So, Harvard President Claudine Gay is now former Harvard President Claudine Gay. She “resigned” this past week as I told you she would.
She’s staying there as a professor and she’s keeping her $900-thousand a year salary.
I don’t understand how Harvard allowed her to skate on her blatant plagiarism of other scholars in her field, but okay, good for her. It’s a helluva lot more than other people who’ve been steamrolled by DEI, cancelled by #MeToo or slammed with false accusations of racism, have walked away with.
The Harvard Board of Governors let her down easy. They said they were sad to accept her resignation, acknowledging she made missteps, during her short tenure as president of the once prestigious university.
Gay, in her resignation letter and in her subsequent essay in the New York Times, also said she made mistakes. She says she should have made her initial response to the 10/7 massacres more forceful. She says she should have said Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state.
About last month’s botched congressional hearing with her colleagues from MIT and UPenn, Gay says she fell into a well-laid trap. She says she neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that [she] would use every tool at [her] disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.
Writing about the examples of plagiarism that were uncovered, she called them citation errors and that some material duplicated other scholars’ language without proper attribution. She blamed obsessive scrutiny of [her] peer-reviewed writings.
And here’s where former Harvard President Claudine Gay laid down her race card. In her letter of resignation she wrote, Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor…and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.
There you have it.
- Yes, she made mistakes, but who doesn’t? Anyway, she said she was sorry.
- She was the victim of a well-laid trap by a crafty Republican congresswoman, herself a Harvard graduate. Damn that Ivy League education!
- She really didn’t plagiarize, and it wouldn’t have come to light anyway if it wasn’t for right-wing wackos running AI checks on her work.
I guess denial ain’t only the name of a river.
Gay groans that she is a victim of being a Black woman in a position of prominence, hounded by the rightists who want to rob American universities of their academic freedoms.
Her echo chamber-mates in the woke world are right there with her.
Congressman Jamaal Bowman:
- This isn’t about plagiarism or antisemitism. This is about racism and intimidation…The only winners are fascists who bullied a brilliant & historic Black woman into resignation.
Charles M. Blow, New York Times columnist:
- It was and is a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress.
Founder of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones:
- Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.
Funny, or maybe not so funny, the right-wing guy who did the deep dive into Gay’s plagiarism, agrees that Gay’s resignation is part of a bigger battle, although of a very different nature.
Christopher Rufo, writing in the Wall Street Journal said:
- The successful campaign to topple Harvard’s president is about much more than Claudine Gay. It is about the great conflict between truth and ideology, colorblindness and discrimination, good governance and failed leadership.
Claudine Gay’s self-defenestration is not the victory over DEI, the rightists are portraying it as. Neither is it the death knell for Black women in positions of leadership and power.
Here’s what it is. Claudine Gay would still be president of Harvard if she hadn’t revealed her unconscious bias when answering Representative Elise Stefanik’s simple question. Is calling for the genocide of Jews a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct on bullying and harassment?
Instead of saying hell yeah or you bet your bippy it does, Claudine Gay said, it depended on context. She was asked twice and she blew it both times.
Gay, Liz Magill of UPenn and Sally Kornbluth of MIT also blew it. Magill also got canned, Kornbluth is still hanging on.
So yes, when Claudine Gay displayed enormous attitude, shall I say chutzpah, by flipping off the worries and fears of her Jewish students, the activists that hate what elite American universities have become in the past decade or so, smelled blood.
They were unwittingly aided by the obtuseness of the Harvard Corporation that embarrassed itself by threatening the New York Post over evidence of Gay’s plagiarism and by bending Harvard’s standards to cover up it’s own malfeasance while vetting her.
The truth is, there’s a lot of rot at Harvard and Gay can’t be blamed for all of it. She assumed the presidency only in July. But while she and her supporters call racism on her detractors, and her detractors call DEI-ism on her, they all should be focusing on why such a smart person did such a dumb thing. What caused her to be so insensitive to the words that trigger so much fear in the hearts of her Jewish students? Why was she so cavalier about hate even after she says she’s been called the N-word more times that [she] cares to count?
It’s because in her world, in Harvard’s world, in the world of wokeism, Jews are seen as part of the white oppressor clique and not part of the cadre of multi-cultural, oppressed victims. It’s because Jew hatred must be put into context. It’s because a victim of racism couldn’t possibly be a racist herself.
The demise of Claudine Gay is due to all that, as simple as all that.
If only she had answered Elise Stefanik’s question the “right” way she’d still be President of Harvard. But she couldn’t. Jews simply and sadly weren’t on her DEI list.
Claudine Gay the scholar, should pay heed to William Shakespeare’s famous verse from Julius Caesar. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Neither fate nor the color of her skin pushed Claudine Gay out of the Harvard president’s office. She pushed herself.