Harvard’s Real Scandal Was A Black Woman Leader — NEW EPISODE

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Technology

4.4 • 820 Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Happy New Year! We’d intended to air the first newscast of 2024, but instead we have to talk about what happened to Dr. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard. She resigned last week after an intense campaign to get her fired led by right wing activist Christopher Rufo. Yup, the same right wing activist who created the moral panic over Critical Race Theory. He’s been completely transparent, through public tweets and interviews in big outlets like Politico, that his goal in creating the campaign against her was a broader desire to destroy the concept of “DEI” (Diversity Equity & Inclusion).

And yet, legacy media outlets like the New York Times uncritically legitimized his bad-faith framing with multiple featured articles. People like tech podcaster Jason Calacanis have celebrated her resignation as evidence of a return to meritocracy, a ridiculous idea that only makes sense if one believes that prestigious leadership positions are just being handed out willy-nilly to unqualified Black women, which is obviously not true! Black women have to work twice as hard to get half as much, and even then one misstep is all it takes for bad faith allegations to take down a powerful Black woman in the eyes of a public that is all too willing to believe that DEI initiatives are the only way a Black woman could possibly achieve a leadership position.

We Sat Down With the Conservative Mastermind Behind Claudine Gay’s Ouster: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618

Why White Women Won DEI: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-white-women-won-dei-aparna-rae/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.
0:12.1	I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
0:17.9	Happy New Year.
0:19.9	So we were meant to air a new newscast, the first of 2024, but instead we have to talk about this clotting gay thing at Harvard.
0:28.6	So this is kind of an unplanned emergency episode.
0:32.1	We weren't even actually going to do it, but then Mike, you and I started talking and it was clear that, I'll just say that
0:37.8	it was clear I had a lot to say and I had a lot of opinions and I had a lot of big feelings.
0:42.1	And eventually you said, you know, if you feel like getting on the mic and yelling at me about it,
0:46.6	I'm here.
0:47.6	I'm here for you, Bridget.
0:48.8	Okay, so let take on it.
0:55.4	But I feel like I need to say a few things right off the top. First of all, some of these issues
0:59.7	that we're going to talk about are thinky, right? They deal with facts and what happened.
1:04.8	But some of them are feely. This issue is really personal for me. It felt personal and it was clear when I was putting
1:12.2	together in my research and my thoughts that I have a lot of big emotions about it. When gay resigned,
1:17.8	a bunch of the like black women's group chats that I'm in were all buzzing about what it means
1:23.2	and how we should all be feeling in this moment. So I say all of that to say this, which is that
1:27.3	it is
1:28.0	important to me that I am giving y'all very clear facts and also separating my feelings and my
1:33.9	opinions from those facts so that y'all can make sense of what's actually happening and also
1:38.2	come up with your own take on it. But this story was, I have to say, pretty complex for me.
1:43.6	It's not a terribly complex story,
	...

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