The board of Harvard unanimously voted to retain the university’s president Claudine Gay despite her public refusal to say that calls for genocide of Jewish students would contradict Harvard’s code of conduct — and subsequent allegations of past plagiarism.
“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,” the Harvard Corporation announced in a statement on Tuesday.
Gay kept her position despite both credible allegations of plagiarism and an abysmal performance alongside other university presidents before the House Education and the Workforce Committee. On Capitol Hill last week, Gay along with the presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania refused to testify that calls for Jewish genocide violate student codes of conduct — despite their schools’ histories of punishing students for conservative speech.
“We embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful,” Gay said. “It’s when that speech crosses into conduct that violates our policies against bullying, harassment, intimidation.”
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Gay’s peers offered lawmakers similar answers when it came to confronting students who called for the genocide of Jews at their respective schools. University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned from her role on Saturday after donors responded to her disastrous testimony by pulling contributions. Ross Stevens, a hedge fund manager who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, threatened to withdraw a $100 million donation from his alma mater — and he was only one donor to threaten to pull funding.
Investor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman claimed that Gay’s poor performance had cost Harvard more than a billion dollars. But somehow Gay survived both poor reactions from donors and allegations of plagiarism, a chief sin in academia — and it was likely not a coincidence.
Gay is the first black woman to run the university that is one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious institutions in higher education.
“She assumed leadership with high expectations, but her tenure, which began this summer, has been mired in scandal,” Chris Rufo reported Monday in City Journal. “As dean and then as president, Gay has been accused of bullying colleagues, suppressing free speech, overseeing a racist admissions program, and, following the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, failing to stand up to rampant anti-Semitism on campus.” She landed the top job at Harvard despite having only authored 11 peer-reviewed articles, four of which have now come under allegations of plagiarism.
Gay, however, is among one of the most protected classes according to the left’s hierarchy of victimhood. Firing not just a woman but a black woman would be blasphemous against the religion of identity politics.
“A white male would probably already be gone,” observed Carol Swain, a retired professor from Vanderbilt and Princeton whose work was apparently plagiarized by Gay.
Swain, who is black, told Fox News that “obviously” Harvard “did not have the courage to fire its first black president.”
The New York Post reported Monday night that Harvard University even threatened the paper months ago over the Post’s own probe into Gay’s allegations of plagiarism. Yet, as dean, Gay reportedly forced “dozens” of students to leave campus over violations of academic integrity codes.
So-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives such as the programs endorsed by Gay, however, have begun to replace merit-based standards in academia, government, and business, with physical characteristics becoming a factor in employment eligibility. The vice president and a Supreme Court justice were both explicitly chosen based on their sex and skin color.
In the Soviet Union, residents needed a party card to guarantee their employment and other benefits unavailable to the rest of the country. In America today, special perks are now afforded to those who meet the criteria of preferred classes, from race to sexual orientation.
