s chief critic — ripped the decision to allow her to remain on the faculty.

Stefanik argued that Gay’s plagiarism charges are an indelible stain that mars the school’s legitimacy.

“She’s not fit to be a faculty member,” Stefanik told The Post.

“It’s unacceptable when you have students at Harvard who would be expelled for plagiarism to allow a faculty member who has nearly 50 examples of plagiarism in their very slim body of academic work. It’s absurd and everybody knows it. Harvard knows it, too.”

Wrap Up

Universities are overvalued by vast amounts. Really, they are Human Resource filters, so companies don’t have to do the actual work of vetting hires.

Companies used to trust places like Harvard to do the vetting for them. But if the institution has become such a political animal, rather than a place of unblemished education, of what value is it?

Unfortunately, just like Slick Willie, Gay got off with a slap on the wrist.