The founding coauthor of those hilariously p-hacked but vastly celebrated “studies” by McKinsey Consulting of how adding more blacks and women to your board of directors and C-suite boosts your profits because diversity is our strength is, unsurprisingly, a black woman, Dame Vivian Hunt.
With so many black women at Harvard, such as former president Claudine Gay, being embarrassed by revelations of all the corner-cutting in their research, Harvard has responded by appointing Hunt, another black woman shoddy researcher, president of its Board of Overseers. This sets her up to likely be on the yet-to-be named committee that will nominate a new full-time president of Harvard.
Harvard University is controlled by two bodies, the more consultative Board of Overseers and the more powerful President and Fellows of Harvard College, also known as the Harvard Corporation. While the latter’s title refers to Harvard College, it is the main controller over the entire university (e.g., also the law school).
I decided to quickly look at the demographics of the current 13 members of the Harvard Corporation:
| Name | DEI Points | Occupation |
| Alan Garber | Jewish | interim President of Harvard University |
| Timothy R. Barakett, Treasurer | former CEO of Atticus Capital | |
| Kenneth Chenault | Black | former CEO of American Express |
| Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar | Mexican immigrant |
President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former Justice of the Supreme Court of California |
| Paul Finnegan | co-CEO of Madison Dearborn Partners | |
| Carolyn Martin | Lesbian woman | President Emerita of Amherst College |
| Karen Mills | Jewish woman | former Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration |
| Diana L. Nelson | Woman | chair of Carlson Holdings |
| Penny Pritzker, Senior Fellow | Jewish woman, head of Corporation | former United States Secretary of Commerce |
| Tracy P. Palandjian | Asian woman | co-founder and CEO of Social Finance |
| Shirley M. Tilghman | Woman, single mother | former president of Princeton University |
| Ted Wells | Black | partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison |
| Kenneth C. Frazier | Black | former CEO of Merck & Co. |
Three of the 13 are black. During Gay’s short reign, 4 of the 13 were black.
The woman with an Armenian-sounding name appears to be East Asian. There’s a Mexican immigrant.
Six of the 13 are women. I see one obvious lesbian judging from the titles of her books, but I didn’t pry too closely into the others. Most of the women are married to men and have children.
I count three Jews, with one the interim president of Harvard and another, Penny Pritzker, the head of the Fellows.
This article in a Jewish publication says that Barakett, Finnegan, and Palandjian are not Jewish. Barakett was a professional hockey player from Montreal. Finnegan is from Massachusetts.
Nelson is Scandinavian and Tilghman’s maiden name growing up in Toronto was Caldwell. The lesbian, Biddy Martin, sounds very Southern.
Six made political donations to Democrats in 2022, while Finnegan also chipped in a little to Republicans.
Still, I suspect that some big Jewish donors like Bill Ackman tended to feel that having blacks outnumber Jews 4 to 3 on the Corporation during Gay’s tenure was a little much.
