HARVARD’S GAY GAVE ACTIVISTS EXACTLY WHAT THEY NEEDED
Two things can be true at the same time. Yes, the first Black president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, was forced out by a right-wing pressure campaign orchestrated by bitter opponents of diversity. And yes, she gave her enemies the ammunition they needed to destroy her.
Republican activist Charlie Kirk, executive director of the conservative group Turning Point USA, could not resist saying the quiet part out loud after Gay resigned on Tuesday: “One unqualified diversity hire down, just a few million to go.”
In fact, Gay was eminently qualified to serve as Harvard’s president. After a stellar academic career at Stanford University, she became Harvard’s dean of social sciences in 2015 and dean of faculty of arts and sciences in 2018. She knew how to deal with the vagaries of budgets, having guided her department through the disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic. She knew how to handle Harvard’s prickly tenured professoriate, which is less akin to herding cats than wrangling wolverines.
Gay had the exact skills needed for a job that is like being chief executive of a sprawling, multibillion-dollar corporation at which you can’t fire the employees who hold — for as long as they want — the firm’s most important jobs. One day, the president of Harvard might have to decide whether to build a student dormitory; the next, they might have to say yes or no on purchasing a piece of equipment for the astrophysics lab; and, on another day, they might have to decide whether priceless artifacts in Harvard’s museums should be returned to the places where they were bought or stolen.
The Harvard president’s job is not to perform scholarship; it is to ensure that world-changing scholarship can be performed — and that the next generation of scholars, senators, Supreme Court justices, financial wizards and industry titans can be educated. Gay was well prepared to do those things.
But leading the nation’s oldest, richest and most prestigious university made Gay a public figure. In this aspect of the job, she failed spectacularly on Dec. 5, at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) asked Gay whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” was a violation of Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment.
“It can be, depending on the context,” Gay replied.
Wrong answer.
Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, is one of quite a few Ivy League-educated Republican politicians who have gone full MAGA as a means of advancement, or mere survival, in today’s GOP. Her grilling of Gay, who sat alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, was a performance. Stefanik seemed genuinely surprised when Gay and the others hemmed and hawed rather than knock her simple questions out of the park.
The obvious right answer is that calls for the genocide of Jews, Palestinians, South Sudanese, Rohingya or any other group “are vile” and “have no place at Harvard.” That’s what Gay said the next day in an attempt to clean up the mess she had made. But it was too late.
Gay had given an opening to an organized campaign, primarily led by far-right Republican activist Christopher Rufo and disgruntled Harvard donor Bill Ackman, to force “the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader,” in Rufo’s words.
On Dec. 10, Rufo reported allegations of plagiarism against Gay, which Ackman, a wealthy and influential financier, promptly amplified. Ackman had already been critical of Gay, saying she had not done enough to counter a rise of antisemitism at Harvard during the Israel-Gaza war.
I don’t know what the result would be if all the writings of all the former presidents of Harvard were subjected to the kind of minute scrutiny that Gay’s work faces. I doubt all would hold up. I do know that Gay appears to have been ungenerous in her use of quotation marks and footnotes. But I also know that no one has questioned the originality or scholarly value of her research findings.
Rufo told Politico in an interview published Wednesday that his “primary objective is to eliminate the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] bureaucracy in every institution in America.” To him and his collaborators, it did not matter that Gay had acknowledged her errors and had begun correcting them. What mattered was making her into a trophy.
“The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader,” Gay wrote in The New York Times on Wednesday. “This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. … For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.”