Fresh from what he calls a coordinated campaign to oust Harvard’s first Black president, Christopher Rufo came to the University of Colorado Boulder to spread his message that America is being destroyed by diversity hires like Claudine Gay.

Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, would have been wise to pick another institution for his lecture on how American universities and colleges can, as he wrote for the New York Times, “restore their reputation as stewards of scholarship, rather than political partisans.”

The parallels between Claudine Gay’s short tenure at Harvard and CU President Mark Kennedy’s brief stint at CU are too numerous to overlook. Gay is a Black woman hired to run America’s most prestigious Ivy League school despite shortcomings in her resume and a lack of vetting of her academic writing. Pressure for her to resign mounted after in testimony before Congress she said it was context-dependent whether a student would face discipline for gross antisemitism.

Kennedy was hired in 2019 by a Republican board looking for a conservative who checked all the right boxes. Kennedy was a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who led the University of North Dakota for three years before coming to Colorado. He left after little more than a year, partly because of faculty opposition that started during his hire amid questions about exaggerated qualifications and culminated with a flippant and insensitive remark using “the trail of tears” colloquially.

Rufo coming to CU Boulder after his victory against liberal academia makes a mockery of his claims that conservatives only desire meritocracy in academia and are not opposed to diversity as long as it is earned.

Rufo was silent about Kennedy’s thin resume or his bumbling efforts to lead the state’s flagship university system. It’s OK for white men who have been handed a coveted position well above their qualification level to be incompetent, but Rufo was loud and aggressive when it was a Black woman struggling in her new role.

Coloradans who watched Kennedy’s hire unfold in a blatant effort to fill former President Bruce Benson’s shoes with another equally conservative individual can now laugh at Rufo coming to town to tell us about how the problem of hiring underqualified individuals to fill roles is uniquely a problem of the liberal institutions dead set on realizing equality.

Someone should ask Rufo what the difference is between a hire made of an underqualified individual in pursuit of breaking a glass ceiling that has existed at Harvard for 387 years and a hire made to perpetuate conservative control of a university system.

Colorado’s Republican Sen. Hank Brown was president of CU from 2005 to 2008. Benson, owner of an oil and gas company, took the role after him and served a remarkable 11 years before he retired in 2019. Benson worked hard to ensure there was a conservative presence on CU’s campuses, including creating the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization.

Rufo spoke at an event organized by the Benson Center on Wednesday night with a lecture titled “Laying Siege to the Institutions.” His speech centered on encouraging a concerted effort to reclaim American institutions from within from radical philosophies that he says have permeated our federal bureaucracies since the ’60s.

Since the ’60s, the University of Colorado has seen two women lead the institution. The presidents of years past stand as a testament to how difficult it is for people of color to work their way up the “meritocracy” of academia.

Rufo’s speech came at a perfect time to highlight the reality that the meritocracy has never been fully based on merit, and even conservatives in modern-day America hand out jobs based on qualifications and criteria that have little to do with ability. Rufo should consider that the scales of meritocracy have been tipped for so long in one direction that it is OK today for the scales to tip the other way.

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