Gutfeld: DEI is destroying the very college campuses that created it
'Gutfeld!' panelists react to reports accusing Harvard chief diversity and inclusion officer Sherri Ann Charleston of 40 instances of plagiarism.
Happy Wednesday everybody. So don't look now, but the #MeToo movement is back, but this time, what's being attacked isn't women, it's academic integrity and once again, we look to Harvard, the DeVry of the East. They don't know DeVry is. Trust me, that joke worked in the meeting. Sherri Ann Charleston, the chief diversity officer at the university, has just been accused of roughly 40 instances of plagiarism in her PhD dissertation and in the single academic paper she published in her career. There would be more accusations of plagiarism, but she was too lazy to write more than one fake paper. Which begs the question, who was the last person to have an original idea at Harvard? John Adams, Al Gore, Barack Obama? You know, Barack must be sweating right now. Not for plagiarism. He just ate a really spicy dog.
Now, Charleston's husband is also a professor and according to the reports, her one publication even ripped off the research that he did back in 2012. Wait, a woman bringing up something her husband did years ago. That's not plagiarism, that's marriage.
ANNOUNCER: A sexist would say!
TYRUS: Or any married man.
Yeah, but coming on the heels of Harvard President Claudine Gay being forced to resign over the same thing, Charleston's scandal is looking like Harvard's own academic version of the #MeToo movement. Suddenly, a suppressed truth is being dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Call it a reckoning, and it's wrecking academia. But what do you expect? This is a school that hired such luminaries as Bill de Blasio, Lori Lightfoot, and yes, even Brian Stelter. I mean, what could Brian be teaching? How to roll naked in a pile of flour to find a lost remote? There's an image. So why is this important? Well, first, take one world class institution, add DEI, and you get a sleepaway camp for 7,000 graduates whose only expertise is tearing down statues and replacing them with men's tampon vending machines. You know, they've taken a good name and ruined it. Like Madonna.
TYRUS: I thought you were going to say it's a good face, but that works too.
The academia has been trending hyper-progressive for decades while pushing out all other competing ideas. You get more diverse opinions from a Panini press, but it was the 2020 George Floyd incident that really took DEI from an idea to an ideology, because any suggestion to pump the woke brakes made you a racist killer. And so, near the end of 2020's Summer of Love and looting, Harvard wasted no time in hiring Charleston to be its first chief diversity enforcer, who then served on the committee that picked Claudia Gay to take over as the school's new president. Perhaps as plagiarists, they knew they could copy off each other.
CRITICS CHEER RESIGNATION OF 'ANTISEMITIC PLAGIARIST' HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY: 'BYE FELICIA'
Harvard banners hang outside Memorial Church on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday, Sept. 4, 2009. (Photo by Michael Fein/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
According to Harvard's own school paper, the new president was chosen after the shortest search in 70 years. It's almost as if they already knew what to hire and just worked backwards. It's like when Fox decided they wanted the most unpopular man on Earth to host the 8 p.m. slot. I couldn't compete. And as you'd expect, when you don't vet a candidate's academic achievements, you get Claudine Gay, whose academic record turned out to be as spotty as Hunter's penis.
MICHELE TAFOYA: Oh, God.
Unnecessary, but hey, of course, Harvard panicked, even threatening to sue the New York Post for immense damages for reporting this story. How could this happen? They cried: Claudine gay was the perfect diversity hire, she couldn't have done anything wrong because she didn't do anything period. But when the investigator herself, Charleston, needs to be investigated, you see how corrupting DEI really is. It gives mediocre people authority to be bigots and the power to protect themselves from the laws that they push on others. And as progressives push DEI into all aspects of American life. It's no wonder we're losing faith in our institutions, which are crumbling faster than a city run by a Democrat mayor.
Now, this does not mean that minorities cannot be highly accomplished. Liz Warren is a senator, but if you narrow the field to a select identity, which is racist, by the way, you make it harder to find a competent person because everyone else is doing the same thing. They're all fishing from the same small pond. Pretty soon, all you have left are worms, frauds, and cars driven by a Kennedy.
Harvard made clear in the Friday summary of its review that Harvard Corporation would not be involved in handling further allegations of misconduct against Gay because she is no longer president. (Erin Clark/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
MICHELE TAFOYA: Oh, gosh. Oh, no.
TYRUS: Too soon.
And now it's destroying the very college campuses that created it, but only because they were caught. And not by the legacy media, but by conservative upstarts. So not only is DEI illogical and un-American, it's also insulting to minorities who do succeed based on merit, because the message to them is Whites can succeed on their own merit, but you can't. And so the real racists, they're on the left. They don't wear sheets over their heads anymore. Although, you know, some really should, but there's more and it's worse. Now a Harvard teaching hospital is being forced to correct dozens of research papers by four of its top researchers who are accused of falsifying data. So remind me not to have my pec reduction surgery in Boston. They're just in the way of everything. But it's really scary.
You know, I'm not that bent out of shape if a diversity hire runs a diversity program, but hospitals, do you want your surgeon to slide through for reasons that have nothing to do with skill? Ask any liberal after two beers who they'd want operating on their kid and DEI goes out the window faster than a window on a 737. Fact is, if this country is going to have a future in an increasingly competitive and dangerous world, it needs to recover the meritocracy that built the place to begin with. And that includes talented minorities and they exist even if the left wants you to think they don't.
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