Claudine Gay finally resigned as Harvard’s president on January 2. I am truly bewildered why it took almost a month after her disgraceful testimony before Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) on December 5 about Harvard’s virulent anti-Semitism.
In my opinion, Gay is morally bankrupt, who simply sees Israeli Jews as colonizing oppressors and Hamas as the never-ending oppressed in her warped woke worldview guided by Marxist critical race theory.
She obviously sympathizes with the menacing and genocidal chants of “intifada, intifada” and “from the river to the sea” on the Harvard campus. At best she is administratively indifferent to the plight of Harvard’s Jewish students.
I also think that during the month of December she must have been in extensive negotiations with Harvard to keep her almost $900,000 salary as a professor.
Congresswoman Stefanik, who is a 2006 Harvard graduate, questioned Gay during a House Education and Workforce Committee Hearing, and twice asked (video) the former president, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment (code of conduct)?”
Gay callously evaded the question, and flabbergastingly replied, “It can be, depending on the context (no video)” infuriating Stefanik.
The former president’s practiced and lawyerly reply was like stating that Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and anti-Semitic speeches of the 1920s and 1930s would have been tolerated at Harvard until his words turned into actual violence and mass murder.
God forbid if Hitler’s First Amendment rights would have been violated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That just would have been a total tragedy for the Harvard Corporation.
In my opinion, Gay’s Congressional testimony was pathetic, and violated the old maxim of nipping a problem in the bud.
I wonder how she would have replied if Congresswoman Stefanik had instead replaced the word “Jews” with African Americans, Latinos or homosexuals? Would it have then violated Harvard’s code of conduct regardless of the context in calling for the genocide of these three minority groups?
I strongly suspect that Gay would not have equivocated in answering these two questions.
She undoubtedly believes that calling for the genocide of the Jews despite the Holocaust of six million Jews and five million non-Jews has to be first evaluated within the context of free speech before making a moral judgment.
According to Gay’s thinking, the sacred nature of free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment must be preserved at all cost before any condemnation of Jew hatred.
Never once in Gay’s shameless resignation letter did she ever mention anti-Semitism as the reason for her resigning the Harvard presidency. Instead, she astoundingly played the race card.
Gay stated that “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus” were the major reasons for her resignation.
As Michael Goodwin wrote in the New York Post, “predictably, in her resignation statement, she played the victim, offered no apologies and blamed her downfall on those who exposed her misconduct.” She never once mentioned her almost fifty acts of plagiarism nor the staggering $1 billion in lost donations to Harvard.
Whether Gay resigned as Harvard’s president because of either anti-Semitism, plagiarism or a combination of other reasons, time will tell. However, I say follow the lost money as a major reason.
I predict that Gay’s tenure on the Harvard faculty earning close to a million dollars per year will be quite short lived because most plagiarists tend to be unapologetic serial plagiarists.
Now that Gay has followed the example of the Penn president, Elizabeth Magill, who resigned on December 9, perhaps the MIT president, Sally Kornbluth, will soon emulate them both.
Meanwhile, I say good riddance to Claudine Gay.
- Robert L. Maronic
