Thoughts on Claudine Gay's Resignation
And how she managed to become president of Harvard.
After a series of denials and statements of “unanimous support for the president,” threats against the New York Post, and accusations of bigotry, the Harvard Corporation, the authority responsible for hiring the university’s president, finally persuaded Claudine Gay to resign on Tuesday. The end of her presidency is long overdue, and the delay was at her expense.
Gay’s defenders played every card in the pack, resorting to the Left’s magical incantations (“racist!” “misogynist!” “white supremacist!”) and maligning her critics as the wrong sort of people, to whom a victory could not possibly be accorded.1 The flagrant plagiarism was denied, falsely investigated, redefined, and ultimately recast as a tool of politics. Even Barack Obama got involved, lobbying Harvard to stay the course.
Gay isn’t exactly disgraced, however. The university is not only allowing her to keep her faculty position despite violating academic standards expected of students, but she will continue to draw her nearly $900,000 salary.2 Indeed, Gay is being treated like a victim who has suffered a grave injustice, along with all those who share her demographic traits. “This never would have happened to a white university president,” they keep saying, completely ignoring the fact that it happened to Penn’s president Liz Magill — except without the plagiarism angle — and Stanford’s white male president resigned earlier this year because of the retraction and/or correction of five scientific papers.
For her part, Gay certainly believes she’s a victim and has refused to apologize. Her Times op-ed, which reads like self-protected fiction, repeated the idea that she had fallen into “a well-laid trap” and doubled down on her own “broadly respected research.”3 And her resignation letter blamed it all on “racial animus.”
It is true that Claudine Gay has been described by some as an “affirmative action hire.” But that’s because one cannot help coming to that conclusion. How did someone with an academic resume as thin as Amber Heard’s septum — she hasn’t written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years, and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia? Some of her predecessors, like Lawrence Bacow, Drew Gilpin Faust, and Lawrence Summers, have had vastly more voluminous academic records. The discrepancy strongly suggests that Gay wasn’t chosen because of her academic or scholarly qualifications, which Harvard supposedly puts a premium on, but rather because of her immutable traits.
Gay’s rise depended on the willingness of various members of America’s power elite to overlook her shortcomings and defend her when others with the same deficiencies — like, for instance, being a serial plagiarist — would have been cut loose. This is the tainted laurel the Left believes all marginalized individuals are due, the poisoned chalice of de facto innocence, the status of permanent, preemptive acquittal. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations.
People assume she was an affirmative action hire because Harvard and its apologists have made it sound as if she was. It is telling that the first thing the Harvard Crimson noted in its story celebrating Gay’s appointment as president last year wasn’t her academic contributions, or why she was the right person to serve as the school’s chief executive, fund-raiser, and cheerleader, but her race. When she was criticized in that role, her defenders talked about how she’s a black woman. Now that she is out of the role, prominent progressives are insisting that this is an attack on all black women, and some are urging that “Harvard’s Next President MUST Be a Black Woman.” I haven’t heard anyone contend that Gay was actually good at her job; the whole thing has been about rank identity politics.
Charles Cooke points out that advocates of affirmative action try to have it both ways: They condescendingly insist that the practice is necessary if minorities are to reach positions of power and influence; then, once they get their way, they deny that anyone has ever benefited from the preferential treatment that they argue is so imperative. The truth is that hiring based on DEI imperatives creates an “end-to-end problem”: Hiring someone incompetent based on their race leaves your hands tied; you can’t easily fire that person, because of the same racial calculation. Prioritizing identity over competence compromises an institution, with the ultimate outcome the destruction of standards.
Some good has come from the Claudine Gay saga. Over the past month, we basically witnessed an implosion of the liberal elite. Hundreds of liberal-minded academics took the opportunity to downplay or dismiss real instances of plagiarism, resorting to Orwellian doublespeak and verbal acrobatics — “duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues” — while insisting that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly verbatim, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that everyone does it. Or that it’s merely a technicality. Just as many liberal-minded journalists downplayed or dismissed the plagiarism because it was discovered by conservative journalists. These people were willing to surrender the most basic academic standards the minute doing so became politically embarrassing.
The other good thing is that the truth about DEI has been thrust into the mainstream. People are beginning to catch on to the fact that it is little more than “the programmatic implementation of an intolerant progressive agenda,” as Ayaan Hirsi Ali puts it. Society’s existing structures of government, education, media, and industry are presented “in the light of a hierarchical intersectional model of the oppressors and the oppressed,” with straight white males the ultimate oppressors who must performatively kick the ball of guilt toward the ever-receding goalpost of absolution, and women and minorities defined as their victims. According to proponents of DEI, this system redresses past wrongs by designing new structures of “positive” discrimination. Merit, experience, qualifications, leadership potential—such criteria have been recast as expressions of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”
This is how someone like Claudine Gay managed to reach the commanding heights of one of the most powerful institutions in the country. But those who have benefited from DEI are far from the only ones to be blamed for this. Gay managed to climb the ladder of academic preferment thanks to the complicity of gatekeepers and woke entryists who have implemented the social-justice model of higher education currently centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and who blew up the excellence model based on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery, and the free and vigorous contest of ideas. It is because of them that nearly every aspect of academia is pervaded by a kind of racial gerrymander that has replaced considerations of individual achievement with social engineering. And it is because of them that someone like Claudine Gay was deemed a suitable candidate for the position of president.
In her graceless attempt to portray herself as a victim whose downfall was more than the result of being exposed as a fraud, Gay alleged that there was “a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society… Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organisations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility.”
The truth is very different. Harvard — like the public health agencies and news organizations Gay laughably believes people still respect — has managed to erode public faith all by itself. The school has made a mockery of its brand for the sake of an ideology. And until that ideology is abolished from not just Harvard, but from American education as a whole, stunning mediocrities like Claudine Gay will continue to enjoy undue influence.
As Harvard Law’s own Charles Fried told The New York Times, “It’s part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.” And: “If it came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence … But not from these people.”
One X user put it this way: “You have to understand how surreal it is for people who wear hard hats to work watching leftists lament the unendurable oppression faced by a professor earning $900,000 a year.”
Gay refuses to share the data upon which her research is based.
It's hard for me to blame or resent black people who, coming up under the white liberal dispensation that rules American culture (most esp in academia, media, Hollywood and publishing), take all the jobs, awards, checks, genius grants, Pulitzers, Oscars etc that white liberals are desperate to bestow upon them, in their eternal neurotic quest to perform (and receive) public atonement and to be given the official stamp of being One of the Good Ones.
If you woke up one day to find yourself appointed sacred cow and had all sorts of anxious apparatchiks wanting to shine your shoes and pay your mortgage, would you tell them it was all infra dig, or would you take what you could—especially if you don't come from money, and see all this as a chance to get some security for you and yours?
But now that the poisoned chalice of DEI (which is more or less Affirmative Action as if overseen by the Soviet Politburo) has been drunk to its dregs, the poison has begun to kick in: it's just going to be hard going forward trusting any black professionals and their credentials and achievements, because it's obvious they've been rewarded not for merit but because of politics and because of the First Commandment of the Social Justice faith: Thou Shalt always center, support and applaud any and all POCs.
Once again, black people have become props in a white American Civil War and once again they will be left with pockets full of wooden nickels when the politics shift. White liberals needed to appropriate their history of oppression for their immediate political needs—the ultimate form of stolen valor—and did them no favors by treating them as symbols instead of humans.
No one would benefit more from the dismantling of the DEIocracy than black Americans.
I am done giving these people the benefit of doubt. She is the living embodiment of the rot of our educational system.
What is so outrageous (and dangerous) about this incident imo is the same reason it will eventually implode:
They can't even think of how to make plagiarism look novel (Pretty sure all of us would've been able to figure that out in fourth grade)!!!
Which means they can't even build upon prior knowledge because they can't understand contributions of knowledge from those prior to them.
Knowledge about knowledge is the true measure of intellectual prowess. These people neither have the capacity nor the scruples to acquire the most important aspect of academics.
In other words the university is selecting against wisdom, ergo novelty
Benjamin Button Academia can't go below zero. Right now it's hovering around Kelvin and any dean worth their salt should be white hot with anger.