Free Form Friday: On Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard President

I was going to write a letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay, urging her not to resign. But I was too slow. President Gay resigned under pressure on Tuesday.

I have a Master’s Degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School, which makes me an alumnus and gives me reason to send a letter to the Harvard President. I have personal experience with pressure to resign, and I have worked with others who did too, not the least of whom being former Governor Andrew Cuomo. I’m reluctant to get into the specifics because I didn’t resign from my job, and am still in it, and don’t want to inadvertently give those who might want to take another shot at me any extra ammunition to do so.

That said, as an abstract matter, I viewed the pressure directed at President Gay as being of a piece with efforts to get someone— like her or me— to resign ostensibly for one set of reasons but actually for something else entirely. In the case of President Gay, she drew negative attention to herself by giving a dunderheaded answer to a question during a congressional hearing about antisemitism on college campuses. This, in addition to her being a relatively young black woman in charge of America’s most prestigious university, made her a target of some so-called “conservatives” (I’ll get back to that) who began to scrutinize her academic work, going as far back to her 1997 doctoral dissertation. They were looking for ammunition, and they found some. Some of Gay’s work included inadequate citations which have been characterized as plagiarism. Were these genuine instances of plagiarism? I don’t know. I didn’t really look into it myself. And, as far as I can tell, neither has any kind of academic review panel with adjudicatory authority. If that right there seems like a dunderheaded response on my part, my point is that the judge, jury and executioner on allegations of plagiarism seem to me to be some right-wing provocateurs rather than anyone from academia. Maybe Harvard’s governing body would have reached the same conclusion, but we’ll never know because President Gay chose to resign.

I am not defending Claudine Gay’s controversial statement at the congressional hearing. I’m also not defending the integrity of her academic work. But the people who wanted to put her head on their trophy wall didn’t really care about any of that.

Rep. Elise Stefanik, Gay’s chief inquisitor at the congressional hearing (and fellow Harvard alumnus) is not simply a rabid defender of American fascists, you know, like her preferred presidential candidate who likes to paraphrase Adolph Hitler about blood and soil and whatnot— she’s not only a defender of those guys— she’s one of ‘em. So for her to pretend to be concerned about antisemitism is more than a little rich.

Claudine Gay will have served as Harvard President for a very short period of time. We’ll have no good idea whether she would have been great or lousy. I am not pretending to have a good sense of that. But by choosing to resign, she will forever be the antisemitic plagiarist who was chased out of office by Elise Stefanik and her merry band of chaos agents.

This brings me back to the use of the word “conservative,” which you are going to see describing Gay’s antagonists. Sure, some of them might be conservatives in the normal sense of the term, but a lot of them are fascists, or fascist fellow-travelers.

In a seemingly totally unrelated development, YouTube suggested for me a video titled, “Top 5 Woke Hollywood Disasters of 2023” by a YouTuber called Nerdrotic. I previously watched this guy’s review of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, which I thought was great and he hated. Having now seen two of his videos, I can say his reviews are replete with right-wing shorthand terms like, “diversity girl boss” and “M She U” (a play on “MCU”— Marvel Cinematic Universe). His main objections seem to be with non-white men being portrayed as competent, or cast at all in movies. In the Indiana Jones movie, he seemed to dislike the Nazis as being portrayed as bad guys. Regardless of Claudine Gay’s actual mistakes, I can’t help but think that’s what’s behind the animus directed at her, too.

I understand that had President Gay stayed on, Harvard might have lost some donors or even some applicants. But I also think that Harvard deserved more. If she truly was guilty of disqualifying plagiarism, I think our community would have benefitted from an open process of whatever is the appropriate entity evaluating the accusations and explaining their conclusions. If she had a defense, she should have made it in this process. And if she made disqualifying mistakes, she should have been removed after such a process rather than resign, where she became complicit in her own use as a political pawn.

She also shouldn’t have resigned because she bumbled an answer at a hearing. If her actual policies encouraged antisemitism on campus, for instance, if she was advocating positions like Donald Trump’s, or spreading conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers or the great replacement theory, well then, the governing board of Harvard should have examined those policies in an open and methodical manner and, upon reaching the conclusion that such policies are not in keeping with Harvard’s values, removed her (I don’t think this would have happened).

I can tell President Gay from experience that she’s wrong if she thinks resigning will make things better for her. She just set her own reputation in concrete, and there it will remain, unless, that is, if it gets worse because, now denied a platform to tell her own story, her name and likeness could get appropriated by the far right for use during this year’s electoral campaigns.

I’m sorry I didn’t get to writing her that letter.