After meeting to address the backlash to Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony last week, the school’s board of directors announced on Tuesday that it would not ask Gay to step down and that it would instead unanimously support her as “the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
The decision comes not only in spite of Gay’s embarrassing refusal to say whether antisemitic rhetoric at Harvard was a violation of the school’s conduct code but also in spite of new reporting that Gay repeatedly plagiarized others’ academic work throughout her career. In other words, she is not only a morally inept ideologue but an academic fraud too.
HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY KEEPS JOB FOLLOWING DISASTROUS TESTIMONY
And yet, the Harvard Corporation has refused to do what is obviously necessary if it wants to preserve the last fragments of the university’s reputation. According to billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been outspoken against the school ever since its initial response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Harvard’s directors declined to fire Gay in part because they didn’t want it to seem like they were caving to him or other pro-Israel voices who have been critical of the school.
But that’s only part of the explanation. After all, Gay’s documented plagiarism is reason enough for the board to fire her, as it is a violation of the school’s policies on academic integrity to which both students and faculty must adhere, and it undermines any intellectual credibility Gay might have claimed. But even on this point, the Harvard Corporation dismissed Gay’s plagiarism as “a few instances of inadequate citation.”
To be clear, stealing work from more than 20 authors in four different papers by lifting full sentences (and even entire paragraphs) and passing them off as your own is not “a few instances of inadequate citation.” That’s a well-established pattern of laziness, dishonesty, and entitlement that would earn students an immediate expulsion at just about any academic institution. In fact, as a dean of Harvard, Gay required 27 students to withdraw from the university during the 2020-21 school year for violating academic integrity standards.
Harvard knows Gay’s failures well — they just don’t care. Gay wasn’t hired to lead Harvard because of her intellectual prowess or tremendous academic accomplishments. She was hired because she adheres to a leftist ideology that places race and diversity above equality and merit and because she promised to infuse that ideology in every facet of Harvard’s operations.
Consider what she wrote in a memo to Harvard faculty shortly after the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020 (while she was the dean of arts and sciences): “Our engagement in anti-racist action and the infusion of inclusive practices into all aspects of our teaching and research mission reflect a new sense of institutional responsibility and will require sustained effort over time.” Gay went on to commit to “amplify[ing] teaching and research on racial and ethnic inequality,” “expand[ing] leadership opportunities for staff of color” and “dismantl[ing] the cultural and structural barriers that have precluded progress.”
In practice, that meant creating a new diversity, equity, and inclusion office within the arts and sciences department and pressuring the university to revoke the tenure of Roland Fryer, a black professor in Harvard’s economics department, after he released research challenging the leftist narrative on police brutality against black people.
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To fire Gay now, then, would mean acknowledging that she never should have been hired in the first place. It would, as Buck Sexton put it, invite additional scrutiny of others elevated to powerful roles because of their commitment to leftism and further undermine the Left’s DEI goals, in particular. Gay has to be unfireable — or the DEI system she represents would lose all of its power.
The truth is Harvard has done us a favor. Firing Gay would have convinced many that these institutions could be saved. Now the public is under no illusions. Harvard and schools like hers are morally bankrupt and intellectually rotten institutions that prioritize radical ideology above all else — and they don’t want to be saved.
Of course Harvard didn't fire Claudine Gay
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12.12.2023
After meeting to address the backlash to Harvard University President Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony last week, the school’s board of directors announced on Tuesday that it would not ask Gay to step down and that it would instead unanimously support her as “the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.”
The decision comes not only in spite of Gay’s embarrassing refusal to say whether antisemitic rhetoric at Harvard was a violation of the school’s conduct code but also in spite of new reporting that Gay repeatedly plagiarized others’ academic work throughout her career. In other words, she is not only a morally inept ideologue but an academic fraud too.
HARVARD PRESIDENT CLAUDINE GAY KEEPS JOB FOLLOWING DISASTROUS TESTIMONY
And yet, the Harvard Corporation has refused to do what is obviously necessary if it wants to preserve the last fragments of the university’s reputation. According to billionaire Bill Ackman, who has been outspoken against the........
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