So, Claudine Gay is out.
The president of Harvard University — now the former president — is the shortest-tenured president of Harvard in its history.
Let us all remember just why. Lest we forget, Gay was unable to say that calls for genocide against Jews violated the college’s policies on speech.
This occurred after she issued a weak statement complaining about the “death and destruction unleashed” on October 7 in Israel, without any reference to Hamas. Harvard students testified about their feelings of unease on campus — unease underscored by actual attempted violence against some pro-Israel students, allegedly including members of the Harvard Law Review.
After that insane exchange with Rep. Elise Stefanik — after all, Harvard isn’t exactly a hotbed of free speech, being one of the most restrictive campuses in America on a variety of hot-button topics — Gay came under even more fire.
The Washington Free Beacon did Pulitzer-level work in uncovering her academic charlatanism. By mid-December, the Free Beacon had uncovered dozens of allegations of her plagiarism. Then, Monday night, the Free Beacon revealed even more examples of plagiarism — what Harvard euphemistically termed “duplicative language without proper attribution.”
There’s a word for that: plagiarism.
But still, Harvard tried to keep her on.
They had to. She was the poster child for their core philosophy: diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. To allow that she should never have gotten the position — that her academic record was scanty, and that she had involved herself in no original groundbreaking work (emphasis on the word “original”) — would have been to admit she had been given the job because she was a black female.
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And so the Leftist powers that be had to maintain she deserved the job. The head of the NAACP said those who wanted Gay to go were engaging in “nothing more than theatrics advancing a white supremacist agenda.” Dozens of black Harvard faculty members wrote an open letter proclaiming “any suggestion that her selection as president was the result of a process that elevated an unqualified person based on considerations of race and gender are specious and politically motivated.”
Of course, that was a lie. She wasn’t qualified. But she had the right intersectional qualities to maintain her job. She wasn’t a black male with heterodox leanings like Roland Fryer, the economist who had debunked notions of disproportionate anti-black police shootings. She wasn’t a Jewish male like Larry Summers, who had pointed out that the lack of women in STEM might have something to do with both skills distribution and desire to enter the STEM world by women.
She was a far-Left black woman.
And her immunity was absolute.
Until it wasn’t.
Now the question is whether Americans will be satisfied to leave DEI in place with Gay gone. That narrative will rely on portraying Gay as either a grifter who abused DEI or a martyr.
The Left will never call her a grifter — that might open the door on the other grifters.
Predictably, those race grifters are therefore calling her a martyr.
Who would have guessed?