What to do about ‘increasingly silly’ Harvard

As someone who totally relied on CliffsNotes to get through high school and college, I do have some sympathy for the serial plagiarizer Dr. Claudine Gay, the now former president of the increasingly silly Harvard University (“Harvard President Claudine Gay resigns after antisemitism testimony, plagiarism claims,” Jan. 2). In a dangerous world of bloody tumult, we, as a society, should probably spend less energies deconstructing the cribbed and hardly read scribblings of pedantic academics and, maybe, concentrate more on actual important matters. You know, like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

To be fair, Gay’s undoing was her inability to articulate that calls for genocide were wrong and unacceptable and not subject to some kind of tortured, woke contextualizing. That she was a big copycat just gave Harvard the hall pass to ease her out the door without honestly acknowledging the breathtaking institutional antisemitism that hangs over that place like a putrid shroud of ivy.

As the product of a state school, far be it from me to suggest to the grandees of the Harvard Corporation how to extract their heads from their pompous posteriors and move on. But here’s an idea: Hire Chelsey Sullenberger, the former US Airways pilot, ambassador and speaker who successfully landed Flight 1549 in the Hudson Riverin 2009, as Dr. Gay’s successor. “Sully” doesn’t check off the empty boxes of wokeness. But he’s cool under pressure, commanding, competent, deeply respected by Americans everywhere and not silly. Harvard could do a lot worse in selecting their next leader — and probably will.