Will antisemitism ruckus turn into one about race?

SAN DIEGO — Claudine Gay got an early Christmas gift when the Harvard Corporation, one of the school’s two governing boards, decided this week to keep the university’s first Black president in her post.

In a statement signed by all 12 of its members — except Gay — the Corporation declared: “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.”

That’s strange. As a two-time Harvard graduate, I don’t think Gay is the solution as much as she is part of the problem.

The Corporation acknowledged that Gay made mistakes and that those mistakes did not start with her disastrous Dec. 5 testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, when she did not condemn calls on campus for violence against Jews. Rather, the Corporation’s statement said, Gay did not respond well to the barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas: “So many people have suffered tremendous damage and pain because of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack, and the University’s initial statement should have been an immediate, direct, and unequivocal condemnation.”

Many of Gay’s defenders claim she just had one bad day before Congress. Yet the truth is that Gay — who told the House committee that she has “not always gotten it right” — has gotten a lot wrong.

Her initial response to the Oct. 7 attack, and the upheaval it caused at Harvard, was slow and pathetic. For instance, when an offensive letter — signed by representatives from nearly three dozen Harvard student organizations — blamed Israel for the tragedy, on the very day of the attack, Gay had little to say. But when critics of the letter publicly identified some of the students who signed it, she came to the students’ rescue and condemned the tactic as harassment.

What? And the offensive letter that started the ruckus didn’t constitute harassment of Jewish students? During her testimony to Congress — for which, we have learned, she was coached by a law firm that appears to have prepared her for a courtroom instead of a conversation with the public — Gay tried to present herself as a defender of free speech. But the way she responded to the crisis, condemning Hamas but not Harvard students, suggests that she thinks some types of speech should be “freer” than others.

While speaking to members of the committee, Gay dodged questions, used legalese and avoided direct answers. She said Harvard would take action against hateful and offensive speech only if it “crosses into conduct that violates our policies, including policies against bullying, harassment or intimidation.” Even as a Black woman, Gay couldn’t manage a simple “yes” or “no” answer to a no-brainer question from Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who asked whether “calling for the mass murder of African Americans” is protected speech at Harvard. Instead, Gay launched into what sounded like an academic answer, saying: “Our commitment to free speech …” An impatient Stefanik cut her off.

Of course, Gay wasn’t the only university leader to come across that day as mealy mouthed. Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of MIT also testified, and they too were evasive and slippery, camouflaging their answers with words like “context.”

That’s not what Americans in either party want to hear at this moment. We want clarity. If these people were your employees, you’d fire them. If they were politicians, you’d never vote for them.

After her lackluster testimony, Magill resigned under pressure.

Meanwhile, at Harvard, donors, alumni and students — many of them Jewish — ramped up their campaign to oust Gay. At the same time, hundreds of faculty members and alumni signed open letters in her defense. The latter effort seems to have worked, since Gay was spared.

I believe that Gay should have lost her job. A university president is supposed to be, above all else, an effective communicator who makes her students feel safe and her institution look good. Gay failed on all counts.

But this controversy is probably far from over. Given that Magill (who is White) has been ousted at Penn while Gay (who is Black) will keep her job at Harvard, the optics are terrible.

Among Gay’s critics, there were already those who said she got the job as a “diversity hire.”

That glib assertion smacks of bigotry. So why feed it? Some of the same people who made that claim will probably now say that the fact that Gay is Black is the only reason she got to keep her job.

Brace yourselves. It’s likely that a story that was about antisemitism will soon morph into one about race.