By the first week of 2024, Harvard had sustained all the damage it could absorb by standing behind its president, Claudine Gay. On Tuesday, the embattled academician resigned following weeks of sustained criticism of her handling of antisemitic episodes on campus and amid mounting allegations of plagiarism. But Gay is hardly disgraced. The university will allow her to retain her faculty position despite violating academic standards expected of her students, and she will still reportedly draw her nearly $900,000 salary. And yet, to hear her defenders tell it, a grave injustice has been done to Gay and, by association, all who share her demographic traits. In the process, her defenders are exposing themselves.
Some of Gay’s supporters don’t appear to understand their own definitions of what constitutes racial discrimination — at least, not insofar as they apply to Gay’s case. Celebrated author and Boston University lecturer Ibram X. Kendi is among them. The many allegations of plagiarism surrounding Gay’s modest oeuvre of published works were only a “seemingly legitimate” guise designed to justify the actions of a “racist mob,” he insisted. “The question is whether all these people would have investigated, surveilled, harassed, written about, and attacked her in the same way if the Harvard president, in this case, would have been White.”
Comments