Will Harvard jettison Claudine Gay? I have a running bet with an old Harvard roommate that they will not. I hope that I am wrong.
One of the funniest experiences that I had at Harvard bookended my time there. Freshman year, a roommate came in with a copy of the New York Times, and there was a full page ad for one of Tom Hanks’ first movies, Splash. “For Alan Bauer, it was love at first sight” read the advertisement. That being my name, I took great interest in this movie and ordered a poster. At the end of my senior year, John Candy, who played Hanks’ brother, Freddie, came to Harvard to receive an acting award. I cornered him on his way out and bluntly said, “My name is Alan Bauer.” He thought for a second, took my hand and pleaded, “Please, don’t sue us!” I got a personalized autograph (“To my brother...”) and then he was on his way. One of the lines from the movie has an ecstatic Freddie Bauer running into the family office with a copy of Penthouse, screaming, “They published my letter! A Lesbian No More.”
Will the Harvard Crimson be publishing “Gay No More” sometime soon? Will Claudine Gay join her former colleague from the University of Pennsylvania on an unemployment line? At the time of this writing, she is still the president of what has been considered forever as the top university in the United States, if not the world. By the time I send this piece off, that may no longer be true. But I doubt it, though claims of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis are bouncing around Twitter. It could be the excuse the Harvard Corporation needs to give her the boot, if that is their goal.
There are several reasons why I think that Harvard will hold onto Gay as president. Firstly, she came into office on July 1 of this year. Throwing her out of office after only a few months would look unprofessional—the Corporation did not give her enough time to put her imprint on the job, and whatever problems are on campus are no doubt due to her predecessors. This is a major problem in all aspects of American leadership. When was the last time you heard an American politician, business leader, or someone else in a leadership role take responsibility for something that went wrong and/or apologize for it? I don’t remember a single US president taking responsibility for a failure on his watch. Scandals, military losses, a lousy economy—it’s always somebody else’s fault. When George W. Bush was asked about mistakes in his first term, he said that maybe some secondary appointments could have been better—everything else including the wars was just fine in his mind.
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Another reason why I think that Harvard will keep President Gay is that she ultimately reflects what Harvard’s leadership of Penny Pritzker, et al. want to show the world: a black woman with an edgy last name—try to trump that one, Yale! Bill Ackman has recently uncovered a memo that Gay wrote as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). It is an Obama-like call for a fundamental transformation of Harvard inlight of George Floyd’s death and Covid. The memo is typical of seeing the world in a leftist intersectional worldview. Maybe that memo got her the job. So, when students and faculty blamed Israel for the barbaric rape, murder, and kidnapping of its own citizens, their statements were actually in sync with the official line that Claudine Gay and much of the Harvard faculty toes.
This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. The national conversation around racial equity continues to gain momentum and the unprecedented scale of mobilization and demand for justice gives me hope. In raw, candid conversations and virtual gatherings convened across the FAS in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, members of our community spoke forcefully and with searing clarity about the institution we aspire to be and the lengths we still must travel to be the Harvard of our ideals," a portion of that memo from August 2020 read. "It is up to us to ensure that the pain expressed, problems identified, and solutions suggested set us on a path for long-term change. I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.
A scientific theory is only as good as it explains the facts and/or predicts future behavior. If one looks at the rigid, dogmatic intersectional system, all white people—especially Jews—are bad while non-white women, trans, gays, blacks and “brown people” are always good. So, if our Harvard president could have been in a helicopter over the music festival on the morning of 10/7 and had witnessed Hamas men gang-raping an Israeli woman who begged them to kill her, she would have noted that the victimizer is the Jewish woman clearly receiving what she deserves, while the guys abusing her were undoubtedly the victims simply expressing their anger at the pain that had been inflicted on them. And this is the failure of intersectionality, as well as those who invented it, those who teach it, those who accept it, and those who run the trash institutions that sell it. For the Harvard Corporation, the oldest corporate body in the United States,t o fire Claudine Gay, it would essentially be negating its entire philosophy of teaching for the past few decades. Who would replace her? A mini-George Patton brought in to clean house? A Claudine Gay clone who thinks exactly as she does but simply is someone else? Harvard does not have the courage to fight its students, throw out foreigners asking for Jewish blood, and enforce a speech code favorable to Jews that is already baked in for blacks, gays, trans, and Hispanic. It’s a joke to think that one could demand genocide of American blacks and not be arrested and ejected from campus in short order.
I doubt that Harvard will fire Claudine Gay. But even if they somehow do show her the door, then what? Will they enforce speech rules against the very students they have proudly brought up to hate the US, Jews, capitalism, and Israel? Will they clean up their curricula and allow for more views than left and lefter? The universities will only change with pressure from the outside, namely the exit of the government from the student loan racket and conditions in place for federal research funding—including no tolerance for genocidal speech or threats. The universities cannot reform themselves. The wrecking ball must come from the outside.
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