Woke victimhood is nice work if you can get it

Claudine Gay was a disaster for Harvard because she failed to stand up to racism. Still she has her defenders

Last month’s Congressional hearings on anti-semitism on US campuses will go down as one of the biggest disasters in modern academic history. The presidents of three major US universities all proved unable to answer the question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews would be considered beyond the pale on their campuses. The president of the University of Pennsylvania – Liz Magill – managed to ride out the backlash for a few days. Harvard’s president held on rather longer. But this week she, too, finally resigned.

Claudine Gay might have weathered the storm because she had the protective cover of being Harvard’s first black female president, and in an age of identity politics that puts her very close to the top of the oppression Olympics that now dominate everything in American public life. You can be rich, privileged and the president of Harvard. But it transpires that you can still claim to be a victim if you are Claudine Gay.

That is what she tried to claim in her resignation statement on Tuesday. She said that there had been “racial animus” in the attacks on her. In fact, the attacks started because of her glaring inability to stand up to racism, followed by allegations that Gay’s distinctly meagre academic work, included a significant amount of plagiarism. The plagiarism story had been around for a while, but after her Congressional embarrassment, a larger number of people – including Leftist media – started to look into these serious allegations.

At first, Harvard tried to ignore them. Its board embarrassed itself by repeatedly expressing its full support for her. Ordinarily, basic academic failings like seeming to lift whole chunks of work – including acknowledgements – from the works of others would have seen a student censured. But not the Harvard president, apparently.

Finally it became too much. Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday could have confessed to her failings and apologised. But it did no such thing.

She went out the same way she had got in: on a blizzard of victimhood. Others joined in her defence. Ibram X Kendi (author of the mistitled bestseller How To Be an Antiracist) claimed that “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism.” Nikole Hannah-jones (who initiated the New York Times’s lamentably ahistorical “1619 Project”) claimed something similar. She said in the wake of Gay’s resignation that “Academic freedom is under attack. Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.”

In its coverage of Gay’s resignation, even the BBC claimed that the embattled former president had been a victim of America’s “campus culture wars”. The broadcaster also said that “For her Right-wing critics, Dr Gay – who is black – represents much of what they loathe about modern American higher education, which they view as being dominated by a Left-wing ideology that places a greater emphasis on ethnic and gender diversity than on academic rigour.”

Which is a typical BBC smear. Note the way in which the report implies that Gay being black was the problem here. And that the idea that identity politics trumps academic rigour is some kind of phantasm from the fevered imagination of the Right. The trouble is that identity politics does trump academic rigour in the modern American academy. Gay’s own appointment last year was testimony to this. Although in her bitter resignation statement she claimed that academic excellence and standards are central to who she is, they have never been obviously so. She herself is almost entirely without academic distinction.

She has written no published books, and only has 11 journal articles to her name. Nearly all of these are about the usual modern American sociology obsessions about race and status. It is an embarrassingly thin output for anyone expecting any academic preferment. The idea that someone with such paltry achievements could ever have risen to be president of Harvard would until recently have been preposterous.

The very idea is ridiculous. But it doesn’t mean that the Left in America and further afield will not continue to excuse Gay. The truth is that as well as being a moral catastrophe, she was a walking disaster for Harvard. It was high time she went. But nobody should feel sorry for her. This already very privileged woman is going to remain on the teaching faculty of Harvard with a nice pay package of around $900,000 a year. Victimhood turns out to be nice work if you can get it.