We should celebrate Claudine Gay’s damage to Harvard’s ‘elite’ reputation
Jeremiah Poff
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Harvard University President Claudine Gay is starting off 2024 on the unemployment line after the Harvard Crimson reported Tuesday that she is planning to resign her post amid allegations of plagiarism.
The ouster of Harvard’s president, a mere six months after she took the job, is a welcome development amid a tumultuous few months that saw the university’s public reputation crumble. Gay had faced numerous allegations of plagiarism, and on Monday, the Washington Free Beacon reported on six new allegations, increasing the total number of allegations to nearly 50.
But while Gay, the first black woman to lead Harvard, enjoyed the support of the university’s board, which had laughably defended her blatant academic dishonesty as merely “inadequate citations,” her tenure atop one of the nation’s most elite institutions has done immense damage to Harvard’s institutional reputation that we can only hope is never recovered.
In many ways, Gay’s murder-suicide of the Harvard regime’s reputation is simply a case of the crowd acknowledging the child who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes. And her resignation will not change that.
From its militant defense of affirmative action, abysmal free speech record, and ideological uniformity, Harvard long ago abandoned its pursuit of the “veritas” it still proudly displays on its logo. But despite its institutional bent toward liberal orthodoxy, Harvard kept its reputational perch atop the pyramid of higher education, even among conservatives.
At its core, Harvard, like the vast majority of colleges and universities today, has embraced a model of education that has eschewed the formation of a critical mind and has instead embraced the formation of a conforming mind.
Instead of requiring students to study how Socrates analyzed, through thoughtful questioning, whether or not the just life was worth living or the reasoning behind Aristotle’s conclusion that virtue lay between the extremes of two vices, Harvard’s students can now fulfill an “ethics and civics requirement” by taking a course in “Economic Justice” or “Equity and Excellence in K12 American Schools.”
Gay’s proud display of moral and intellectual bankruptcy over the past three months has served to lay bare the institution’s failures as a place of intellectual challenge, academic inquiry, and, most importantly, the pursuit of truth. Even without her leadership, there is little appetite in the Harvard network to change any of those things.
There is no question that Harvard suffered immense reputational damage by protecting Gay from calls for her ouster, and whether or not her resignation can salvage any part of the school’s damaged reputation remains to be seen, as the school has seen donations and applications plummet in the past few months.
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But removing Gay won’t solve Harvard’s moral and intellectual rot. Nor will it solve the moral and intellectual rot that plagues the vast majority of institutions of higher education. The only way for Harvard to be reformed is for it to be rebuilt, and the only way to rebuild something is to ruin it.
Pushing for the ouster of a serial plagiarist and moral relativist is a good thing and should be encouraged. But Claudine Gay didn’t become the president of Harvard by accident. Despite her resignation, students and donors should still stay as far away from Harvard as they possibly can.