It's Time for Claudine Gay to Go

Is the fat lady singing for Harvard University President Claudine Gay?

Two nights ago hedge fund tycoon and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman wrote this on Twitter:

I have heard from a source that is reliable but a step or two removed from the situation that the @Harvard Corporation has asked President Gay to resign and she has refused. 

Gay has apparently said that if she is fired, she will sue. Gay has retained her own counsel. I can’t 100% confirm the above is true, but if it is, I am sure the Board is concerned about what may emerge in legal discovery in the event of litigation. 

At this point, however, what choice does the Board have? If the Board makes an inappropriate deal on severance or gives Gay a guaranteed position at Harvard, it will look like a payoff to keep her quiet. I can’t see how she stays at Harvard in any capacity. 

President Gay’s performance and her academic record issues provide plenty of cause for termination without compensation. 

But at every step so far, the Board has made the wrong call and dug a deeper hole for themselves and Harvard. As we all know, the best time to start making good decisions is now. The sooner Gay is gone, the sooner repairing the damage can begin.

And liberal Washington Post columnist, Ruth Marcus also called on Gay to resign. Claudine did not merely plagiarize content; she plagiarized her acknowledgments.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that there is a growing insurrection among Harvard faculty members, calling for Gay’s resignation.

I and many others have suggested that if Gay had any self-respect, she would resign. In that way she would save Harvard the embarrassment of being led by a manifest incompetent and a serial plagiarist.

As noted in these pages, and as recognized by most commentators now, the problem is reputation. The Claudine Gay presidency has severely damaged Harvard’s reputation:

Billionaire Bill Ackman said Saturday that even if embattled Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigns over her plagiarism and antisemitism controversies, the Ivy League school’s damaged reputation will not be restored.

Ackman, an alumnus, said that Harvard can only restore its reputation as one of the world’s premier universities “when the Corporation board members acknowledge that they made a bad choice of leader, which they have been unwilling to do,” he wrote in a lengthy X post.

Gay continues to hold her position for only one reason: she checks off a certain number of woke boxes, particularly race and gender. Under the aegis of Barack Obama himself, the Harvard corporation, led by Obama supporter and famed nepo babe, Penny Pritzker.

As for why Obama supports Claudine Gay, nothing about it is mysterious. The New York Post speculates:

One explanation for Obama backing Gay is he shares her tolerance for the pro-Palestinian Israel-haters and their woke comrades on the radical left, with whom he may well feel a kinship.

It’s easy to conceive of a college-age Obama marching in solidarity with these students as a onetime campus radical himself who would graduate to the pews of rabid “anti-Zionist” and anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright; pal around with the like-minded Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers and Rashid Khalidi; and spend eight years as president empowering Islamic supremacists Sunni and Shia while putting the screws to Israel.

The more obvious reason is that Obama does not want to expose diversity, equity and inclusion as a racket designed to give people degrees that they did not earn and to put them in jobs that they cannot do.

Even if a minority candidate succeeds, he will always, as Shelby Steele pointed out more than two decades ago, walk under the shadow that says that he did not earn it.

Besides, as Alan Dershowitz has declared that the DEI regime is intrinsically anti-Semitic-- because if those who excel are criminals and cheats, the judgment must apply, not only to Chinese applicants at Harvard, but to Jews. 

The episode has certainly damaged Harvard’s reputation. About that Claudine Gay and Barack Obama care not a whit. 

As I have noted previously, the conceptual framework of identity politics involves power and control. It imagines that these two limited concepts can explain everything. If someone from an oppressed group gains power, he has simply overpowered the white oppressor class. And he must continue to hold his office, regardless of his dereliction and regardless of the embarrassment he is bringing on to his institution. The only reason anyone would want him to leave would be to restore the white male power structure, and regain control.

Firing Claudine Gay would clearly expose the truth about  diversity, equity and inclusion. In truth, corporations across the country are shutting down their DEI departments, perhaps because they have learned that the diverse candidates who had not been hired or promoted did not deserve to be hired and promoted.

DEI proponents have made it clear that certain candidates are not allowed to fail. If they are students admitted to fulfill diversity quotas they must be given the best grades, regardless. When a previous Harvard president, Lawrence Summers, raised the issue to  members of the African-American Studies department, he was roundly excoriated.

So, no one is allowed to say that DEI candidates did not earn their way or that they cannot do their jobs. Because, if you do not say it, it is not true.