Claudine Gay’s exit as Harvard’s president is doubtless a tragedy for her, but the rest of the country can benefit from her saga. Hired despite her meager publication record, then kept on even as credible evidence of plagiarism mounted and a catastrophic testimony to Congress proved an institutional embarrassment, Gay exemplifies what happens when diversity is prioritized over merit.
A tragedy is a dramatic play in which the leading character meets an epic downfall, generally due to a damning character flaw (hamartia), which leaves the audience with a moral lesson. King Lear’s hamartia was that he was arrogant and insecure; Hamlet had many defects, but the main one was indecision.
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Gay’s hamartia appears to have been that she was a diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, champion who thought that this attribute trumped shoddy scholarship as a requirement to be Harvard’s president.
Her defenders appeared to agree. Jonathan Chait wrote an essay in New York Magazine titled “Claudine Gay had to resign, but she was right about the big things.” Chait ludicrously wrote that Gay had “violated rules of attribution on multiple occasions,” but these were minor infractions. “For better or worse, though, Harvard maintains strict, unforgiving standards on plagiarism,” he complained. Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law, agreed, telling NPR that Gay’s critics had made “a mountain out of a molehill.”
Actually, by the time it was over, there were nearly 50 charges of plagiarism, especially damning for an academic who only showed 11 published journal articles , a paltry amount that ordinarily would not qualify her to become an adjunct professor, let alone a Harvard president.
Aaron Sibarium at the Washington Free Beacon, one of the leaders in the ultimately successful campaign to expose Gay as a fraud, captured but one of them in a Jan. 1 story that included the graph below. You decide if these are minor violations of the “rules of attribution”:
The Harvard Corporation, the name for Harvard’s ruling board, knew of these charges almost from the start of Gay’s term as president. But they came to light in the press only after Gay had a disastrous testimony to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5, during which she said that calls for genocide of the Jewish people would not violate Harvard’s standards in some contexts.
Until this week, however, the board tenaciously circled the wagons. Gay is black, and since the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, those trusted to lead our cultural institutions have bought into the fallacy that the American system itself is racist, and thus every attempt must be made to redress disparities through ham-fisted numerical proportionalism in hiring, not by addressing the causes of the disparities.
That Gay was Harvard’s first black president in its nearly 400-year history was the very thing that was flaunted by all. As New York Times columnist Bret Stephens reminded us this week, it was the very first thing the Harvard Crimson thought mattered when Gay became president on July 2 last year.
And Gay built a career on championing DEI. After 2020, as dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Science, she created a DEI office, which disseminates the “systemic racism” canard, and founded the “Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage.” Its final report was an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of DEI gobbledygook.
But the Harvard Corporation’s stubbornness in defending this record has had its consequences. Shortly after her resignation, Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-VA) lambasted Gay, saying her “academically dishonest behavior is appalling,” and announced that an investigation the committee has launched into Harvard will continue.
What Chait, Kennedy, and Foxx agree on is the cultural significance of Gay’s downfall. Kennedy told NPR that it was “a very effective cultural hit.” Chait summarized what happened by writing that “the tragicomedy of it lies in the disjuncture between the picayune scale of her sloppiness and the broader ideological stakes she came to symbolize.”
They are right on this score. Gay’s ultimate demise, which came on Jan. 2, after she resigned and the Harvard board accepted, may be a turning point. Crusading journalists such as Chris Rufo and Aaron Sibarium have demonstrated that the culture wars matter and that determination pays off.
The political world seems to agree now. Many Republicans tend to run for the hills at the sight of cultural issues, but now, some are discovering courage.
“Postsecondary education is in a tailspin,” Foxx, whose leadership on the crucial issue of education has been stellar, said. “There has been a hostile takeover of postsecondary education by political activists, woke faculty, and partisan administrators. College campuses are a breeding ground for illiberal thought.”
Here’s hoping Gay’s many shortcomings make her now a symbol of the rottenness of a system that hires and promotes based on DEI criteria, not on merit. Her departure thus offers a hope that the nation will finally have the reckoning it truly needs.
DEI is the real systemic racism, and Gay’s hamartia was its product.
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Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution .
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