Claudine Gay Is Only Digging Deeper
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by sfnadmin
January 9, 2024

It is understandable that Claudine Gay is furious over her forced resignation, her calamitous fall from grace, and the public consensus about the great damage done to Harvard by her presidency.
But still, playing the wounded fawn is no excuse or defense.
Thus Claudine Gay’s recent New York Times disingenuous op-ed alleging racism as the prime cause of her career demise was, to quote Talleyrand, “worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” And her blame-gaming will only hurt her cause and reinforce the public’s weariness with such boilerplate and careerist resorts to racism where it does not exist.

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Gay knows that her meteoric career trajectory through prestigious Phillips Academy, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard was not symptomatic of systemic racism, but rather just the opposite – in large part through institutional efforts to show special concern, allowances, and deference due to her race and gender.
And she knows well that her forced resignation was not caused by a conspiracy of conservative activists. It came at the request also of liberal op-ed writers in now embarrassed left-wing megaphones like The New York Times and The Washington Post, black intellectuals, and academics – and donors who usually identify, like the vast majority of Harvard philanthropists, as liberal Democrats.
Gay knows, too, that in her now notorious congressional testimony, had she just offered an independent assessment of the epidemic of antisemitism on her campus and a Harvard plan to stop it (rather than joining in the finger-in-the-wind groupthink of the other two presidents), and had she not been guilty of long-standing, serial, and flagrant plagiarism, she would still have her job.