Both conservatives and progressives couldn’t be more misguided in their reaction to Claudine Gay’s resignation from Harvard and how to move forward, offering more conservative and progressive urban legend or myth than reality, for different reasons of course.
Last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned from her position after mounting evidence that her supposed academic career was a lie, based on some fifty and counting instances of plagiarism, and her disastrous performance before Congress in December when she bizarrely claimed that calling for the killing of Jews depended on the context. In her view, one might stand in the middle of the square and demand the deaths of your fellow students without facing any disciplinary action, unless you actually tried to kill them in cold blood. Conservatives celebrated the sacking as some kind of victory over the woke, despite that Ms. Gay will remain on the Harvard faculty and continue to earn some $900,000 per year when a student caught doing the same is likely to be expelled, insisting that is acceptable because Harvard is a private institution. The phrase “failing upward” has been perhaps never more applicable, revealing once again that our betters live lives that are protected far more than your average citizen. I can only imagine telling my boss that I mucked everything up and will resign, so long as he continues to pay me most of my salary for doing nothing. Progressives, meanwhile, insisted that the forced resignation was inherently racist, and Ms. Gay was targeted by white people specifically in the equivalent of a modern day lynching. The way this thinking goes: If Ms. Gay were white, none of her transgressions, either refusing to condemn antisemitism, plagiarism, or generally being completely unqualified for her position having published only 11 articles in her entire “academic” career, would matter and she would have retained her position. She was fired, instead, for blackness, and what has happened to her is happening to every black person in the country in a position of power.
Both positions couldn’t be more misguided, more conservative and progressive urban legend or myth than reality, for different reasons of course. On the progressive side of the aisle, the claim that racism is everywhere and driving everything, from the roads themselves to who occupies those positions of power, has become so entrenched that it is impossible for adherents to Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, anti-racism, or whatever you would like to call it, to even consider the possibility that Ms. Gay should never have been charged with leading one of the most prestigious institutions in the history of the known universe in the first place, because she lacks the intelligence and qualifications to do so. Perhaps even worse, they are equally incapable of viewing anything in individual terms. Instead of focusing on Ms. Gay and her obvious inability to lead along with her shoddy academic record, or acknowledging that the white President of the University of Pennsylvania was also forced to resign for the same sort of disastrous testimony, far earlier in fact, the situation exploded into an assault on black people everywhere in the country. Thus, Ms. Gay’s ouster was greeted with claims typified by anti-racist “scholar,” Ibram X. Kendi. “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism. What these racist mobs are doing should be obvious to any reporter who cares about truth or justice as opposed to conflicts or clicks.”
Setting aside the obvious irony that the mainstream media studiously ignored mounting evidence of rampant plagiarism and refused to critique Ms. Gay’s complete lack of qualifications, exhibiting no skepticism about how she got the job in the first place, what evidence is there anywhere that “racist mobs” are actively pursuing vendettas against other black people in positions of power? Mr. Kendi, after all, kept his position even after rampant mismanagement resulted in $43 million dollars of donations to his Anti-racism Research Center at Boston University disappearing without a trace, producing next to nothing of value. At the time, his own progressive colleagues slammed his “imperious” style. “Commensurate to the amount of cash and donations taken in, the outputs were minuscule,” explained Saida U. Grundy, a Boston University sociology professor and feminist scholar who worked with Mr. Kendi. Another former colleague, Phillipe Copeland, said “It wasn’t long before I ran into obstacles. I noticed that leadership would make decisions that either weren’t adequately explained or made no sense. I received mixed messages and contradictory directives. I would make recommendations based upon my expertise that went unheeded. I would go to meetings and get the sense I was in a class with students who hadn’t done the reading. I would express concerns and it would go nowhere.” Despite this, Mr. Kendi remains in his cushy perch, complete with an estimated net worth of over $200 million. He earned $15 million a year for the past two years. If this is what happens to black people in positions of power, and obviously racist ones who make ridiculous claims that white people can’t “connect” with humanity at that, we should all hope to identify as black and be subject to such oppression.
It should not be surprising that progressive politicians wholeheartedly echoed these sentiments. Representative Jamaal Bowman, fresh from pulling a fire alarm to obstruct Congress with next to no consequences, claimed without evidence, “This isn’t about plagiarism or antisemitism. This is about racism and intimidation. This makes no one safer. The only winners are the fascists who bullied a brilliant & historic black woman into resignation. 2024 will be a battle for truth, democracy, and our shared humanity.” Incredibly, the “without evidence” standard applies to every single clause and phrase in the statement. First, the entire affair began because Ms. Gay was incapable of clearly stating that calling for genocide against Jews had no place at Harvard. If she had simply said, emphatically and without equivocation, that Harvard students cannot call for the death of other Harvard students without repercussion, none of this would’ve happened. The controversy that led to her resignation was purely the result of her own incompetence and inability to answer the most basic of questions – had the question been about whether students can openly call for the return of slavery, for example, she certainly would have had no problem condemning it for obvious reasons. Second, the initial accusations of plagiarism were started by Harvard itself, not some nebulous outside forces. Right wing activist Chrisopher Rufo merely reported on a process that had already begun, months earlier, and was mysteriously hidden from view, as if the public shouldn’t have been made aware that the leader of the premier academic institution on the planet was not a premier academic herself. The Washington Post, not exactly a right-wing mob of a publication, reported it this way last week, “According to a summary provided by the university, Gay and the Harvard Corporation (the university’s most powerful governing body) learned about some portion of the allegations on Oct. 24, when a New York Post reporter contacted the university.” This was almost two full months before conservatives got involved. Second, the only intimidation that has occurred was against Jewish students, whom Ms. Gay completely failed to defend, being derelict in her duty to protect the entire student body. She sat idly by while student groups literally cheered on Hamas’ slaughter of some 1,400 Israelis, among other reprehensible instances. The Department of Education under President Joe Biden, another non-right winger, officially opened an investigation into the matter on November 29. Before then, Ms. Gay, as was her habit, equivocated, penning a nonsensical letter about “how antisemitism manifests within our community” and that she would help craft “a plan that addresses its complex history, including acknowledging this specific form of prejudice in Harvard’s past, in a comprehensive manner” while doing nothing to protect Jewish students.
Third, whether or not anyone will be safer as a result remains to be seen, but it’s hard to see how the situation could be worse given Ms. Gay’s inability to control the student body and safeguard the rights, if not the lives, of Jewish students on campus. Fourth, the idea that Ms. Gay is brilliant borders on the absurd. By any rational standard, the woman is a middling at best academic who produced an extremely small amount of work, cut every corner conceivable given the plagiarism charges, and was completely unable to lead the institution. Nothing she has said or done during or before this debacle indicates anything close to brilliance, and suggests something well below mediocrity. To be fair, she might well be historic, but for all the wrong reasons and then some. Fifth, contrary to Representative Bowman’s race-baiting, progressives are far from optimally positioned to lead the charge to save “truth, democracy, and our shared humanity.” One cannot champion truth while promulgating complete lies and fabrications whenever it suits the cause, cannot claim the mantle of democracy while attacking people freely and accurately speaking their minds on an important topic and obtaining a democratic result, nor can you blather about shared humanity by supporting someone who did nothing to stand up for the humanity of her own students. Once again, what would Representative Bowman be saying if she failed to condemn calls for a return to slavery? Does anyone believe he’d be defending a President who refused to expel students who did so?
Conservatives, meanwhile, blithely repeat the “private institution” canard, the standard response to anything supposedly in the hallowed, untouchable private sector, as if organizations of any kind are simply free to do whatever they want, whenever they want. Jazz Shaw, writing for HotAir.com upon learning Ms. Gay will be retained at Harvard to the tune of $900,000 a year, noted, “What the school chooses to do is, in the end, entirely up to them. But it really doesn’t sound like there’s all that much actual ‘accountability’ on display here. Gay may not be in the university president’s office anymore, but she will still retain a position of power and influence at the school. No mention has been made of any new policies designed to stamp out the pro-Hamas, antisemitic demonstrations that began this entire mess. And to top it all off, Harvard apparently no longer has a policy of addressing plagiarism.” From this, it is unclear what world Mr. Shaw inhabits where there is actually a free market in the sense he describes, but even if that were the case, Harvard, as it is currently constituted, is an institution that exists at least partially – if not largely – because of government largesse. The school rakes in an incredible $560 million per year in research grants from the Federal government, accounting for over 10% of their annual budget. Almost a thousand students receive federally backed loans to attend. Last but certainly far from least, Harvard sits on an approximately $50 billion, completely tax free endowment, which as some have pointed out generates enough free and clear money to fund the entire student body without anyone paying a dime in tuition rather than raping them for some $80,000 per year to get harassed if they happen to be Jewish. (Technically, that was calculated in regard to Princeton University, which has a lower endowment, only making the point more applicable.) Putting this another way, you and me have to pay a 20% capital gains tax every time we sell a stock outside of our IRA and 401ks, but the behemoth that is Harvard gets to keep every penny – because the government, as in we the people, allow it. To suggest that we do not have a vested interest in the affairs of an institution we are funding, that would not exist as it currently stands without the taxpayer, is nonsensical. Every American has a right to know how it is possible that a plagiarist will continue to make more than 10 times the median income, and has a right to demand she be permanently fired. We also have a right to demand an equal and fair application of policy, and a say in determining those policies. We’re paying for it, after all.
This is why it remains baffling that Republican politicians, who have been demanding investigations that will lead nowhere, are not exercising the more timeless and effective “power of the purse.” It’s almost like they’d rather talk about reform than actually accomplish it. The federal government places stipulations on almost every dollar it doles out, enforcing back door mandates for unproven vaccines for example by refusing Medicare and Medicaid dollars for institutions that do not comply, for example. There is not a government check written that comes without regulations and requirements to do what they want, when they want, and how they want. If one really seeks meaningful change at Harvard and elsewhere, money talks and bullshit walks as the old saying goes. Yank their research funding, tax their endowment, and limit student loans to less expensive schools. How quickly do you think Harvard caves and we see real progress in that case? I assure you, it will be faster and more effective than Ms. Gay’s ouster.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 