Peak DEI Is Here

And it isn't pretty...

The shape of things to come: Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, in her pose as the dauntless foe of police brutality in 2015

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For Harvard, the hits just keep on coming.

It was a great moment in comedy when Claudine Gay, president of America’s most prestigious university, was outed as a fraud, a plagiarist and an enabler of antisemitism. The story was so bad that all the efforts of progressivism on multiple fronts did not suffice to pluck her carcass from the clutches of Cosmic Justice. Out she went, and DEI be damned.

But wait, there’s more—and it’s even better! Sherri Ann Charleston, Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, has been hit with forty charges of plagiarism. Among other transgressions, Charleston is said to have “quoted or paraphrased” the writings of a dozen scholars without bothering to credit them in her 2009 doctoral dissertation for the University of Michigan. She is also alleged to have taken credit for a study written by her own husband.

Perhaps some additional letters should be added to the acronym: say, DEIIT for diversity, equity, inclusion and intellectual theft.

I find myself wondering how these women managed to persuade themselves that they could get away with such thievery—and all I can assume is that they believed their status as DEI hires rendered them bulletproof. Indeed, it seems to me that all sorts of misconduct can be traced back to that sense of invulnerability. What possessed Fani Willis, Georgia’s would-be Trump slayer, to suppose that she could use her prosecution of the former president to funnel money to her married paramour? Almost certainly, it was a belief that no one would call her out, or that if someone did, she could dodge the bullet by posing as a victim of right-wing white racists intent on destroying a woman of color. And indeed, Willis has slapped down the race card.

Then there’s Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri and AOC Squad member. She’s under investigation by the Department of Justice for misuse of campaign funds that supposedly were spent to provide her with personal security—controversial figure that she is. Turns out that around $60,000 went to her husband. Not a good look—and very possibly illegal.

Yes, I know, the four individuals mentioned above are all women of color. But that’s not my fault! I found it impossible to overlook the coincidence of all these stories, landing one after another over a period of weeks. Something’s going on that shines a revealing—and unflattering—light on the concept of DEI. Indeed, it seems that the accumulated absurdities of DEI have reached some sort of apogee.

Take Claudine Gay. She was praised in fulsome terms when she was chosen as Harvard’s president: distinguished scholar, talented administrator, visionary leader! But she was none of those things, and even if she had been, such admirable qualities would have been incidental. Gay was selected for two reasons only: race and gender. And though everybody, Gay included, knew this, a conspiracy of silence prevailed. To candidly admit that she’d been installed as Harvard’s president in accordance with DEI dogma would be to concede that qualifications and merit are beside the point, and that DEI itself is a crude racial formulation: postmodern progressivism’s update of Jim Crow.

Over time, therefore, DEI was bound to foster a culture of mediocrity, buttressed by a sense of entitlement, armored by cancel culture. To notice that some beneficiary of this racial/gender spoils system is a dud has thus become a thought crime.

Now it’s certainly true that there are numerous straight white males who are duds—as an examination of the United States Senate reveals. But they lack the protection of DEI orthodoxy. A white male CEO who fails at his job can be unceremoniously sacked and no one will complain. But if the failed CEO should happen to be a female of color, her defenestration, if it happens at all, is made the occasion for loud condemnations of racism, sexism, blah, blah, blah.

We should have seen this coming. Mostly forgotten today—but well worth pondering—is an early and egregious example of DEI underperformance. In Baltimore in early 2015, a black man named Freddie Gray died after being arrested by police for possession of a knife. His death became a progressive cause célèbre, with charges of racist police brutality broadcast far and wide. In short order, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney, a young black woman named Marilyn Mosby, filed charges against the six police officers involved. The driver of the police van in which Gray was transported was charged with second-degree depraved-heart murder; the others were hit with charges ranging from manslaughter to illegal arrest. Mosby, of course, was instantly canonized as a heroine of progressivism in the battle against racist police brutality. No word of praise was spared in the description of her overall wonderfulness.

Here and there, however, doubts were expressed as to the propriety of the charges. These were waved away with the assurance that such a young, talented, energetic and virtuous prosecutor must know what she was doing.

Alas, no.

Things got off to a rocky start for Mosby when the first trial in the case resulted in a hung jury—this due to the fact that the prosecution utterly failed to make its case. Various legal commentators opined that it was a scandal that the defendant was not acquitted outright, given the near-complete lack of evidence against him. Nevertheless, Mosby vowed to retry the case.

But it was not to be. The next two officers to be tried wisely opted for a bench trial (with the judge, not a jury, as finder of fact) and both were acquitted. The judge’s written verdicts were scathing in their criticism of the prosecution’s case. It was in fact clear that Mosby had falsely charged the defendants, no doubt confident that Baltimore juries, inflamed by anti-police anger, would convict the officers even if the facts didn’t support conviction. Ultimately her whole case collapsed, all pending charges being dismissed. In an op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun, a former Baltimore City State’s Attorney characterized her behavior as “either incompetence or an unethical recklessness.”

Despite this fiasco, Mosby remained in office until 2023, when she lost her reelection bid. (This, incidentally, was in sharp contrast to the treatment meted out to the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case, a white male, who was chased out of office and disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct.)  No doubt Mosby’s loss had something to do with the fact that in 2022, she was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of perjury and two counts of making false statements on loan applications. Late last year, she was convicted of the two perjury charges; the other two charges are pending.

Marilyn Mosby’s dumb and malicious handling of the Freddie Gray case was a harbinger of DEI follies to come. And now, here we are…