Firing Harvard’s Claudine Gay won’t cure the cancer at this elite university

Harvard University and American higher education are sick. People like former university president Claudine Gay and the pro-Hamas college students ranting in the streets are not the cause of the disease, so firing them or expelling them will not cure the disease. They are just symptoms of a rot that has been spreading for decades.

When Gay became the first Black female president of America's oldest university in July, her appointment was hailed by allies on the left as a major step toward equity and inclusion. Harvard University released a slick commercial promising a “repair,” or reckoning, for Harvard's past racial sins.

Her first problems began this fall, when a large group of students supporting Hamas' mass murder and rape of Israelis broke out. Her problems worsened in December when she toughened her stance in Congressional testimony in which she defended anti-Semitic hatred. While Harvard supported her, her donors fled, and instances of plagiarism abounded throughout her rather limited academic career. She finally left, replaced by a modest Jewish professor, but not before she released a statement condemning her critics of racism. She refused to go away quietly, and her problems that made her become president in the first place aren't going to go away quietly either, and it's not going to be that easy.

Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigns amid anti-Semitism and plagiarism controversy

While it's worth celebrating the demotion of a racial swindler and plagiarist, she is the shortest-tenured president in the school's history and is merely a symptom of Harvard's decline rather than the cause. It is important to remember that there is no Gay, who was chosen from a process involving more than 600 candidates and her 20 committees, did not rise to prominence through her prolific career, with relatively few peer-reviewed publications to her credit. It was only announced. However, what she published adopted left-wing views on racial issues. Considering her gender and race, she was the perfect candidate for a university obsessed with identity politics.

The political part is extremely important. Because while being black ticks important boxes in Harvard's standards of excellence, it's certainly not enough. Consider the case of Roland Fryer, a black economist and the second-youngest Harvard faculty member ever to achieve tenure. Fryer has angered diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advocates for his work poking holes in claims of systemic racism in policing and other fields.

Later, after he claimed that the secretary he had fired made an inappropriate joke, the management committee recommended that he participate in sensitivity training. But when the committee, which included Gay, received the recommendation, it rejected it, shutting down Freyer's lab and suspending him for two years without pay.

Fryer was a promising academic who grew up in a difficult environment. His mother escaped his father's abuse when he was only four years old. His father was then convicted of rape and imprisoned, leaving Fryer to fend for himself and attend the University of Texas at Austin on an athletic scholarship.

In contrast, her gay parents sent her to an elite boarding school in New England and then to Princeton. When Fryer faced accusations of misconduct, he was nearly fired. Last fall, when Gay was accused of serial plagiarism, Harvard University suppressed the allegations and threatened to sue the newspapers that flagged them. Harvard's efforts to elevate marginalized voices turned out to be deeply rooted and determined by liberal politics rather than truth.

In a farewell statement, Ms. Gay called the Phillips Exeter Academy, Princeton University and Stanford University graduate's short tenure into a career in which “all conceivable backgrounds, at least as long as they are of the right skin tone and have the right skin tone, He wrote that he hoped people would see it as evidence of Harvard's dedication to uplifting people who have “been able to live.” opinion.

She hasn't even been fired, despite a 17 percent drop in early admission applications this fall and a tenure that saw the school suffer from major donor defections and persistent negative publicity. Instead, she returns to teaching. She has not resigned from the board of directors that governs Harvard University. There is no real accountability here. There is no real effort to deal with cancer.

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Claudine Gay became president of Harvard University not because Harvard likes plagiarism, but because Harvard likes bad publicity, lost endowments, and rejected applications. I didn't even continue. Similarly, the students shouting support for Jewish genocide terrorists on the streets of Cambridge are not the products of Hamas, which has infiltrated Harvard's faculty and quietly spread its propaganda. Rather, both of these things are symptoms of: Identity politics/DEI corruption It is deeply embedded in our university.

The series of scandals at Harvard University was a great thing for the American people. They draw attention to the astonishing mediocrity of our elites and the moral rot they teach their chosen successors. Changing titles for gays and some punishments for students won't solve this problem. Over the years, the American people have rightly accumulated the honors of top universities, while also sanctioning new elites to further propagate their rotten ideas.

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When Harvard University was founded in 1636, it had a great future ahead of it, and it would spend that future developing the best young people the nation had to offer. Today, its leaders and students are synonymous with decline rather than greatness. There are good ideas being considered among some faculty to solve this problem, but it would require a lot of effort and create powerful opponents.

Demotion and a few club suspensions are good things, but true healing requires treating the root cause. So far we haven't seen that.

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