One of the downsides of denouncing my alma mater is that I only hear about its latest unethical conduct when the story imposes itself on my consciousness or when the alumni magazine arrives, usually containing news that it a month old or more. I was going to write about the last two, post-Claudine Gay presidency issues, which were fascinating as exercises in denial, spin, and self-delusion: the framing of Harvard’s most recent debacle was essentially that “something happened” to Old Ivy, you know, like an earthquake or a plague of frogs. These are supposed to be smart people. Instead, America is auditing a Harvard course on just how stupid bias can make us. Well, that’s a lot more useful than a lot of Harvard courses now.

But even I didn’t see this coming: I didn’t think Harvard could be this stupid. I really didn’t; when I saw this headline in the Washington Free Beacon, my first thought was that I had hit the Babylon Bee on an unfunny day. No, not only was it true, the story was two weeks old.

As the Harvard Crimson had announced on April 16, Vivian Hunt (seen here in a student production of “The Handmaiden’s Tale” or something—I don’t know what the hell she’s wearing or why, but it’s weird)…

… is the newly appointed head of the Harvard Board of Overseers. Hunt is a Harvard College alum, female, black, a likely affirmative action success, and a vocal DEI activist, even more of one, arguably, than disgraced ex-prez Claudine Gay.

Hunt is nearly “patient zero” for the DEI plague. In 2015 she co-authored the McKinsey consulting firm’s influential and dishonest paper, “Why diversity matters,”based on data that has recently been shown to be junk as many (like me) long suspected. She has vigorously argued that meritocracy “isn’t good enough” and urged the private sector to hire based on color and gender rather than that old-fashioned, busted, racist, “talent, ability, and demonstrated success” formula.

Now this open-minded, objective analyst will sit on Harvard’s presidential search committee along with the 12 members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s top governing body. The Board of Overseers she now leads can veto a selection of president by a majority vote.

This is supposed to be the premier institution of higher learning in the U.S., yet its resident geniuses have yet to grasp the Law of Holes. I touched on one of them just two days ago, but the full list is…

The First Law of Holes: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
The Second Law of Holes: When you stop digging, you are still in a hole.
The Third Law of Holes: When you find yourself in a hole, climb out of it.
The Fourth Law of Holes: After you have climbed out of the hole, don’t fall or jump back in or dig yourself a new hole.

Now how hard is that? A 10-year-old should be able to figure those life competence rules out, but not Harvard. The school is experiencing plummeting donations and a major precipitous drop in applications as well as a vanishing reputation, all substantially because of more than a decade of unethical decisions and incompetent management culminating in the appointment of a president whose only scholarly credentials were in the diversity field, and she had had cheated to achieve them. As a leader, Claudine Gay had her fingerprints on some of Harvard’s most indefensible woke fiascos during he tenure as a dean. But DEI dictated her ascension (meritocracy “isn’t good enough,” after all), and the result was a multi-lateral catastrophe. And it is a continuing catastrophe, as the same twisted philosophy that led to Gay’s mercifully brief regime is also the reason pro-terrorism and anti-Semitic students are currently occupying Harvard Yard and chanting various versions of “Kill the Jews!” Diversity!

What are the odds, realistically speaking, that a presidential search at Harvard with Vivian Hunt prominently involved will not end up selecting a black female whose primary credentials are her color and gender? (She’ll probably be gay, too: Claudine was named “Gay,” so that was apparently sufficient in her case.) A thousand to one? A million to one? A gazillion to one?

Back into the hole!