Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University on Tuesday, January 2. Her controversial tenure was a symptom of a major problem at the school that won’t be cured by her exit.
Harvard University and American higher education are sick. People like now-former university President Claudine Gay and those pro-Hamas university students bellowing in the streets aren’t the cause of the sickness, so firing and expelling them won’t cure it. They are merely symptoms of a rot that’s been spreading for decades.
When Gay became the first Black, female president of America’s oldest college in July, her appointment was hailed by left-wing allies as a great leap forward for equity and inclusion. Harvard released a smooth commercial where she promised a “reckoning,” or settling of scores, for Harvard’s past racial sins.
Her first problems began this fall, when large groups of her students erupted in favor Hamas’ mass murder and rape of Israelis. Her problems got worse in December, when she doubled down in defense of anti-Jewish hate in testimony before Congress. While the Harvard Corporation stood behind her, donors fled and examples of plagiarism stacked up across her fairly limited academic career. She’s finally gone, replaced by a low-key Jewish professor, but not before she released a statement accusing her critics of racism. She refused to go quietly, and the problems that made her president in the first place won’t go quietly either–nor nearly as easily.
While it’s worthwhile to cheer the demotion of a race huckster and plagiarist, it’s important to remember she was the shortest-serving president in the school’s history, so rather than the cause of Harvard’s decay, she’s merely another symptom. Chosen from a process involving more than 600 nominees and 20 committees, Gay hadn’t distinguished herself by virtue of her prolific career: She’d published relatively few peer-reviewed papers.
