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December 27, 2023

Carol Swain explains how DEI has kept conservatives out of academia

By Monica Showalter

A plagiarism scandal is engulfing and tainting Harvard University's president, Claudine Gay, and the entire woke institution that defends her.

But there's a certain silver lining that's coming of it: One of the academic scholars who got plagiarized, Carol Swain, has begun to draw some attention, and she's well worth paying attention to indeed.

I'll admit I'd never heard of her until the Gay scandal drew her name into the news. What a loss that was. Her knowledge of academia and her lion-like courage to challenge it is absolutely worthy of attention because she's a truth teller.

Here is her latest tweet:

 

 

That's a powerful expose in a nutshell explaining why academia has gotten so left-wing.

They already were left-wing when I was a student in college, decades ago, at the Jesuit-run Univesity of San Francisco, but there were pockets of ideological diversity at the time. By the time I got out, they slowly and surely being shut down by the left.

By the time I got to Columbia in the 1990s, it was all left-wing, but there still was tolerance and respect for divergent views. I remember we had a whole class lecture featuring an essay by Stephanie Guttmann of National Review on the slow shutout of conservative ideas.

Today, academia is a disaster area -- solidly woke, censorship-minded, cancel-culture-minded, triggered, micro-aggressed, safe-spaced, and completely intolerant of dissent. And sure enough, in that academic monoculture, it's also corrupted with plagiarism, which shouldn't surprise anyone. In any political system of any kind where there are no checks and balances, stealing happens. It's Claudine Gay's world and it's the scandal-plagued Harvard world of now that she helped make.

Swain points out that the villain is diversity, equity, and inclusion -- which is what is shutting conservative academics, and the very people who could provide checks and balances in academia -- out. 

She explains that every university committee requires these statements of applicants, and they are what are used to keep conservatives out. DEI, in other words, is the absolute truth, like water is wet, so someone who doesn't hew to its premises is considered crazy or not a good fit for the comfy one-party faculty lounges financed by taxpayers of all political stripes. The DEI crowd cannot distinguish between political takes and objective truth.

She also tweeted about what she told one of these DEI committees, which is a masterpiece of brevity and clear thinking.

 

 

Naturally, she didn't get the job. Soviet-style mediocrities know a threat to their blotting-paper world when they see one.

But she did show why and how this very negative development is happening. 

Nor is she afraid to name names of the most flamin' hot hypocrites out there:

 

 

Swain has obviously been hidden away for too long based on the stark truth of her writing and thinking. She ought to be running Harvard and in a fair world, she would have been. She's a perfect example of how black conservatives are treated even more harshly by the wokester left than white conservatives. 

But in this scandal, she's now visible and she's got a platform. Thank heavens she is using it, because we are all richer to have read the startling clarity of her thought.

Image: Twitter screen shot

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