Over the weekend, news broke that the University of Pennslyvania President Liz Magill stepped down following congressional testimony where Magill and the presidents of MIT and Harvard refused to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews. While the MIT board appears to be circling the wagons around their leader, Harvard called an emergency board meeting yesterday that was purportedly about the future of President Gay.
Late last week, Harvard’s Claudine Gay offered an apology that was directly opposed to her congressional testimony from 24 hours before, but did so using the term “my truth.”
“What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community — threats to our Jewish students — have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged.”
Instead of saying “my conviction” or “my belief”, the term “my truth” relies on the social power construct of critical theory that is taught in DEI classes across Fortune 500 companies and higher education. Instead of objective truth, critical theory surreptitiously claims that truth is a lived experience that is based on the level of oppression an individual has faced. As a black female, Claudine Gay’s truth trumps my truth as a white male because of the ancestral oppression black people have faced.
Oddly enough, the power dynamic that Gay is reliant upon is the same dynamic that is used to justify calls for genocide against her Jewish students. Since critical theory claims that Jews are a part of the oppressor class because of the pigment of their skin, the Arab student’s “truth” is a call for genocide that would free the oppressed Palestinian people.
While all of this hopefully sounds like lunacy to you, progressive professors at elite institutions of higher education are teaching this to their students every single day. In turn, the new woke students are targeting the Jewish students with various forms of harassment while the faculty gladly sits idly by.
The reality is that if any other brown-skinned minorities from the Middle East were the subjects of targeted verbal or physical harassment, these school administrators would have immediately acted. Just imagine the response if the school’s Republican chapter called for genocide against trans people. Would the first instinct of school officials be to emphasize the university’s “free speech” code? I think not.
But therein lies the problem. One of the effects of the terrorist attacks of October 7th was to expose the defacto double standard that institutions of higher education have for their protected classes of people. It’s time for colleges and universities to recognize the cancer that is DEI and critical theory. As Fareed Zakaria said on CNN this weekend, maybe it’s time for higher education to refocus on the disciplines they claim to teach.
