Claudine Gay

Minouche Shafik has reigned as president of Columbia University. Culture wars, like the kind involving actual armies, have casualties. Shafik is the fourth Ivy League president to step down in the last nine months. She was proceeded by Liz Magill at the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay at Harvard. Magill and Gay were casualties of their hapless testimony before the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on December 5 and, in Gay’s case, the subsequent revelations about her serial plagiarism. She was also proceeded by Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, who hung up her mortar board in June, without an assist from the House committee but citing the “enormous, unexpected challenges” of having to deal with antisemitism and Islamophobia.

One of the key critiques of DEI — the identity-based preference system better known as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion — is that it places workers in professional positions they’re clearly unqualified for. Often with devastating outcomes. Boeing, for instance, has been accused of favoring race and gender when hiring for its factory floor — factories that have turned out airplanes that have literally fallen from the skies. Disney, too, has seen its quest for race- and gender- and sexuality-based inclusiveness come at a cost — a steep slide in its stock price.  But no area of public life has been more fully infiltrated by DEI than the academy — and the results have been disastrously on display since the Hamas attack against Israel nearly seven months ago.

The idea that Western civilization ushered in an age of oppression, cultural destruction, environmental degradation and all manner of human exploitation, is bittersweet. I don’t mean that it tastes like coffee or dark chocolate. I mean bittersweet the vine, Celastrus orbiculatus, with the colorful orange-red berries. This kind of bittersweet grows at a phenomenal rate, ascending into the canopy and strangling trees. If you drive north out of New York City, you will pass endless miles of arboreal carnage. Tens of thousands of roadside trees are draped in the deadly vine. It is an invasive Asian species that, once established, is impossible to eradicate. And while its fall berries are attractive and make for good floral arrays, they are inedible.

Claudine, we hardly knew ye. Gay’s tenure atop Harvard was the shortest in that university’s history. Yet it was still too long. In mere months, she did enormous damage to one of the world’s great universities. Gay is not the only one who should be held accountable for this fiasco. The university’s governing board, the Fellows of Harvard Corporation, should be out, too. They chose her, and their choice did enormous damage to the institution. They should pay for it. Their statement accepting her resignation shows just how feckless they are. Don’t read it if you are glucose intolerant. “First and foremost, we thank President Gay for her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence . . .

You are probably almost as sick of hearing about Claudine Gay — as of this writing, still the president of Harvard University — as I am of writing about her. As I pointed out a year ago in this space, Harvard’s appointment of Gay, a black woman, was simply the next chapter in the university’s long-running pursuit of its racial spoils system. Gay’s entire academic career has been a testimony to the power of that enterprise. What a prize Harvard had in Claudine Gay: a black female who was an avid proponent of the whole “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” racket. Could there be any doubt that she was being groomed for the top slot?

Harvard president Claudine Gay’s troubling history of appropriating other people’s idea and words and passing them off as her own has a well-worn name: plagiarism. Every college and university in the United States prohibits plagiarism. Most present students with explicit rules against it and lay out the possibility of drastic punishments, such as failing a course and, depending on the severity of the offense, expulsion from the college. Typically, instructors in freshman English include lessons on the proper ways to quote, paraphrase and cite sources.  Why? What is so wrong with plagiarism? We don’t punish actors for reciting their lines and failing to add, “Mr. William Shakespeare wrote that.

History sometimes rhymes. You can’t expect things to work out the same way every time. But sometimes events are so nearly opposite each other it is as though they rhyme, like hired and fired, acclaim and blame, or adore and deplore. The names “Claudine Gay” and “Scott Gerber” don’t have that phonetic somersault, but they rhyme the other way: nearly simultaneous events that are perfect opposites.  Before I get to that, let me return to, “History sometimes rhymes.” Many readers will recognize that as a paltry paraphrase of Mark Twain’s comment, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.” Those readers would be wrong because Twain never said this.

As a left-wing sympathizer to the Palestinian cause, I cringed when I heard reports that college students around the country, including at Columbia University, my alma mater, had expressed support for Hamas’s murder of Israeli civilians on October 7. My first thought was that “woke” students had lost their minds — confusing the perfectly legitimate defense of Palestinian rights with the usual laundry list of “resistance” clichés that pay little attention to history, morality or the subtleties of the English language.

It was a clarifying moment, wasn’t it? The presidents of MIT, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania testifying for the House Education Committee about the wave of rabid antisemitism on their campuses. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York asked the same question of UPenn’s Liz Magill, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth and Harvard’s Claudine Gay. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your campus’s rule of conduct, yes or no? That was the question.  You might think it was a pretty simple question.