Christopher Rufo: Claudine Gay Built a DEI Empire at Harvard

Harvard’s embattled president, Claudine Gay, has quietly built a “diversity” empire over the course of her career, which has “influenced every facet of university life,” says conservative activist and CRT expert Christopher Rufo.

Gay oversaw the Harvard’s racially discriminatory admissions program — which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional — as dean of the largest faculty on the Ivy League university’s campus between 2018 and the summer of 2023, Rufo said in an article for City Journal.

After the Supreme Court ruled Harvard’s admissions program as racially discriminatory against Asian and white applicants, Gay, then a dean at the university, said it was a “hard day,” and defended the school’s unconstitutional policies.

While insisting that she would comply with the ruling, Gay also promised to remain “steadfast” in her commitment to advancing “diversity,” suggesting that university leadership would find a way to evade the law.

In one example, Gay commissioned a Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage after the death of George Floyd in 2020. This task force later released a series of recommendations for engaging in what it referred to as the “historical reckoning with racial injustice.”

Among its recommendations reportedly included a mandate to change “spaces whose visual culture is dominated by homogenous portraiture of white men.” It also said administrators should “refresh” the walls of Annenberg Hall, which “prominently display a series of 23 portraits, none of [which] depict women, and all but three of [which] depict white men.”

The task force never explained who the white men were or why they were on the walls of Annenberg Hall in the first place. The only reasons for the removal of these paintings appeared to be due to their skin color and sex.

Last year, Gay launched an initiative within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for “de-naming” any “space, program, or other entity” deemed racist by the faculty and administration.

Moreover, deeming such entities racist would be “based on the perception that a namesake’s actions or beliefs were ‘abhorrent’ in the context of current values,” meaning that Harvard would use presentism in order to pass judgment on individuals who lived hundreds of years ago.

“Since then, the university has grappled with denaming multiple buildings, including Winthrop House, named after John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his great grandson, also John Winthrop, a Harvard professor and president,” Rufo pointed out.

In another example, Gay, as president of Harvard, is leading a “sprawling DEI bureaucracy,” otherwise known as Diversity, equity, and inclusion, which “seeks to influence how students speak, think, and behave in relation to race,” Rufo says.

The CRT expert noted that Harvard has deleted nearly all DEI materials from its website following President Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony, in which she declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus.

Recovered DEI documents through an Internet archive show that Harvard’s diversity administrators urge students to internalize the Critical Race Theory narrative, which is that America is systemically racist, riddled with “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” and the “weaponization of whiteness.”

Students have also been encouraged to “unpack” their so-called “white” and “male” privileges, and to consider their “white fragility,” which the DEI documents say is derived from “the privilege that accrues to white people living in a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.”

As Breitbart News reported, Gay has been facing nationwide scrutiny since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel due to her failure to properly respond to the matter. Harvard leadership botched its statement after more than 30 of its student groups signed a pro-terror later blaming Israel for the terrorist attack against itself.

Gay later delivered a disastrous testimony during a congressional hearing regarding antisemitism alongside the presidents of University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Now, the Harvard president’s own Ph.D. dissertation is being called into question over allegations of plagiarism.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.