Harvard University - Cambridge, Massachusetts

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As the clock ticked on racist admission policies at the country’s top colleges, Harvard announced prophylactically (but in vain) its selection of a new president, Claudine Gay, who becomes Harvard’s 30th president today. It did not surprise that the choice was a black woman. It may have surprised that she is not a lesbian. But Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

Why should we care that Ms. Gay is black? Would we care if she were the first Harvard president with complete heterochromia? Or incurable halitosis? Do we care that she’s black because she’s doing something useful for blacks? You know the answer. Her selection, announced months ago, was part token, meant to assuage those pesky Supreme Court justices appointed by President Trump. But she’s actually more than that.

Ms. Gay is a card-carrying member of the woke gestapo. Recently she was the Gruppenführer of an indoor lynching of a black tenured professor at Harvard, Roland G. Fryer. Fryer, a student of Nobel laureate Gary Becker, and the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant for his work on the black “achievement gap” in grade school, presented a problem: His research showed that black children are not locked into academic last place before they even reach school. Their surroundings and upbringing (married parents?) make a difference (who knew?!). Fryer also wrote a paper (“An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force”) that contradicted the claim of the Black Lives Matter crowd—and the usual gaggle of Harvard über-racists—that the police target blacks. Clearly, Fryer had to be punished. So the university suspended him for two years and barred him from teaching or using university resources. Uppity black!

But Gay has other talents as well. She’s a first-rate sociobabbler. One of her research interests listed in a 2012 résumé (the most recent one available online) was “Voting Behavior, Political Participation, Public Opinion, Minority Politics, and Representation.” Two papers listed as “in preparation” were “Is Racial Linked Fate Unique: Comparing Race, Ethnicity, Class, Gender, and Religion (with Jennifer Hochschild)” and “Race and Perceptions of the ‘Most Important Problem.’” Under “Recent Talks” from the same 2012 résumé are listed: “Knowledge Matters: Policy Cross-Pressures and Black Partisanship” and “Race, Representation, and Responsiveness: Lessons from the Post-Civil Rights United States.” This is not Netflix material.

There may be a silver lining: Anyone who sounds as tedious and pedestrian as Ms. Gay might be able to finish off Harvard before the next inevitable lawsuit challenging the inevitable racial discrimination by the institution as it seeks a work-around to the Supreme Court decision.

Ms. Gay is obviously a reliably liberal Democrat. Asked by The Harvard Gazette, “How do we ensure that democracy survives in this country?” she replied, “One answer might be a bipartisan consensus and commitment to re-establish a common foundation of facts.”

Would that include a common foundation of facts about the candidates for president and their relatives, e.g., Mr. Biden and his son Hunter? A common foundation of facts concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed by social media at the urging, we now know, of the FBI and Antony Blinken, who was appointed Secretary of State for his troubles. Would knowledge of those facts (remember “Knowledge Matters”) have mattered? Polls indicated that the answer is yes.

It would also be interesting to know what Ms. Gay has said or written about the public’s lack of knowledge of the immigration crisis at the U.S. southern border. Is that a race issue?

In fiscal year 2022, Border Patrol agents encountered 2,378,944 immigrants crossing illegally into the U.S.—a record. And there were an additional 600,000 who evaded the Border Patrol completely. Since Biden became president, more than 5 million immigrants have entered the country illegally. And with the expiration of Title 42 on May 11, the flood became a tsunami.

The number of illegal immigrants is startling—always assuming you retain the capacity to be startled. Do Harvard students know those numbers? Does Ms. Gay?

It’s not an irrelevant question. According to Ms. Gay’s CV, she is very concerned with race. Question: What group of people is likely to be hurt severely, and perhaps most, by millions of illegal immigrants flooding into the United States and soon to be crowding public schools?

A good answer might be those American citizens who are most in need of good public schools. Those Americans tend to be blacks. Now, per the 1982 Supreme Court’s ruling in Plyler vs. Doe, black citizens will have to compete for the attention of school personnel with the millions of illegals who are—until that case is reversed—as entitled to public school services as citizens are.

And what group is most hurt by the Democrat party’s obsession with eliminating charter schools? Blacks, of course. Has Ms. Gay ever even visited a charter school?

Just because a person is black doesn’t mean that she is obliged to care about public policy or about making better public policy for blacks. But if studying public policy as it relates to blacks is what you do—as it is what Ms. Gay does—you probably ought to be on record talking about major policies that hurt blacks, two of which are immigration and making it difficult or impossible for black children to go to good schools.

In her paper, “Knowledge Matters,” she writes: “Once you separate the relationship of policy views to partisan attitudes among the politically informed from the same relationships among the uninformed, we begin to see the extent to which the strength of [blacks’ commitment to the Democrat party] is sustained not only by the bond of race, but also by low knowledge.” If you don’t think that’s a really startling admission from an überpartisan Democrat, read it again.

Yes, knowledge matters—which is why it’s important for Democrats to keep blacks ignorant, and to make it easy for the most ignorant to vote. During the 2012 presidential campaign Joe Biden told blacks, “They’re gonna put y’all back in chains.” And attacking voter ID laws, Biden said, “The 21st-century Jim Crow assault is real. It’s unrelenting.” And in April 2021, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (RACE BAITER–NY) joined in with, “Some of these voter suppression laws in Georgia and other Republican states smack of Jim Crow rearing its ugly head once again.”

Okay: Knowledge matters. But does it matter to Ms. Gay? In her interview with The Harvard Gazette, she complained that Americans now live in separate “‘factual’ universes.”

And just what universe does Ms. Gay live in? Does she know about Ray Epps, possibly an FBI plant who urged people to go into the Capitol on January 6, but who remains unindicted? Does she know about the invasion of illegals at the U.S. southern border? Does she know how much better charter schools are than public schools? And does she know about the Hunter Biden laptop and the scandals it contains? And if she did (or does) know about all those matters, would it change her position on the major issues of our time? The answer, obviously, is no.

Ms. Gay is no Clarence Thomas, but even so, and even though she went to Exeter, Stanford, and Harvard, she could—in addition to being a boring “scholar” writing third-rate sociobabble—be an advocate for major policies that would actually help blacks, especially those blacks who will not be admitted to Harvard.

But if she were, she wouldn’t have been selected to be the new president of Harvard.