The Left’s Latest Cries of Racism
How predictable: Leftists are now claiming Harvard President Claudine Gay’s ouster was the result of a racist campaign by conservatives.
Better add “demands for academic standards” and “moral decency” to the left’s list of “racist” sins, because, in truth, it was just such demands — from voices on the left and right — that forced her resignation. As opposed to actual racism.
In a since-deleted post on X, the BBC called Gay a “casualty of the campus culture wars.” NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Janai Nelson posted on X: “Attacks against Claudine Gay have been unrelenting [and] the biases unmasked.”
Ex-Harvard prof Cornell West singled out three Jews: “The same figures and forces enabling the ethnic cleansing and genocidal attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — [Bill] Ackman, [Edward] Blum, [Larry] Summers and others — push out the first black woman president of Harvard!”
Gay herself cried “racism” — and continues to paint herself as a victim.
Please. Harvard admits she failed to sufficiently cite sources in her work. Even Gay acknowledges mishandling her response to Hamas’ savage Oct. 7 attack and her disastrous congressional testimony, in which she was too morally dense to declare calls for genocide against Jews intolerable.
And don’t forget: University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill (who is white) stepped down in shame a mere four days after the hearing — without even facing plagiarism charges.
Nor was it just conservatives calling for her ouster. At The Washington Post, John McWhorter and Ruth Marcus, both self-described liberals, called for her to quit over the plagiarism allegations. Students at Harvard added their voices. Big donors, including Ackman, Kenneth Griffin, Seth Klarman and Lloyd Blankfein, blasted Gay’s weak response to antisemitism.
These were people truly concerned with Gay’s lack of moral clarity and misconduct and its devastating effect on Harvard.
Lefties can wail about imagined bigotry, but they can’t argue with Gay’s record.
Her ouster was entirely of her own doing.