It’s hardly a shock that Claudine Gay finally walked the plank at Harvard.
In a head-spinning series of developments, she had been exposed as indifferent to antisemitism, an academic fraud and a symbol of everything wrong with American higher education.
Because there was no legitimate case for keeping her on the job, her departure was only a matter of time.
I predicted the end would come during the Christmas-New Year break, when the campus is quiet and most students and faculty are away.
Yet the Tuesday announcement that she is “resigning” is far from satisfactory and cannot be the final word.
Gay’s removal shifts the focus of the sordid affair to the small group of people who hired and protected her.
U. board must answer
The members of the secretive governing board threatened The Post and possibly others who dared question her background and qualifications.
That alone must force them out of the shadows.
The need to explain why they refused to make the decision to part ways with Gay sooner raises two major questions:
Why, in its vetting process, did the board not discover the numerous examples of her copying other people’s work without giving credit?
As even The New York Times reluctantly admitted, The Post and private bloggers found problems the board didn’t.
And why, when rampant plagiarism emerged, did the board continue to ignore or downplay her unprofessional work when some examples that surfaced violate the standards Harvard imposes on faculty and students?
The stakes are not run-of-the-mill academic back-scratching.
The drawn-out defiance of the inevitable ending for Gay did enormous damage to Harvard.
As I noted, there is no precedent for the reputation of a top college falling so far in such a short period of time.
And because we’re talking about Harvard, the damage doesn’t stop there.
The case illustrates the moral rot that has turned many of the nation’s most prestigious campuses into leftist indoctrination factories.
Put it this way: A prevailing ethos in elitist circles is that if a practice or a pattern is good enough for Harvard, it’s good enough for everyone else to copy.
And so they do.
One result is the poison of wokeness, including anti-Americanism and anti-white racism, infecting much of a generation.
The nonsense dished out by radical faculty substitutes far-left politics for academic rigor and makes a quasi-religion of trigger warnings, safe spaces and cancel culture.
The resulting worldview that divides all humanity into oppressors and oppressed, based largely on race and nationality, is a breeding ground for the antisemitism that exploded on campuses following Hamas’ savage attack on Israel.
With the Holocaust in living memory, the belief that it could happen again — and in America — was and is terrifying.
It is, then, more than a Harvard problem that Gay was unmasked as a walking, talking fraud who gamed the system of racial spoils and was unfairly rewarded with the most prestigious spot on the academic food chain.
She would almost certainly have had a long tenure as president, celebrated for being “first” even if her accomplishments were as thin and insignificant as her scholarship.
Her “truth” and “lived experience” trumped everything else.
Deflecting ’til the end
Predictably, in her resignation statement, she played the victim, offered no apologies and blamed her downfall on those who exposed her misconduct.
In a key passage showing her sense of entitlement remains intact, she wrote that “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.”
In another passage, she ignored the elephant in the room by insisting that her appointment let people from around the world see “in my presidency a vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging — their sense that Harvard welcomes people of talent and promise, from every background imaginable, to learn from and grow with one another.”
With such obnoxious self-flattery, she should get a job at the Obama Foundation.
After all, the former president reportedly lobbied the Harvard board to keep her as president.
Although Gay started only in July, she was not alone in inflated visions about what she represented.
From the start, she was held up as an example not only of her distinction but of Harvard’s commitment to diversity.
Less noticed until lately, her appointment came after what has been reported as the fastest search in the university’s history.
Unverified claims that white candidates were not seriously considered should be investigated.
Apart from her race and progressive politics, board members didn’t want to know too much about her, lest it spoil the shared sense of superiority that she and they were cut from the finest cloth.
Day of infamy in DC
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Most alarming, the world would be none the wiser about Gay’s history of plagiarism and the board’s thuggish threats if not for her cold-hearted evasions to congressional questions about the shocking Jew hatred that erupted on Harvard’s campus.
In her testimony, Gay, who had issued at least two mealy-mouthed statements that said nothing to offend terrorist sympathizers, was asked about the open calls for the elimination of Israel and harassment of Jewish students by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Harvard grad.
That was Dec. 5, and infuriated by the evasions and events the presidents defended, Stefanik foreshadowed Tuesday’s announcement by calling on Gay and the two other presidents to resign immediately during the hearing.
Her point was that calls for genocide of black, Latino or transgender students would not have been tolerated, but as Gay and others insisted, “context” mattered when antisemitism was involved.
All three presidents embraced that cowardly path, and later it was reported the same law firm counseled at least two of them. Somebody should demand a refund.
One of the three leaders, Liz Magill, of the University of Pennsylvania, was forced out within days by her governing board.
Now it’s “two down,” Stefanik said after Gay’s resignation, calling her an “antisemitic plagiarist.”
The third, Sally Kornbluth, remains in her job at MIT.
But a few firings, even of Ivy League presidents, must be only the start of a wholesale approach to fixing what ails American higher education.
Too many campuses and administrators have been taken captive by political activists who aim to turn America into a socialist nation and distort the Constitution and laws to serve their blighted visions.
Cowed by demonstrators and complicit faculty, presidents, provosts, deans and boards of directors have found it easier to submit rather than fight to uphold free speech rights and uncensored, open debate.
The good news is that, as the Harvard and Penn cases demonstrate, alumni, including large donors, have an impact when they speak up.
They need not sit quietly as their alma maters are hijacked by radicals and their donations fund causes they find objectionable.
Their willingness to take a stand will at least force students to hear a different view than the one they are usually force-fed.
Faculty members with traditional values about the need for a contest of ideas also would appreciate knowing they are not alone.
For everyone involved, the simple realization that there are competing valid views would be the best education of all.
Source link: https://nypost.com/2024/01/02/opinion/claudine-gays-obnoxious-self-flattering-resignation-is-just-the-start-harvard-needs-to-answer-what-took-so-long/