Claudine Gay and America’s new class system
Hugo Gurdon
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Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racist” pronouncements are pure grift, but his woke prestige makes them a good place to start in examining Claudine Gay’s belated exit as Harvard’s first black president. In her long-overdue resignation letter Tuesday, Gay played the race card — of course she did — decrying “racial animus” rather than acknowledging her hypocrisy and academic malfeasance. Kendi echoed this on X, formerly known as Twitter, describing her ouster as an “anti-black racist attack” to which a white president would not have been subjected.
The usual parade of race hustlers chimed in. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a career demagogue who once stoked a black riot against Jews in New York, complained that Gay’s long goodbye was “an attack on every black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Princeton’s Cornel West denounced it as “undeniable and despicable” racism. He also took a significant swipe at Jewish donors to Harvard and linked Gay’s supposed persecution to racism against Palestinians. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), as shameless a race demagogue as Capitol Hill has to offer, said Gay’s denouement was “about racism and intimidation” and the winners were fascists. There was much more such guff from the people you’d expect. But the facts don’t fit the outrage.
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Gay drew scrutiny initially for slippery and evasive Capitol Hill testimony on Dec. 5, in which she gave protective cover to leftist student threats against Jews and refused to say advocacy of genocide against Israelis breached Harvard’s code of conduct. To maintain this line of argument, she glibly cited free speech principles that Harvard traduces more egregiously than any other university when contentious speech challenges woke ideology. But she was hardly singled out for this. Two other university presidents, both white, were equally excoriated for their disgraceful performances, and one resigned weeks before Gay did.
Then, widespread disgust at Gay’s dishonesty and arrogance led to closer examination of her flimsy academic career. Several days before she was explosively revealed to be a serial plagiarist, a highly respected Harvard alumnus and public intellectual told me privately that he’d looked at her oeuvre and that it was “not mediocre but garbage.”
Then came an avalanche of evidence that Gay, who was promoted to the pinnacle of the academic world without publishing even one book and with only 11 articles, filched ideas and phrasing from other academics. Notoriously, she even plagiarized their acknowledgments, usually the most personal of written statements.
Like the woman he defends, Kendi appears to have done no research at all in alleging that an elite university head would not have been subjected to the same criticism and sacked if he or she were white. Not only was University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, a white woman, forced out last month for her casuistic testimony to Congress alongside Gay, but in July, the president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, was also obliged to quit because he was discovered to have perpetrated an academic crime as serious as Gay’s, falsifying evidence to fit his theses.
Thus, the heads of Harvard, Stanford, and Penn, three of the nation’s top 10 universities, have all been guillotined in the space of six months. There was no racial or sexual discrimination between them. They were black and white, male and female.
Gay was not singled out for being black. That, in truth, is the real problem her supporters cannot abide. Kendi, West, Sharpton, Bowman, and all other members of the outrage gang demand special treatment because Gay is black. They will not acknowledge, but evidently believe, that black people in lofty positions should be regarded as members of a race-based high caste above criticism. These people are not seeking an equal society but an unequal one in which a certain few, elevated for their left-wing beliefs and high intersectional rank, should be able to get away with crimes that ruin lesser mortals.
The Left’s race hucksters treat Gay’s being held to account for dishonesty and plagiarism as a victory for right-wing extremists, as Bowman suggested. You might think it dumb to associate your foes with concern for truth and the maintenance of good standards. Doesn’t that imply that you yourself stand on the side of lies and fraud?
But that misunderstands what is going on here. And West’s snipe at Jews is enlightening in this matter. He linked supposed prejudice against black people to prejudice against Palestinians. For him, Palestinian atrocities don’t come into it, and Gay’s wrongs are equally irrelevant. The taxonomy of the Left insists that no outrage perpetrated by their upper class can be held against them.
But, thankfully, the Gay case shows that despite their worst efforts, the activists have not yet created the unequal society they desire. Wrongdoers can still sometimes be held to account. They are not yet an entirely untouchable class — untouchable not in the original sense of defiling whatever they touch but untouchable in that nothing, no matter how dirty, can sully them.