The Harvard Corporation is just as bad as, if not worse than, Claudine Gay
Jeremiah Poff
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If the board in charge of governing Harvard University had its way, a morally bankrupt serial plagiarist would still be leading the Ivy League school.
For most people concerned about academic and moral integrity, Claudine Gay’s resignation as the president of Harvard on Tuesday was a welcome sign that one of the nation’s most prestigious universities would have the opportunity to rectify its broken image and restore confidence in its status as a premier institution dedicated to the pursuit of excellence.
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But the Harvard Corporation is not most people. It is a collection of highly credentialed, excessively wealthy, and self-important people tasked with governing the most exclusive and elite college in the United States that also happens to cost a fortune to attend.
No, unlike most people, the Harvard Corporation, with its former senior government officials, retired CEOs, and college presidents, expressed “great sadness” in having to announce the resignation of a serial plagiarist it called “a leader, a teacher, a scholar, a mentor, and an inspiration to many.”
Gay, with her academic- and bureaucratic-filtered public statements that she likely didn’t write herself, coupled with her out-of-touch and morally bankrupt testimony before the House Education and the Workforce Committee last month, was an easy target of ridicule as she quickly made herself the enduring image of Harvard and higher education’s slide into political activism and indoctrination. Her demise is certainly worth celebrating, but it was ultimately the Harvard Corporation that hired her, and it stood by her even in her resignation.
Without a hint of irony, the corporation, in accepting the disgraced academic’s resignation, thanked Gay for “her deep and unwavering commitment to Harvard and to the pursuit of academic excellence.”
“Throughout her long and distinguished leadership as Dean of Social Science then as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — where she skillfully led the FAS through the COVID-19 pandemic and pursued ambitious new academic initiatives in areas such as quantum science and inequality — she demonstrated the insight, decisiveness, and empathy that are her hallmark,” it wrote. “She believes passionately in Harvard’s mission of education and research, and she cares profoundly about the people whose talents, ideas, and energy drive Harvard.”
One only needs to look at the membership of the Harvard fellows and their ideological leanings to see why Gay’s downfall was so painful for them to oversee.
Atop the corporation is Harvard senior fellow Penny Pritzker, a billionaire who served as former President Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce and is the Biden administration’s “special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery.” Her brother is Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-IL).
The rest of the fellows include Karen Mills, who also served in the Obama administration as the top official at the Small Business Administration; Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, who sat on the California Supreme Court and worked in the Obama White House; Biddy Martin, former Amherst College president and feminist author; and Shirley Tilghman, who championed LGBT causes during her time as president of Princeton in the 2000s.
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This is the board that hired Gay in the first place despite her unimpressive academic background. It is also the board that stood by her in the face of mounting evidence of academic dishonesty.
Now, the Harvard Corporation is tasked with hiring a new president, and there is no reason to believe the corporation will not hire someone in the same ideological and administrative mold as Gay. There will be no change to Harvard’s culture or approach to academics until the ideological uniformity and groupthink that dominates the corporation is broken. There will be no accountability at Harvard unless the fellows abruptly decide to resign and are replaced by a far more ideologically diverse and thoughtful group of people who do not see university education as a politically progressive endeavor.