On Tuesday, Claudine Gay announced her resignation as president of Harvard. Her departure comes in response to immense backlash over her disastrous congressional testimony last month and the multiple allegations of plagiarism that have emerged since.
"It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president," Gay wrote in her resignation letter to the Harvard community. "This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries. But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual."
A day before she resigned, I predicted that Gay would eventually resign in order to "take the negative attention away from Harvard.” The resignation came quicker than I expected. It was undoubtedly the right thing to do, but her resignation won’t repair the damage done to Harvard’s reputation.
Claudine Gay did her personal reputation no favors during her congressional testimony in December, but it exposed systemic antisemitism and wokeness at Harvard that is much bigger than her. After all, the Harvard board stood behind her.
"As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a letter to the Harvard community last month. "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."
The board not only excused her horrific testimony before Congress but also the accusations of plagiarism, which it promptly excused. "With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles,” the board explained. "At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications."
Gay’s alleged plagiarism goes back decades, and it’s hard to see how her status as a black woman and the first black president of Harvard didn’t protect her from the accountability that someone not from a protected minority group would have experienced. The board showed itself beholden to wokeness, not academic integrity. And that pretty much sums up her entire career at Harvard.
As Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter recently wrote, Gay "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, meaning she checked boxes that should be meaningless but, in academia, mean everything.”
Related: Good Riddance To Harvard’s Reputation
"She published just 11 academic articles in her career,” Schlichter continued. "That’s a joke. And her topics were a joke too, the typical race/gender/jargon nonsense that these untalented hacks generate. But the punchline is not that her work is crap. It was that she plagiarized it. It’s not even her crap. Hell, if you are going to steal, steal stuff that’s not garbage. Oh, and be able to speak in public without embarrassing yourself."
Without a doubt, her sex and race propelled her to the presidency of Harvard despite her lack of credentials.
Did the Harvard board eventually pressure her to resign? Sure. But not for the right reasons. Not only has Harvard experienced a significant drop in applications, but deep-pocketed donors also suddenly shut their wallets to the once-famed institution. The financial squeeze from having fewer applicants and big donations drying up left and right, the board no doubt concluded that Claudine Gay had to be sacrificed to stop the bleeding.
When potential students are worried about a stigma from having Harvard as their alma mater, that’s a huge problem that has to be fixed. But Claudine Gay’s resignation won’t mean anything if Harvard doesn’t change the culture that allowed her to become president in the first place, permitted the institution to foster antisemitism, and enabled her to remain in her position far longer than she should have.
