Claudine Gay’s departure doesn’t fix what’s wrong at Harvard or elsewhere: the illiberal takeover of higher education.
The resignation of Claudine Gay, Harvard’s embattled former president, doesn’t end the university’s troubles. Indeed, it doesn’t even end its plagiarism scandal. The Harvard Corporation (the formal name for the board of trustees) still must answer for sweeping the initial plagiarism allegations against Gay under the rug and hiring a law firm to threaten journalists who had the scoop. The school is still plagued by a toxic campus culture, ideological corruption, and bureaucratic bloat that stifle open inquiry and free discourse. In that, Harvard is by no means alone.
Claudine Gay is a mediocre scholar—having authored 11 insight-less papers and no books—and hardly a superstar of the Ivy League constellation. But she comes from a privileged background and was elevated for advancing progressive orthodoxy while checking the right intersectional boxes. Her ascent thus epitomizes the illiberal takeover of higher education. She is the apotheosis of an anti-intellectual movement that values DEI, identity, and activism over truth-seeking, merit, and education.
This illiberal takeover goes beyond what conservatives have criticized for decades: hippies invading the faculty lounge at Berkeley. It manifests in the shifting and narrowing of the range of permissible views, such that everyone on campus walks on eggshells and is unable to discuss certain ideas.
