Claudine Gay Has Gone Away

Is this the dawn of a new day?

Harvard President Claudine Gay has resigned.  She follows Penn’s president Liz Magill, and leaves only MIT President Sally Kornbluth surviving among the three university presidents who disgraced themselves in their testimony over campus antisemitism.

So what’s next?  And what should be next?

I’ll approach those in reverse order.  Kornbluth should resign too.  Her performance was just as bad as the other two, and the plagiarism charges against Gay, while apparently well-founded, aren’t why Gay resigned.   She resigned because she sounded like a gray bureaucrat when confronted with the bloody reality of terrorism and antisemitism abroad, and shameless support for terrorism and antisemitism at home.  Kornbluth sounded no better.  University presidents are supposed to be leaders, and you don’t lead by retreating, squid-like, behind a cloud of gray technicalities and evasions.

Next to go should be Penny Pritzker, senior fellow (essentially chair of the board) of the Harvard Corporation.  The fellows of the Harvard Corporation hire the president.  Pritzker had a responsibility to learn if Claudine Gay had a history of plagiarism, and if she had the personal and intellectual qualities to lead a top university.  (The answer to both questions is now clearly “no.”)

Gay’s academic record is unimpressive – her publication record is hardly stellar, especially for Harvard – and she clearly wasn’t up to the challenge of the job.  The plagiarism is just the icing on the cake, but if Chris Rufo could find it, Harvard’s recruiting educrats should have been able to do so.  Most likely, they didn’t do a very in-depth job because they wanted to hire a “diversity” president.  How did that work out for them? (Then there was the threatening letter Harvard’s lawyers sent to the New York Post. How’d that work out for them?)

After Pritzker resigns, let’s look at the rest of the Harvard board.  Tyler Cowen was inspired by the Gay contretemps to take a look at the board as a whole, and pronounces it quite unimpressive:

Harvard, upon closer examination, seems to have a quite mediocre governing board.  I believe there are a few exceptions on the list of names, but nonetheless I see a lot of evidence for a critical mass of poor decision-makers, many of them also lacking in courage.  Furthermore, they are bad at the things they are supposed to be good at.

Just as Harvard has many of the best faculty, and many of the best students, I had expected the school would have a super-distinguished and super-competent board, even if it was a board I might have disagreed with on many key issues.  I had never looked at the Harvard board before.  So I was naive.  But in fact the board of “the Corporation” is a big, big disappointment, relative to the rest of the institution.  Harvard seems to do best when the relevant decisions are not being made by the governing board.  More fundamentally, viewed as a political economy problem, I don’t see which are the institutions or incentives in place to make the board really, really good, as it ought to be.  Nope.  So this month I learned something big about Harvard.

What to do?  Cowen adds:  “The first step toward reform and improvement would be for a significant portion of the board to realize — if only to itself — that it is not very good at precisely the matters its members are supposed to be good at.  And then make plans to step down, and to have the remainder of the board set up better institutions to govern board membership in the future.  I don’t expect that to happen, though there may be a resignation or two over time.  In any case, that is my recommendation, noting that procedures for choosing future board members is a ‘collective choice’ problem without a simple answer. . . .  I believe many people — including insiders — know and agree with what I have written under this point, but I haven’t seen it spelt out as explicitly as it should be.  So there you go.”

Not-so-great people tend to choose not-so-great people.  In this, Harvard is like so many of our institutions, in and out of academia.  If the best people aren’t getting to the top – if, in fact, the people at the top are often the worst people and are consistently mediocre – then your selection process is at fault.  And if you don’t want to change the selection process, then you’re happy having your institutions run by bad leaders, with the inevitable results.  That’s where we are all across America today.

What Harvard, along with those other institutions, needs is structural reform.  I don’t know if that kind of reform can come from within, though the powerful role played by outsiders and donors suggests that there is some hope.  I hope that the alumni who have been upset by the open embrace of antisemitism, rape, torture, and murder by students at our top universities won’t consider Gay’s sacrifice enough.  They need to fix things.

Among other things, they need to rethink admissions and curricula.  The admissions programs are based on DEI, which inherently fosters racial divisions.  The curricula, meanwhile, embrace the tired cultural Marxist thinking of Critical Race Theory.  Frantz Fanon is not a bold new thinker; he was never much of a thinker at all, really.  Likewise Marcuse and his disciples.  And a curriculum that embraces that sort of thinking is a curriculum that will turn out students who are ignorant, racist, and cruel.  That’s what that sort of thinking is designed to produce.

Next:  What does it mean, besides the obvious return of Claudine Gay to a faculty slot?

Beyond Harvard and the Ivy League, there’s some thought that this may represent a turning point, and I think it probably does.  Atrocities often end an era of intellectual self-deceit.  As Joshua Chaffin noted in the Financial Times, even before Gay’s resignation, the woke era seems to have ended with October 7:

In my ultra-progressive suburb, where people plant signs on their front lawns advertising the many hatreds they oppose, fellow Jews have been startled by the lack of solidarity from groups they have supported in the past. To them, and now me, the woke banner we marched under a few years ago feels hollow, even hypocritical.

Then came the now infamous congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT earlier this month, in which they struggled to answer whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. Their hedging was a revelatory moment for an idea undone by its adherents’ excesses and clumsy application.

Sometimes eras collapse in one horrific gasp. A friend reminded me of this passage from Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”, in reference to the Manson murders: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

It is too soon to say whether the woke era ended on October 7 or merely reached a crossroads. But the racism it called out, and its poisonous legacy, are still haunting us.

Of course, the poison will reassert itself in time; it always does.  But now is a good time to chase it out of our institutions to the fullest extent possible.  Don’t let up.

Finally, this is a success for the alternative media.  It’s an exaggeration to say, as an acquaintance emailed, that “Chris Rufo decapitated Harvard.”  But it’s not entirely an exaggeration.  Note that back before Twitter became X its “trust and safety” apparatus would probably have throttled Rufo’s messages about Gay’s plagiarism, and indeed many other remarks about Hamas.  But even though the top-shelf traditional media were slow to turn on Harvard and Gay, the alt-media and social media were relentless and now they matter a lot.  And even after Gay’s departure, satire site The Babylon Bee was relentless:

The people who head our institutions are mostly mediocre and sometimes wicked; this is why they try to stifle criticism, and especially mockery.  Under the guise of fighting “misinformation” they’ve been doing that for the past several years; it’s not working, really.

Back when my blog was new and interesting (which is to say about 20 years ago) reporters interviewing me about the then-new blogosphere always wanted to know how many “scalps” we’d taken.  To me the role of a blog was introducing people to new ideas, new platforms, and new people.  To them, the measure of media power was about getting people fired.  Well, here we are.

Of course, one point people have made is that Gay will be replaced by someone else, probably not much better.  That’s certainly possible.  We can hope that the Harvard board, even if Penny Pritzker doesn’t step down, will put forth more due diligence in the next hire.  But:  Whoever’s next will now be worried in a way that no Harvard president has been before.  Oh, sure, Larry Summers was chased out, but that was an internal power struggle that he lost.  This was something different:  Actually outside accountability.  And it happened at Penn, too.  Don’t think that university presidents all over America aren’t noticing that.

We have a long way to go to fix America’s broken institutions.  But the new year is off to a decent start.