Gay Will Go Victor Davis Hanson
https://victorhanson.com/gay-will-go/
Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tenure is on life-support. Why, then, would a woke black woman likely soon be asked to resign at one of the most leftwing institutions in America, especially when the Harvard Corporation board hired her precisely for her DEI credentials?
Here are several reasons why ultimately she will have to go. If she does not, daily the Harvard reputation, such as it still remains, will go full Disney, Bud Lite, and Target.
- Under oath, Gay misled or lied to Congress when she claimed “context” determines whether Harvard under her direction punishes “hate speech”. We know that if the target of “hate speech”, however one defines it, is black, Latino, gay, or trans, then all hell breaks loose. In contrast, if the perpetrator is a leftwing black, Latino, gay, or trans person, exemption is accorded along the First Amendment “free speech” reasoning. In the past Gay has both disciplined any white male or conservative minority supposed perpetrator and shrugged indifference when the target is the same. But in the case of targeting Jews with physical harassment, and genocidal chants and calls for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, Gay suddenly, but predictably, becomes inert.
- University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill, a white woman, was forced to resign after her similar testimony, on grounds that her plea of “context” seems to have been used only in the case of anti-Semitic hate speech rather than in all cases of “hate speech”. And while she is not a scholarly heavy weight, McGill has considerably more and better journal publications than does Gay. So Gay and her supporters claiming “racism” won’t work—not when Gay outlasted McGill, a white woman and a far better scholar with far more administrative experience.
- Gay has a prior notorious administrative record of going after anyone deemed a skeptic of DEI and a target of woke censors, such as black professors Roland Fryer, Jr. and Ronald Sullivan, Jr., among many others at Harvard. Hypocrisy is not a reason alone to be fired but it is certainly a force multiplier.
- Gay is a plagiarist. To excuse her, Harvard had to mislead the country about the timing and nature of its “investigation” and went to the extreme of embracing new euphemisms for intellectual theft such as “duplicative language”—a term that would have not saved in the past several Harvard students disciplined or expelled for less egregious plagiarism. Harvard can either claim to be America’s preeminent university or be headed by a known plagiarist president—but not both.
- The current controversies reopened past, though hushed-up problems with Gay’s meteoric career. Her four weak journal articles should not have normally won one tenure in the Stanford Department of Political Science, much less a similarly weak scholarly resume earned a tenured professorship at Harvard. Both institutions are notorious for firing after six years, assistant professors with one, two, and sometimes even three books—almost as a rite-of-passage brag that no one hired out of graduate school as an assistant professor really gets tenure at such elite places and thus being let go as an assistant professor is no demerit.
Most associate and full professors come laterally to such places rather than are promoted from within in linear Assistant/Associate/Full fashion. So Gay’s resort to racism again won’t wash since it seems she has been a lifelong beneficiary of extraordinary exemptions not accorded other and superior scholars lacking her DEI credentials.
- If Harvard says to the country that it has no problem having a hypocrite, a plagiarist, and a non-scholar as president—one who seemed in the past hyperactive targeting hate speech except when it is directed, along with physical intimidation, toward Jews—why would multimillionaires and billionaires give any more gifts to Harvard? If they are Jewish, the reasons to demur are obvious; if not, there are plenty of reasons against subsidizing a university that tolerates open declarations and activism that is clearly anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas. In sum, is retaining the Gay albatross really worth $1, $2, or perhaps eventual $3 billion in lost gifting?
- Higher education, in general and especially Ivy League and similar “elite campuses” after October 7, is under new scrutiny—especially after the Supreme Court’s striking down affirmative action.
No longer can they snub court rulings on hiring and admissions, brazenly brag about racially segregated dorms, safe spaces, and graduations, and make it almost impossible for non-woke, conservative speakers to lecture in safety on their campuses—ask Judge Duncan, Heather MacDonald, Charles Murray, or Riley Gaines.
If the Republicans take both houses of Congress and the White House, there will be calls to begin taxing endowment income, to add constitutional stipulations to federal research grants, to make universities guarantee student loans with their own endowments, and to question their tax-exempt status. Blasting the country that it is “racist” to call for Gay’s ouster is not a good way to restore credibility, but such boilerplate will only convince fence sitters that Harvard and other such campuses are overweeningly arrogant and insult the intelligence of the very taxpayers whose largess they so depend on—and thus need a rendezvous with reality.
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