Claudine Gay Pulls the Race Card

The Former Harvard President's Greatest Sin: Playing the Victim

After a long period of silence from The Cornfield as I battled writer’s block, COVID, and an escalating series of life challenges: I’m back. To my subscribers—you small but mighty band!—my apologies. It’s a new year, I’m here.

So let’s talk Harvard.

As of this writing, beleaguered Harvard President Claudine Gay has officially stepped down, in part due to her appalling performance before Congress, where she and two other smirking university presidents seemed incapable of acknowledging calls for Jewish genocide as hateful and unacceptable conduct on their prestigious college campuses. Investigations into Gay’s academic record apparently revealed multiple incidences of plagiarism, or lack of attribution, casting doubt upon her qualifications for her elite position. The severity and unethical nature of these scholarly transgressions is being hotly debated. At its most benign, it appears to be somewhat sloppy work for such an elevated academic. Regardless, the thing Dr. Gay did that was truly disgraceful, in my opinion, was to resign her post whilst crying racism—a predictable and political move.

Aided by left-leaning media outlets, Gay’s narrative is of a racist vendetta, a far-right persecution campaign, directed at a black woman who got uppity. The usual critical social justice advocates, civil rights relics and academic mediocrities added their voices to the geschrei. Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi, whose own disgraceful failure of leadership and squandering of millions in endowments to his failed School of Antiracist Research at Boston University, accuses a “racist mob” of trying to “topple all black people from positions of power and influence.”

You know what? I don’t buy it. Not one bit. Gay may be something of a mediocrity as a scholar, but there was a significance to her appointment that eminently furthers a particular progressive agenda. It’s interesting that Gay accuses others of bringing down black women, when she herself, by pilfering the works of other black women, undermined those scholarly sisters and displayed shocking disrespect for their achievements in the process.

Author Carol Swain, whose work Gay allegedly passed off as her own, said in an interview with Newsmax:

“I want her to be held accountable, because I believe the future of higher education in America depends on us having high academic standards, and Harvard University has decided that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is more important to them than upholding traditional standards of academic research and integrity.”

Gay cut corners; some might say she betrayed the values of academic integrity to further her ambition. Gay’s is not exactly a rags to riches story: she comes from privilege. She went to the exclusive prep school, Philips Exeter Academy; studied at both Princeton and Stanford before attending Harvard. But what really accounts for Gay’s meteoric rise is the focus of her academic work—the ideology she represents and espouses. It’s no coincidence that one of the most committed champions of DEI was singled out to helm the once world-class university that came in dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) College Free Speech Rankings.

If there’s any crusade underway, championed by conservative firebrands like Christopher Rufo, it is a crusade to expose and dismantle the destructive DEI agenda. It’s all too easy to brand Rufo’s investigation into Dr. Gay’s academic qualifications as racist. This has been the reflexive reaction of the activist elites and woke media this week, but what Rufo is aiming at is far more important than Dr. Gay’s race or sex—or even Dr. Gay herself. He’s going after a poisonous, entrenched ideological bureaucracy that controls and polices thought, degrades achievement and excellence, censors and suppresses free speech and discourse on campuses across the nation. DEI influences and limits curriculum, silences debate and free inquiry, pushing the oppressor/oppressed narrative central to critical social justice activism and producing a generation of what Bill Maher calls “useful idiots.”

Richard Bilkszto (left) and DEI trainer Kike Ojo-Thompson

The last essay I wrote before this dealt with the tragic story of dedicated educator Richard Bilkszto, who, after gently challenging assertions made by diversity trainer Kike Ojo-Thompson, became the object of her relentless campaign of character assassination, humiliation and persecution which ultimately drove Bilkszto to despair and suicide. Almost immediately following his death, Ojo-Thompson went public, accusing the opponents of DEI of “weaponizing” the tragedy, and vowing to continue her work of “building a better society.” If you’ve read Dr. Gay’s post-resignation op-ed in the New York Times, this should sound eerily familiar:

“My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.”

None of the values mentioned there are exemplified by the pushers of DEI. Excellence? That means “merit,” and that’s white supremacist, right? Openness? Sure, if you want a screaming mob to de-platform you or get you fired. Independence? Look where that got Mr. Bilkszto. And Truth…? Whose truth? No, no, Dr. Gay. I don’t think you can claim to hold the values exemplified by the old dead white guys, those animated idealists who founded Harvard—you know, the ones whose names you campaigned to have removed from buildings and monuments around campus?

I believe that Dr. Gay resigned as she did in a calculated act of melodrama, engineered to paint herself as the target of “demagogues” who “weaponized” her own failures and inadequacies against her, out of rabid racism and white supremacist hatred. I don’t buy it.

First of all, Dr. Gay isn’t going anywhere. Her resignation of the presidency does not in any way end her career at Harvard. She will remain in a tenured professorial capacity, earning a reported $900,000 a year. That should assuage, somewhat, the ignominy of being “toppled.”

What one might question is why Dr. Gay gave such a weak, pedantic performance before Congress, when her own public statements in the aftermath of the October 7th atrocities and the hateful antisemitic protests that erupted, were unequivocally strong. She condemned in no uncertain terms the pro-Hamas demonstrations and specifically denounced chants like “from the river to the sea” as calls for Jewish genocide. No quibbles about context here; in fact, so definitive was the official reprimand that pro-Palestinian student groups started crying censorship and intimidation, claiming they were being doxxed.

Why didn’t Dr. Gay express before Congress the strong sentiments articulated in her address to Harvard Hillel at a shabbat dinner a few weeks following the Gaza pogrom:

“As we grapple with this resurgence of bigotry, I want to make one thing absolutely clear: Antisemitism has no place at Harvard. As President, I am committed to tackling this pernicious hatred with the urgency it demands. Antisemitism has a very long and shameful history at Harvard. For years, this University has done too little to confront its continuing presence. No longer.”

Imagine how this kind of strong and principled speech might have been received at those congressional hearings. Then there’s this, from Dr. Gay’s October 27th speech to students and parents on Family Weekend:

“Harvard rejects hate—antisemitism, Islamophobia, hate of any group of people based on their faith, their national origin, or any aspects of their identity. Harvard rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs. Pernicious ideologies—and the unconscionable actions they can inspire—are an affront to all that we are and all that we seek to accomplish. They have no place here. Some of us have failed to meet that challenge, choosing to engage in speech and conduct that is intended to deepen and widen divisions among us. This includes instances of antisemitism and of vitriol directed to supporters of Israel and to members of our Jewish community…”

Maybe it’s the theatre person in me, but I have a feeling Rep. Stefanik might not have gotten her 15 minutes of vitriolic viral internet fame had Dr. Gay expressed sentiments such as these, instead of the sterile phrase that should haunt her forever: “It depends on the context.”

Christopher Rufo and others like him are animated by a determination to defeat DEI, and while I am neither ideologically nor politically aligned with him in any other way, I share that determination. It was less his bringing of plagiarism accusations, and more the documents he unearthed—which had been deleted from Harvard’s website following Gay’s appearance before Congress—that caught my attention. A cursory look at these records of Gay’s career at Harvard reveal aggressive measures to impose DEI principles and ideology, which I, and many others from all corners of the political landscape, consider a corrosive and pernicious force that strikes at the core of American values and freedom. 

Whether calculated or not, it is, sadly, all too predictable that Dr. Gay should cry racism as she resigns from her historic appointment. How better to perpetrate the oppressor/oppressed narrative, earning the loyalty of her woke acolytes on campus, and furthering the DEI crusade? If this is her intent, it’s an ignoble one, and deeply disappointing. Her speeches excerpted here, composed and delivered in a moment of crisis, speak to a nuanced mind capable of strong and compassionate leadership. Why did she not speak this forthrightly before Congress? It’s hard to say.  She let herself down by not trumpeting the same repudiation of hate in the halls of Congress that she voiced to shaken Jewish students at that shabbat dinner at Harvard Hillel. Even if she would inevitably have to step down, instead of crying victim she might have shown true leadership—a strength and conviction that young black women and men in her charge could aspire to.

Then again, maybe she plagiarized the speeches.