The most interesting story about Claudine Gay is not who she is but how she was chosen, purportedly over 600 applicants. Given how secret the processes behind such selections have been, my suspicions are that a book has already been commissioned and that, once it appears, reviewers will demand a book that goes deeper into the story. And once that second book appears, some reviewers who know what was omitted will demand yet a third book that will reveal yet more secrets about the operations of university overseers at the highest levels. Knowing little about this procedure, some of us would learn from each one.
Otherwise, some writer might like to explain how the child of Haitian immigrants was chosen to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, perhaps the single most prestigious private prep school in America; and then Stanford University, by common consent the most distinguished university on America’s West Coast. And then Harvard Graduate School, likewise the most distinguished for a humanities doctorate. After teaching at Stanford, she was invited to return to her alma mater, where she soon became a dean and was awarded a name chair in the department of Government. Never below a top drawer did she move. So unusual was this trajectory that her story is probably worth of book of its own, whose subject is what has been recently possible for a bright black child in America, no matter how modest her beginnings.
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