The Attempt to Destroy Roland Fryer
Why Claudine Gay, Harvard, and Today's Higher-Ed Are Far Worse Than You Thought
Somehow I missed this the first time around, but thanks to pointers from fellow substackers Igor Chudov and Karlstack, I’ve now watched the must-see video of 2022, “How Claudine Gay Canceled Harvard’s Best Black Professor.”
Had Claudine Gay responded appropriately to the Nazi-esque pro-Hamas activism on campus, had she never committed any of the 40 or so acts of plagiarism she’s now accused of, she would still deserve removal from her presidential post at Harvard, on the basis of this incident alone.
But of course, as that Karlstack post documented, a year-and-half-ago, and eight months prior to Harvard’s appointment of her as president, there was much more. There was her key role, as a dean, in Harvard’s Jorge Dominguez scandals, in its ties-to-Richard-Epstein scandal, in its ties-to-Harvey-Weinstein scandal, and most importantly, in the Ryan Enos data fabrication scandal which implicated her research as well.
Here’s a recent post-resignation summary from the Karlstack writer on Gay, real name Christopher Brunet, at Unherd.
Gay’s days of “failing upwards,” as in directly upward, to the pinnacle position in American academia, are done. But it’s predictable that instead of spending her remaining days expelled from academia, and perpetually dragged into courts, which is what she deserves, she will now fail-diagonally “down” to some position that is way, way higher than any position held by anyone reading this. Like the tyrannical Oberlin College dean of students Meredith Raimondo, who led the slandering/woke-hate/mobbish boycott against Gibson’s Bakery, leading to a lawsuit disgracing Oberlin and losing it an estimated $40 million, Gay will likely wind up hired by some lower-tiered school, as Raimondo wound up by Georgia’s Oglethorpe University, to become its Vice-President of Student Affairs.
And as a recent National Review article established, Raimondo has apparently brought another toxic Oberlin pattern, that of being soft on leftist antisemitism, to Oglethorpe. But for more on the Gibson’s case that revealed her character, explore this and the linked stories at Legal Insurrection.
It is no act of manners, nor of Golden-Rule ethics, to mince words here. If you have watched the video above on Fryer’s case, or read about the Gibson’s affair, you know that people like Gay and Raimondo are scum, and are as poisonous to any institutions they wheedle themselves into as gangsters or communist agents would be. And if you know contemporary academia, you know that less-obviously-egregious versions of their ilk are everywhere. Nor can you count on incidents of plagiarism and defacto Hamas-support to remove more than a handful of them. This is one of the main reasons, out of a list of around twenty others, why I believe present-day academia is un-reformable. It has to be abandoned by all persons of principle, and new institutions built to replace it.
But let’s avert our eyes from the sad despots like Gay and Raimondo, and turn them towards Roland Fryer. Gay and her allies destroyed his Harvard career for a time, yes. But he is still there, due to tenure, despite remaining barred from teaching, and he now has a fellowship with the Manhattan Institute.
Harvard has the gall to still crow on their site about his being “At age 30…the youngest African-American to receive tenure at Harvard,” but it is the conservative Manhattan Institute, as well as the conservative economist Glenn Loury, that truly highlight the excellence and importance of his research, and in two areas especially: 1) the commonality in Afro-American culture of “acting white” accusations against high-achievers, and 2) the lack of evidence to support BLM-style charges of systematic police-department discrimination against blacks in arrest situations1 :
More here from the great Coleman Hughes. We’ll see what happens in the long run with his career at Harvard, but I would advise Fryer to ditch it as soon as he can do so with the maximum of impact, and of gain for his reputation; it is not a redeemable institution, and he should say so.
A couple of days after the initial release of the George Floyd footage, some facebook friend of mine posted some sloganistic click-bait piece of “75 things whites can do to help blacks.” The suggestions were a Woke-fest of junk, much of the junk being reverse-racism, mixed here and there with exhortations to live up to common-sense precepts of justice. Here was my response, adding 25 more things. Item 91 is the one most relevant to the Fryer videos here on arrests. “76. Don't cause mass unemployment and small-busines failure. 77. Don't require police to arrest people who aren't wearing masks, or for breaking a variety of other new bizarre rules, policy that is destined to bring about another Eric-Garner-style arrest tragedy. 78. Don't flood the schools with identity-politics propaganda. 79. Provide real discipline in the schools, so the behaving majority can learn, and don't put racial caps on referrals. 80. Don't award the 1619 Project, forced to apologize by a host of historians for false and hyperbolic claims, the Pulitzer Prize, and don't let it spread its lies and general race-pessimism in the schools. 81. Read Coleman Hughes. 82. Read Zora Neale Hurston. 83. Read Bayard Rustin. 84. Read King. 85. Read Ralph Ellison. 86. Read Tamar Jacoby. 87. Read books, essays, not slogans, slogans, slogans. 88. Punish incompetently-run police departments, by electing officials who promise radical changes, even if those promising them are Republicans. 89. Don't support racial separation for dorms or classes at colleges, or any similar things at companies. 90. Question whether you should support every form of affirmative action. 91. Question whether proper arrest procedure really deserves to be the top political issue for urban blacks, despite the racism that might or might not be involved in botched arrests, and despite the shocking deaths. 92. Don't hire people, such as Ryan Wash at Weber State or Sarah Jeong at the NYT, who take pride in hating whites. 93. Don't delude yourself about the ideology of most BLM chapters (Read Peter C. Myers). 94. Don't assume BLM is the go-to black interest group. 95. Don't give Al Sharpton or anyone like him the time of day. 96. Don't blithely throw around the term "white supremacy," when within living memory people suffered under the real thing in states like Mississippi and Virginia. 97. Purge the Democratic Party, and it's Media Adjunct, of all those guilty of accusing others of racism falsely, or on the basis of zero evidence, more than three times over the course of their career. 98. Never forget, and constantly learn, the horrible injustices done to protect the segregationist system--Isabel Wilkerson's book The Warmth of Other Suns, is a good one for that. 99. Treat all humans, and especially your fellow citizens, with justice, regardless of skin color, which also means don't be one of those whites who winds up trying to flatter "people of color," and never regards or treats them as individual persons, so he can feel good about himself. 100. Pray, for peace, for God's forgiveness of our nation's sins, and for our yet-alive Dream.”