Yes, I know that Harvard University has one big graduation for all undergraduates and grad students (I went to it when I got my Ph.D. in 1978; Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address in a famous speech that called out the West for its “spiritual degeneration”). At that time, there was but one “identity” ceremony that included everyone. E pluribus unum! (One small exception: people who got their Ph.D.’s in different fields had separate degree-granting ceremonies.)
I’m not sure when this changed, but now Harvard has many different graduation ceremonies for different identity groups. And, of course, they are organized by the DEI office. Here’s this year’s panoply of “identity ceremonies” listed by the conservative National Review:
Harvard University’s Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging will once again host “affinity celebrations” at its 2024 commencement, according to documents obtained by National Review.
Harvard plans to hold a “Disability Celebration,” a “Global Indigenous Celebration,” an “Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi-American (APIDA) Celebration,” a “First Generation-Low Income Celebration,” a “Jewish Celebration,” a “Latinx Celebration,” a “Lavender Celebration” — which refers to LGBT students — a “Black Celebration,” a “Veterans Celebration,” and an “Arab Celebration.” The university will also hold a central commencement ceremony for students of all backgrounds.
. . . . The only publicly available mention of affinity celebrations on any Harvard website is published on the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ page. The note does not mention the specific events or groups recognized, simply describing them as “student-led, staff-supported events that recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of graduates from marginalized and underrepresented communities.”
“Desi-American” means people whose ancestry is Pacific Islander, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani or other Asians, identity groups that may not be so fond of each other! Is there any oppressed group missing here? The “First Generation-Low Income Celebration” puzzles me, as the two features don’t necessarily go together, and of course immediately upon leaving the ceremony the graduates have abandoned that identity.
There was one notable group missing at Harvard last year, and you can guess which one it was. That’s right—the Jews! But now, facing a federal Title VI civil rights investigation for a campus climate of antisemitism, and the fracas around the “Jewish genocide” hearing in Congress that in the end brought down Harvard and Penn’s Presidents, the school decided it had better do something to effect some climate change, though not in the way that the antisemitic Greta Thunberg would favor.
Frankly, I think these separate graduations are ludicrous and, in the end, purely performative. Do they move society forward? No. Are they divisive? Probably, in that they continue the obsessive academic focus on identity. “Identity politics” isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties. But these days, fostered and promoted by DEI offices, it has gone way too far, making someone’s identity, based on features they can’t control, the most important aspect of their persona. This is why Steve Pinker, who’s at Harvard and laid out in the Boston Globe a five-point plan for fixing Harvard that includes this recommendation:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.
An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.
Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
It is, as I said, Harvard’s DEI office that creates these identity-based graduations, reinforcing the malign atmosphere Steve describes in his first paragraph. Am I happy that Harvard, under the gun for antisemitism, now includes a Jewish ceremony? No, of course not: it’s disgusting—pandering to both Jews and DEI in general. It is, after all, DEI that, by fostering a climate that sees Jews as white oppressor colonialists, fosters antisemitism.
This conclusion isn’t rocket science. One Jewish student is quoted in the National Review about the issue:
For some, like Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos Kestenbaum — who spoke about the situation on the ground at his school during a House Education and Workforce Committee roundtable in late February — the addition of a separate celebration for Jewish students simply perpetuates the underlying dynamics driving antisemitism at Harvard.
“Rather than acknowledge the harmful ways in which Harvard DEI has contributed to campus antisemitism, the university further marginalizes individuals into groups of race, ethnicity, and religion,” Kestenbaum told National Review. “Harvard DEI is simply out of control.”
One way to stop this, as Steve suggests, is simply to disempower DEI. Perhaps colleges can keep on staff a few individuals to whom one can bring complaints of bigotry, but there should be none of the training, propaganda, and divisivenesss that DEI sows on campus. Even at the “free speech” University of Chicago, our climate is permeated by DEI, which sends me announcements of events on a nearly daily basis.
A house divided . . .
Indeed. I don’t know where TP is today, but I’m wondering where “tuning out” fits into his dialectical theory. Is this all by design? Sure feels like it. Get everyone fighting and competing with one another. Wear us down. Piss us off. THIS is why the panda (see today’s Hili Dialogue) is so mad!
“Global Indigenous Celebration”
“I’m indigenous somewhere else and wealthy enough to live in Cambridge and attend Harvard for the last four years but don’t call me a colonizer.”
We are all indigenous somewhere but if you are white and by definition “privileged” and by default a “colonizer” if counts for absolutely f all!
I don’t mean this of you personally, just an observation of the madness now because in many ways I mirror your situation but I refuse point blank to feel in any way whatsoever guilty.
Yet another example of Murphy’s Law: “If it can get worse, it will.”
Divided we fall. You have just earned and are being awarded a Harvard degree for christsake! What other recognition could be higher? In spite of any other identity that you or someone else might attach to you, you have accomplished something that very, very few of the so-called oppressors ever will. Be proud and consider your responsibility to use this accomplishment properly and well to contribute to and improve all of society.
The number of these different graduation celebrations will likely expand even further, since the motivation for them is to be seen as extra virtuous. Nothing more. There are points to be earned by creating a ceremony that recognizes the Special Place for graduates who identify as 3rd generation LatinX immigrants who still collect Pokémon cards.
But aren’t they in danger of having students who fit into more than one category? What’s a gay Indigenous low-income graduate to do?
You schedule the celebrations at different times, over the course of a week. That’s what happens now. If you start having more celebrations, maybe you do it over the course of two weeks.
As a white Brit, I guess I could go to the “Global Indigenous” one, right?
That depends… how much Roman / Norman / Viking ancestry do you have?
/jk
This is so stupid. The logical conclusion of all the DEI slicing and dicing is to have a unique ceremony for each graduate.
Harvard is so dysfunctional it cannot recognize antisemitism when it is right there in pride of place.
“The law of holes, or the first law of holes, is an adage which states: “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging”
The next steps are easy to predict. First, the DEI Office will issue a bulletin correcting the terminology: the “Jewish” affinity group celebration will be corrected to “Jewishx”. The Jewish Voice for Peace will demand a boycott of the Jewishx celebration because of its implied microaggression against the Palestinians. Next, some Jewish groups will request separate celebrations for Orthodox, Conservative, Reformed, and Reconstructionist. Finally, Lubavitch and Satmar parts of the Orthodox celebration will secede, while the Satmar
branch will itself subdivide into two antagonistic subunits.
Yes, Jon, again I agree with you.
It is the incentives: the more ID groups the greater the power and Money of the DEI industry to divide us.
I’ve not seen such a disastrous situation in my 53 years.
D.A.
NYC
once we were separated so we fought to live together and now we’re separated again…
/logic
Like an IQ test: All Jewish people should immediately turn down this extra pleading to include Jews in the whole DEI chain of command.
Even in the best hope Jews will be “Zionist colonialists” at sufferance, but how it’ll play out in reality is how it does now: Jews are white adjacent. Evil.
Anybody – of any culture – must reject the entirety of DEI and its progeny.
It is like the neighborhood bully/gangster (DEI) giving Jews a discount when it comes to extorting them b/c the heat is on.
DEI, set asides, racial preferences etc. must ALL go – for all our sakes.
Contrary to our host’s beliefs perhaps, one can not forgive, apologize to/from for sins committed by people who at best look like us against those who look like the other/opressed.
Guilt and repayment is —- and can never be —- intergenerational.
Nobody wins that game.
D.A., J.D.
NYC
ps Again, and I bring this up amidst my friends and readers at WEIT and elsewhere: this entire tragedy of our times only became so dangerous in the last 20 years when we started to **pay** witchfinders (“WAAACISM!”) to find “witches”.
The incentives are so disastrously aligned.
The Jewish ceremony will be interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters (or maybe security will be increased to prevent it).
The new definition of “Indigenous” (capitalized) does not include Europeans, except the Sami (NYT informs me that they are Indigenous people in Sweden and Finland).
“‘Identity politics’ isn’t inherently bad—after all, it was the impetus behind the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties.”
Respectfully disagree. Unlike identity politics, the civil rights movement didn’t assume that society is a zero-sum game. The oppressed group sought to become equal, not to become the new oppressors.
That’s an excellent point (about zero-sum game). An important distinction. Thanks for making it. Helps to clarify what the real problem is.
That statement had disquieted me, too. I think you make a good point…although Martin Luther King did say that because of the things that white people had done to the Negro in the past, white people were going to have to do things for the Negro in the future. And hiring quotas for black people in construction and factory work, which he advocated for, are nothing without identity politics with their zero-sum discrimination against blue-collar white people for the available jobs.
But that said, I think it’s fair that the intent of these temporary policies was to help black people become equal to whites, after which the policies would wither away as no longer needed and both groups would go forward together. I agree with you that the goal of King’s non-violence movement was not to make blacks the new oppressors, even if some of his contemporaries explicitly sought that. Whether King would have liked to have become an oppressor is hard to know. The important thing was he knew that would be impossible in the face of armed resistance from white society and counseled not trying.