ROGER KIMBALL: Gay Science: On DEI’s dangerous lies.

Curiously, Gay herself touched on the deeper significance of her defenestration in the headline of a bitter, self-justificatory aria she published in The New York Times: “What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me.” Forget the shaky grammar. Gay is right that Harvard’s travails far transcend her fate as president.

She is completely wrong, however, in her explanation of why she was forced to resign. It had nothing to do with “racial animus,” as she said in her letter of resignation. Nor is it part of “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.” That faith has unraveled, all right, but not because of “demagogues” attempting to “weaponize” her presidency. Gay says that such efforts begin “with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda.” At stake here, however, were not “education and expertise,” but a failure, a hollowing out, of both, precisely, and ironically, by their subordination to the partisan demands of propaganda.

Again Gay is right that “trusted institutions of all types—from public health agencies to news organizations” have seen their “legitimacy” and “their leaders’ credibility” challenged. But these institutions are not victims of “coordinated attempts” by nefarious “extreme voices.” On the contrary, the crisis of legitimacy is a self-inflicted wound, the natural by-product of the institutional embrace of the ideology of dei, for which values like truth, accuracy, and competence must be systematically subjugated to politics.

Bill Ackman seemed stunned by the real agenda of dei. It is much worse than he thinks. Claudine Gay, as everyone knows though not everyone will admit, is a dei personage. That is, she was hired, groomed, and promoted by Harvard not because of her scholarship, which would hardly qualify for tenure at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople. It wasn’t for her fund-raising prowess or her educational vision that she was made president of the most prestigious university in the galaxy. It was because she was a black female whose parents were Haitian immigrants. True, her uncle owns the biggest concrete company on that unfortunate island and she went to school at Exeter. But the fact that Gay grew up in a bubble of wealth and privilege is but a small liability. She may have benefited from the free market. But she did not let that impinge upon her support for the entire smorgasbord of anti-capitalist, woke attitudes about race, gender, race, climate change, race, identity politics, and . . . race.

That’s what they have instead of competence.