Claudine Gay Must Go

In the course of her abysmal December 5th, 2023 testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, President Claudine Gay did unprecedented damage to Harvard’s reputation and to the moral fiber of the University and the country. 

In a series of imperious, evasive, and robotic responses to Congressmembers’ questions, she proved herself a moral nullity, a university president who cannot reply with a straightforward  “Yes” to the question, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s policy against bullying and harassment?” 

Were she a first-year enrolled in a Moral Reasoning course, her inability to give the only possible correct answer to that question would, even in today’s climate of rampant grade inflation, earn her a grade of “F.”

Gay’s wretched performance before Congress was bad enough; worse still is that everything about her background predicted that she would fail catastrophically at representing Harvard’s traditional values because she does not believe in them. The Presidential Search Committee knew this when they short-listed her in 2020; they’ve also rejected Veritas in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI.)

Gay was a scandal-plagued mediocrity even before credible allegations of plagiarism against her emerged on December 10th, 2023.  In 2005, when she was up for tenure at Stanford, she had published a total of 4 peer-reviewed political science articles and 0 books. 

In addition to a paltry resume that would not have won tenure at any top 50 school, never mind Harvard and Stanford, for anyone but a member of a favored minority group, it was well-known that her data were unsound, her methodology flawed, and her research irreplicable.

Yet she parlayed her subpar record into a professorship in Harvard’s government department in 2006, and in 2015,  as part of her masterclass in failing upward, was made Dean of Social Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

In 2018, she was appointed Edgerley Family Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a position she used to pursue a pernicious agenda of driving out good professors and covering up for bad ones. 

She played a pivotal role in the cover-up of allegations of sexual harassment against Prof. Jorge Dominguez, PhD ‘84, the Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico; and in the cover-up of allegations of data fraud against her Government department comrade, Prof. Ryan Enos; and in the revenge-driven removal of Eliot House Faculty Dean, Prof. Ronald Sullivan, HLS, ‘94. 

Most vital to Gay’s upward career trajectory, though, was her fear-and-envy-fueled lynching of John Bates Clark medalist and MacArthur Prize winner Prof. Roland Fryer, whose lived experience epitomizes the American Dream and whose pathbreaking, methodologically sound research on race and police shootings threatened to disrupt Gay’s career, deconstruct the premise of Black Lives Matter (#BLM), and dismantle the foundations of DEI itself.

Because the Harvard Presidential Search Committee considered only candidates who met DEI Office criteria for the job of running the world’s most powerful university, Gay’s lack of academic distinction and propensity for corruption were no bar to advancement. Quite the contrary; those qualities appear to have enhanced her chances of sitting in the Holyoke Chair.

 At the time she was given stewardship of the world’s most powerful university, Gay had amassed a total of 11 peer-reviewed articles and 0 books.  Her h-index, the metric that measures a scholar’s impact on her field, has been removed from Google’s search engine but is rumored to be available on Scopus.

If W.E.B. DuBois, AB 1890, MA 1891, PhD 1895 was right that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the DEI-color-line: Sacrificing merit to racial equity.

Racial equity is one-third of the Unholy Trinity of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, (DEI), a branch of Neo-Marxist Critical Social Justice, an umbrella term comprising postmodernism, postcolonialism, and antiracism, all colloquially called Wokeness.

Like all things unholy, Wokeness is an inversion of the good. Diversity means privileging the marginalized and marginalizing the privileged in service of the pretextual goal of redressing historic societal imbalances; equity inverts the Constitutional goal of equality of opportunity by replacing it with the goal of equality of outcome; inclusion means the exclusion of all dissenting viewpoints: In 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) ranked Harvard #248, dead last, in campus free speech.

President Gay (even her last name is an inversion; President Woe more befits) is the Platonic Ideal of a DEI hire. A flaccid, unintelligent, and uninspiring woman who owes her career to DEI patronage and rewards denied to the truly meritorious, she holds degrees from 3 of the world’s most well-reputed schools: Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford, and Harvard. How is this possible?

It’s possible because The Long March Through the Institutions has, in just 2 generations, turned America’s best schools into Maoist indoctrination camps. Instead of pursuing truth and disseminating knowledge, these schools inculcate neo-Marxist orthodoxies.

What’s an example of neo-Marxist orthodoxy? Let’s take a look at Decolonize Harvard, a 2021 Exploratory Seminar offered by former Bok Faculty Fellow Visiting Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies in Harvard University’s Committee on Ethnicity, Migration and Rights, Marcelo Garzo Montalvo (he/they.)

The seminar’s goal is “to address issues of race, racism, and colonialism in the university [in the context of] efforts to respond to the national and international global reckonings with white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and other systems of power that are being brought into question yet again by another generation of activists.”

“Systems of power” is the foundation of neo-Marxist orthodoxy. Its adherents divide the world into the powerful and the powerless, then outline a program of action for the powerless to take against the powerful. Which actions? 

In his book, The Wretched of the Earth, the father of postcolonial studies, Frantz Fanon, states “Whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” In short, decolonization is a highfalutin way for neo-Marxists to instigate violence against their enemies.

 That violence has started with Jews but will not end with them. It will not end even when carnage has been visited upon every current enemy, because by then many who now are friends will have been declared enemies. Marxism is the 20th century’s deadliest ideology, with a body count in excess of 100 million corpses. If it is not stopped right now, Neo-Marxism’s 21st-century death toll will surely be higher. 

DEI indoctrination at every level of education is not the only problem. Like many of the students she now oversees, President Gay gained admission to elite schools not because she’s possessed of extraordinary talent, but because she has faddish immutable traits, in her case, race and sex. 

As one Harvard undergraduate tour guide recently put it, “This year, Harvard will officially have 70% of its new students from minority groups, sexually diverse groups, etc.” When asked, “Why is that a big deal?” she responded, “Because that’s what really matters at Harvard. If we aren’t diverse, we aren’t doing the work of Antiracism.”

The work of Antiracism has no place in the university because it is antithetical to the pursuit of the true, the beautiful, and the good. It is a racial retaliation chimera, not a data-driven approach to remedying racial bigotry. 

In typical DEI fashion, Antiracism's creator, the discredited Ibram X. Kendi, took a word that generates positive feelings and used it to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, a societal ill. His proposal to engage in "Antiracist discrimination" against white people invigorates racism but changes its target. That's not progress; it’s racism masquerading as progress.

We can have DEI or we can have merit. We cannot have both. I know no alumni who heard President Gay’s malignant fatuities, the result of a career spent championing DEI’s repressive tolerance, and did not conclude that this cancerous policy must be extirpated, first from Harvard, but ultimately from every corner of American life. 

 Liberal values must be restored to Harvard’s liberal education. The place to start is the Admissions Office, which could choose to obey, rather than circumvent, the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision overturning Affirmative Action, and restore the primacy of merit. Next, every University DEI department must be abolished, and all employees given the choice to continue in the field elsewhere or to be retrained in policies that don’t put Harvard students and professors into ideological straitjackets. There would be much more work to be done, of course, but it cannot and, rest assured, will not, begin under the administration of the current President and Fellows.

Until October 6th, Harvard was the platinum name in higher education, the university equivalent of a Triple-AAA-rated corporate bond. President Gay’s multiple incoherent responses to on-campus pro-Hamas demonstrations, coupled with the cagey banalities she proffered to Congressmembers’ questions, have covered the University in shame and turned Harvard degrees into toxic assets. 

Claudine Gay is unfit to be president of Harvard and must be fired. All of the Fellows of Harvard College and every member of the Presidential Search Committee must accompany her out of Harvard Yard. 

Then, we alumni can immediately begin the process of restoring moral clarity and academic excellence to the University that has contributed so much to each of us, to America, and to the world.