If Claudine Gay’s transgressions were reasonably defensible, she would remain as Harvard’s president in good standing. She would continue to wield her authority to enforce the dictates of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (and to include you out).
The university bought her the best lawyers money could buy to help fashion her congressional testimony on campus anti-Semitism. The university went to the well again for her when the New York Post asked about her compulsive borrowing without attribution to beef up her thin scholarly record. As it is, however, as the facade crumbled, the university could not continue to defend her and she was required to stand down…though not without the obligatory disparagement of those who had the temerity to cast doubt on her standards.
Gay writes in her statement to the Harvard community this afternoon: “Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”
The racial animus shtick — to borrow Samuel Johnson’s expression, it’s the last refuge of a scoundrel. Even a fool can see that.
Kudos to the dogged team at the Washington Free Beacon that would not relax the bite of their teeth on the ankle of President Gay. Even the New York Times takes note of the Beacon’s work in its current round-up (update: more here).
Harvard is one of our sickest elite institutions. John Cochrane rightly homes in on the underlying issues that transcend Gay. If not the least of it, Gay herself is only symptomatic of the rot. Harvard’s Board of Corporation should go with Gay. Its failures are manifold and deeper than Gay’s. The Harvard Corporation’s operative principle (statement here) seems to be accountability for thee but not for me. However, it is good to see an end to Harvard’s insistence on saying “the thing which was not” in defense of Gay.
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