Might the madness finally be peaking? I don’t want to get my hopes up. Every past prediction of an anti-“woke” backlash has come to nothing. But I can’t help feeling that the resignation of Claudine Gay is a watershed.
Until recently, Gay would have been immune to criticism. The fact that she is charged with 50 plagiarism offenses on the back of only 11 published journal articles, all of them about race and racism, should tell you all you need to know about her qualifications.
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But there has hitherto been an unwritten code that shielded left-wing women of color. To suggest that Gay owed her position to anything other than merit would have been to invite calumny, ostracism, and, if you were an academic yourself, unemployment.
What changed? People came to understand how dangerous identity politics could be. The reaction on campuses to the barbarities of Oct. 7 opened many eyes, including those of academics on the soft Left. It was no longer possible to pretend that “woke” values were about treating people fairly or dialing down offensive language. In the aftermath of Hamas’s abominations, we saw students and academics justifying what the perverse values of identity politics had taught them to see as legitimate anti-colonial resistance.
The anti-white worldview that has, in its milder form, corrupted corporations, charities, publishing houses, and local bureaucracies has, in its more virulent strain, infected most universities. In the hours after the pogroms, before there had been any Israeli response, before it was possible to claim that this was about Palestinian suffering, students, not least at Harvard, were excusing the murderers.Gay is right to say that “this was merely a single skirmish in a broader war,” but not, I think, in the way she intends. The front lines have shifted in that protected status — above all, on racial grounds — is no longer the ruling precept to which other values must be subordinated.
In recent years, everything was viewed through the prism of race. Free speech? Not if it meant that someone could offend a designated victim group. Free contract? Not if it meant too many white men being hired. Academic rigor? Not if it meant arbitrary quotas going unfilled. Those who truly believed these things were few, but they were obsessive, aggressive, and ready to destroy anyone who crossed them.
Fanatics tend to get their way as long as a chunk of the population passively accepts their doctrines. Fewer than 2% of Russians in 1917 were Bolsheviks, but there were millions more who disliked tsarism more than they feared what was coming.
In much the same way, many left-leaning academics, especially older professors who grew up thinking that free speech was a liberal virtue, always disliked cancel culture. But they couldn’t bring themselves to say so in public for fear of lining up with Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Until now.Obviously, there are still a few true believers who insist that Gay is a victim of racism: Ibram X. Kendi, Nicole Hannah-Jones, and so on. But it is striking how shrill and isolated they suddenly sound, even as they trot out the lines that, an eye-blink ago, would have silenced all criticism.
Also in that category, I am sorry to say, is the BBC, the report of which began: “Claudine Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University is being celebrated as a high-profile victory by conservatives who have objected to her on ideological grounds since shortly after she took the job.”Gay herself has, naturally, reached immediately for victimhood. But beyond the fringes of racial politics, few believe that she is being treated more harshly than a white man would be. Recall that in 2006, when identity politics was still in its relatively feeble infancy, Larry Summers, a man with genuine academic credentials and impeccably liberal views, was forced to resign as president of Harvard University after saying that men, in aggregate, had a greater innate proclivity to math than women, an observation deemed uncontroversial by most neuroscientists.
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This is not the first time that “woke”sters have overreached. Recall, for example, the insistence by public health professionals in 2020 that everyone must stay indoors unless protesting for Black Lives Matter. But in 2023, they went too far, horrifying many who had previously been vaguely sympathetic to them.
The Hamas attack of 2023 may come to be remembered, like the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, the moment when the scales fell off leftists’ eyes, including those of Summers. Gay is the first casualty of this new mood. She won’t be the last.