Even at Harvard ... or ESPECIALLY at Harvard

Yesterday, I did a piece which included a lengthy reference to the Harvard placemat scandal, wherein its "Office of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion" had to retract placemats it had created to tell students how to answer questions.  The answers, of course, were the oh, so politically correct ones, meaning that the University believed that its students were incapable either of answering the questions lucidly without help, or just incapable of giving the answer Harvard wanted them to.

The university, of course, had to apologize and withdraw the placemats, but not before I got a very widely-read post written about it.  So, thanks.

But then I got a bug up my you-know-what about what an "Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion" actually did, and whether the old-money donors to the university hanging out at various Harvard Clubs were all that happy about what it might be, you know, doing.  There's no better way than to look at its Twitter account, right?

So that's what I did.  And boy, is that interesting.  Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health has an Office of Diversity and Inclusion with a Twitter account.  Yes, they do.  I sincerely hope that, even named as that, it is indeed the same office that was named in the news story; I would be aghast if there were multiple offices at Harvard paying people to do whatever such offices do.  But they had a Twitter account, so for the purposes of this piece -- good enough.

That account has posted 15 tweets since Sunday, the 20th.  Fifteen is a lot of tweets for an office that one would think would be more focused on dealing with student issues, rather than broadcasting them ... at least until you read what those tweets actually are.  So let's take a look.

First, here is a list of the hashtags from just those 15 tweets and one from a few days earlier:
#Islamaophobia
#NoThisIsn'tTheOnion
#VAWA
#genderINequality
#EndYouthHomelessness
#dropthecharges
#lgbt
#LegalDiscrimination
#Harvard
#TitleIX
#immigration
#norway
#genderviolence
#leadingtheway
#translivesmatter
#2015inReview
#whiteprivilege

Many of the tweets referenced online articles.  These included one asserting that 23 "transwomen" [sic] were killed in the USA; one on Norway teaching Muslim immigrants why it is OK for men and women to hug and kiss in public; one pointing to a finding that a woman in jail had killed herself; one how colleges are getting waivers from the Title IX regulations; one about punishment for a disruptive teenager in a high school in another state on a different coast; one citing that the USA is one of only three countries not mandating paid maternity leave; one about "toxic masculinity"; one about the Virginia school system closed because a teacher gave a "calligraphy lesson in Arabic" (making the students write a Muslim declaration); and one about fixing the prison system and the immigration system.

I am really trying to understand how some of these articles -- and some of the hashtags, particularly the #whiteprivilege one -- are associated with the mission of the university, and even associated with the office itself.  Title IX?  I suppose.  Norway trying to teach unwilling Muslims to kiss in public?  Not so much.  But I suppose that is for the university and those who donate to its rather gargantuan endowment to decide.

What I don't get is what the rationale is that would have the school let any office, with people it pays salaries to, put out a tweet with a hashtag "#whiteprivilege."  That article link, by the way, was to a piece touching on affirmative action in a case before the Supreme Court.  White privilege is a term that is offensive on its surface -- offensive, for example, to descendants of immigrants who came from Ireland and Italy 100 years ago and hat to scrap for a living; people from eastern Europe, hated there and hated here when they arrived, who had to work hard to make lives.

It is seemingly not offensive to the privileged dweebs populating the Office of Equity and Whatever at Harvard, who apparently have plenty of time to search for and tweet out any link to a far leftist-slanted article they can find.  I suppose I would be happy with a job like that, except that I'd also occasionally have to deal with the over-privileged dweebs complaining about stuff, just like the ones at Oberlin complaining about their undercooked sushi.

I could handle that, though.  Think that Harvard would hire me to staff an Office of Conservative Value Promotion?

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
 Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.