Well, Claudine Gay has stepped down as president of Harvard. She was already listing badly after her embarrassing testimony before Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, and Christopher Rufo’s withering barrage of examples of her chronic plagiarism finally holed her below the waterline.
Needless to say, in her resignation letter she made no apology for her amply demonstrated misconduct, but in good DEI style, boasted of her “commitment to scholarly rigor”, and blamed her troubles on “racial animus”.
Throughout Harvard’s long history, any undergraduate or faculty member who had been caught committing plagiarism even occasionally, let alone at the scale of Ms. Gay’s career-long spree, would have been ejected from campus in academic disgrace. But this is 2023, and Claudine Gay is a black woman (oops!- I meant to say a Black woman), so she will of course keep her professorship. Had she been male instead of female, and white instead of black (sorry again!! – Black), she’d have been out on her ear. (But that’s a fantastic counterfactual anyway; the idea that a place like Harvard would have a white male president in these enlightened times is obviously ridiculous, and likely both racist and sexist. I apologize again!)
It would be hard to top Andrew Klavan’s comment on all of this, so I’ll just leave you with it:
You know, I have zero respect for DEI bullies like Claudine Gay, but when she said in her Harvard resignation letter, "It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done. It is a far far better rest I go to than I have ever known," I found it eloquent and touching.
— Andrew Klavan (@andrewklavan) January 2, 2024