Who Is Claudine Gay?

The disturbing events on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war that were investigated on Capitol Hill on Dec. 5 are now common knowledge. The presidents of three Ivy League universities faced questions from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about the anti-Israeli and antisemitic protests that erupted on their campuses after the October 7 attack on Israel by the terrorist organization Hamas and Israel's response to the invasion. 

Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faced questions from the House Committee regarding the incidents of violence, threats, and hate speech to which Jewish students were subjected. These university leaders were accused of having failed to prevent the outpouring of hate or to discipline these students — in Harvard’s case, 33 student groups, as Alan Dershowitz remarks, as if with exasperated disbelief — for appearing to advocate genocide, a clear violation of the schools’ codes of conduct. In fact, as Stephen Kruiser exposes, “the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas cancer on college campuses is even worse than people thought.” 

Hateful speech and calls for genocide that impact Jews and Israel are, it would seem, perfectly halal. As Claudine Gay (and others) put it, the issue “depends on context.” Only when “speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies, including policies against bullying, harassment, or intimidation [do] we take action.” The question, of course, is what constitutes “conduct?” What could the term possibly mean but actual threats, harassment, slander, classroom prejudice, grade reduction, and physical violence directed against Jewish students and, by extension, a campaign launched against all Jews, whether in Israel or the diaspora? Was Nazi incitement against Germany’s Jews perfectly acceptable, to be deplored once six million were massacred but not before? “Ideas have consequences,” explains Richard Weaver in his book of that title, addressed to “minds highly unreceptive to unsettling thoughts” about the complex nature of thought itself. Thinking must police itself if it is to remain sober and rational. On the contrary, Gay’s response was abject nonsense, the flagrant attempt of a “highly unreceptive mind” to evade the moral stain of antisemitic complicity.

Liz Magill has resigned her position, the only honorable thing to do in the circumstances. Sally Kornbluth has received the support of MIT’s board of governors and seems content to pursue her academic descent into the Ninth Circle of Dante’s Hell, that is, the Circle of those who betray their sacred trust. Claudine Gay, the most famous of a sorry lot, has received the major share of attention from the media, owing no doubt to the color of her skin and her social réclame. And, as expected, Gay kept her job. In the cloying words of the Harvard puppet masters, “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” 

At this point, it seems fair to ask, Who is Claudine Gay? She is obviously not a poor black student who diligently worked her way up to the pinnacle of social, economic, and academic success. She is plainly a member of the elite class. Kevin Downey Jr. points to her privileged and expensive schooling. “Gay attended the private Phillips Exeter Academy (current tuition $64,789 per year), then went to Stanford (roughly $37k per year) and Harvard ($54, 269 per year), before becoming a founder of the "Inequality in America Initiative.”

We may also ask, Is Gay an original scholar? It seems unlikely. She has been accused of plagiarism by former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain, author of "Black Faces, Black Interests," who is also black. Swain did not mince words. “I feel like her whole research agenda, her whole career, was based on my work.” Harvard conceded that a few insignificant errors in her academic work needed correction for inadequate citation — citations and quotation marks missing on four occasions. It appears the lapsus is far more grievous. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Gay is accused of lifting other scholars’ works in her 1997 Ph.D. thesis and writing four papers published between 1993 and 2017 that did not have proper attribution.” Consulting scholars found that Gay had lifted whole sentences or paragraphs, changing only a word or two. 

According to Christopher Rufo, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Gay’s published 1997 dissertation, Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Policies, “contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.” In each case, Rufo provides documentary evidence. “First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, ‘Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,’ while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language.” Rufo then mentions the Carol Swain affair, and concludes with Gay’s borrowing “at least half a dozen paragraphs—all in violation of Harvard’s standard on academic integrity—from Gary King’s book, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem.” King, who mentored Gay’s thesis and is still at Harvard, called the charge “absurd.” Rufo isn’t buying it and demands a thorough investigation into Gay’s academic integrity, pointing to other university presidents who have resigned for similar reasons. Swain, for her part, told Fox News Digital that allegations that Gay pilfered passages from other people’s work without proper attribution made her blood pressure rise “because of Harvard’s decision that what she did doesn’t constitute plagiarism, and doesn’t rise to the level of her removal.”

It would thus appear implausible that Gay was hired on merit. “Harvard’s current president,” writes Kurt Schlichter in Townhall, “is a shining example of diversity in action. She was not hired because she was talented. She is demonstrably untalented. She was hired because she is diverse.” Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who is leading the charge to have Gay fired, has no doubt that Gay is a diversity hire, whose chief accomplishments are her sex and skin color. 

Judging from the quality of her published work, which is meager, thin, boilerplate, and derivative, there is a high probability that they are right. Gay’s published material is a porridge of clichéd academic jargon that we meet everywhere in these prosaic mills of hyperventilating triteness: “racist violence in this country,” “the pernicious effects of structural inequality,” “race conscious redistricting to create an active electorate,” “individual-level correlates [and] multilevel datasets," and so on. It is reminiscent of the academic production of Jill Biden and Michelle Obama, homiletic discourses that offer nothing new or unanticipated, nothing original, no taut and lissome thinking, just the hanging belly of rhetorical flab. 

The fact that “Gay published just 11 academic articles in her career,” says Schlichter, consisting of “the typical race/gender/jargon nonsense that these untalented hacks generate,” is standard fare. Her CV is alarmingly anorexic — she has not published a single full book, apart from a multiply co-edited volume which counts for little in an academic bibliography, especially that of a senior officer. Curiously, not mentioned on her CV is a currently unavailable 2001 monograph about minority representation in political participation in California.

To give merely a tincture of Gay’s literary achievement, consider one of her more accessible pieces, so bland it might have been composed by AI, "Seeing Difference: The Effect of Economic Disparity on Black Attitudes toward Latinos" — as if anyone actually cared. Gay finds that racial prejudice against other groups increases with the economic under-performance of the resentful party, a rather pedestrian insight, and concludes that the animus blacks express toward Latinos is caused mainly by “competition for scarce resources.” As Janice Fiamengo observes in a comprehensive analysis of Gay’s thought, this is regarded as unfortunate since “it limits the possibility for black Americans to form political coalitions with Latinos…The safety, well-being and economic success of Latinos, who may experience violence at the hands of blacks due to the evident racial prejudice, is not once mentioned.” 

Nor, as Fiamengo notes, is there any mention of black racial animosity against whites or Asians. As Gay writes in the Conclusion of her screed, her concern is chiefly with “coalition politics,” never stopping to think that the black population may have a pivotal share in their inability to compete and that Latinos may have some reason to be skeptical of future partnerships. For Gay, only black prospects matter. “No wonder,” says Fiamengo, “this black woman could not work up genuine outrage at the thought of Jewish genocide.” 

Gay is patently unfit to helm a major university, or any university, for that matter. Rufo reveals that Gay has been accused of “bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech [and] overseeing a racist admissions program,” which does not elicit much in the way of astonishment. It should be admitted that the major university she leads surely deserves so desperately poor and vacant a president. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) gave Harvard University, despite its being the most acclaimed academic institution in the country, a 0.00-point free speech ranking on a 100-point scale, the worst in the country. “I’m not totally surprised,” Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at FIRE, told The Post about Harvard’s wretched performance, “We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom. 

Related: How to Describe the Left?

Gay and Harvard may be bound together with the Gorilla Glue of moral depravity and intellectual decadence, but they are merely symptoms of the institutional dilemma that confronts a declining nation whose educational establishment has grown toxic, a vestibule to civilizational darkness. There is nothing hallowed per se about the university. Like any human institution, it can profane its founding principles and grow corrupt and oppressive. As many have pointed out, the prestigious German universities of the 1930s, for example, were sloughs of degraded scholarship and outright propaganda guilds, softening up their students’ minds for the preposterous theories of National Socialism. 

In "The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower," Stephen Norwood reveals the sympathy of American universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, during the 1930s with the fascist regimes of Hitler and Mussolini; and even after the war, “there was widespread indifference in academia … about the fascist past.” Historian Niall Ferguson similarly reminds us that “anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.” Nor have they studied the history of the contemporary university from the 1960s to the present day.

One cannot do better than close with Ferguson’s peroration. “The lesson of German history for American academia should by now be clear. In Germany, to use the legalistic language of 2023, ‘speech crossed into conduct.’ The ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question began as speech—to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles. It began in the songs of student fraternities.” Ferguson argues that the Holocaust was an exceptional historical crime “precisely because it was perpetrated by a highly sophisticated nation-state that had within its borders the world’s finest universities.” The propensity of American universities to harbor and condone expressions of antisemitism and calls for genocide so long as they do not “cross over into conduct” are not technically innocuous. They are the stuff of a diabolical agenda. And that is why, Ferguson reflects, “Claudine Gay’s double standards—with their implication that African Americans are somehow more deserving of protection than Jews—are so indefensible.”

Claudine Gay and the Harvard Corporation are a perfect match. Same goes for the majority of America’s elite universities and their colluding presidents. Responsible donors and concerned parents must take notice. Perhaps one day these infamous compounds will be silent and empty and function as historical exhibits for the edification of future generations.