If you want to see the progress of diversity, look no further than the ascendence of Dr. Claudine Gay, the first Black president and the 30th president of Harvard University.
As a BIPOC alumn, all I can say is what took so long -- 386 years? That’s apparently how long it takes for diversity to work it’s magic at what is considered, if not the top institution of higher learning, then certainly the oldest.
Surely, it’s one of the slowest in higher ed to finally get with the program.
Emil Guillermo
But history has a way of catching up and exposing sins of the past, and then there is no good excuse. Not for buildings named after racists and colonizers, nor for curricula that covers up truth. You get to a point where it’s time to break with tradition, stop doing things the way things have always been done, and join the modern world.
When it was time to name a leader for now and the future, Harvard realized it’s not 1636 anymore.
When I was an undergrad, Harvard had its scholars, lecturers, and teachers of various ethnicities. I was there when Afro American Studies was still in its infancy. Ewart Guinier, a Jamaican American educator, was the founding chairman of the department now known as the Department of African and African American Studies. It was the only department on campus where a brown Asian American Filipino like me felt really welcome. I took just one class, but I could see the divide. I could learn the white history in the traditional History department. I could get past the colonial truth and express myself in an AAS class.
Wouldn’t it have been nice to have a BIPOC university president back then?
