Way Past Policy

In December of 2023, Claudine Gay had a problem. America was firmly in the grips of its newest oldest social crisis in revived antisemitism following the beginning of another middle eastern conflict; this one between Israel and Gaza. True to our history, we used this conflict to fuel fires burning on every end of the political spectrum. The right, still confused over whether they support the war or not, decided that lack of support for the war, lack of support for the government of Israel was tantamount to antisemitism (or something) and as with the Bush era Iraq war began steadfastly attacking anybody with academic credentials. Testimonials were demanded from the presidents of America’s most elite institutions of which Gay was only one.

She should have known. You never testify to Congress unless you’ve been subpoenaed. You never talk to the cops without a lawyer. You never enter a bad faith argument with good faith. You never fight a man with a perm.

But this is the clever intellectual trap of holding an office such as president of America’s oldest, and maybe even first university. No PhD, no elite would pass up the opportunity to share their take on an issue that all of America is paying attention to. The opportunity to set the record on how the halls of academia feel about antisemitism and the war and all that is just too amazing to watch go by. Besides, they’ve been winning. The fight for diversity, equity, and inclusion within academia seems to be going rather well; Harvard, for godsakes, had its first black President in its multi-hundred-year history.

Claudine Gay then most likely assembled her arguments, no doubt with the best possible consultation from faculty, legal representatives, and associates. She stood ready to address the topic of her and Harvard’s stance on antisemitism on college campuses. Harvard, the university, the institution, would address how all of academia felt about this issue and she would get to be the standard bearer along with Liz Magill of UPenn, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT.

She blew it. We had never seen a bag so fumbled. Within weeks she was ousted from her position as President of a school in Massachusetts. 

In her official statement upon resignation, she states she should have been more forceful in her responses to questioning, that she “neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate”. We have seen this happen before. We have seen someone be so dedicated to giving the appropriate answer that they neglect giving the right answer. And now, more than half of America believes they are right that American institutions have become too rational and too “woke” for their own good. That they are unable to condemn hate in a moral way. This is obviously untrue, but it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It never has. Claudine Gay, near paradoxically, describes what she walked into as a cleverly laid trap. How could it be? The Republicans serving in Congress do their work in the open, she was invited to have a bad faith argument with Elise Stefanik, not give rigorously credulous testimony on a salient topic. This was not supposed to be the stage in a classroom, these are not students of the institution, these are people with an agenda. It wasn’t a clever trap that was laid at all, it was her own intellectual vanity that created what she should have known was a blindspot. Simply put, she got Got.

We can be critical of Dr. Gay all day but there isn’t a reason to be. She’ll be performing an autopsy of this for the rest of her life. And it’s not like Black America or America as a whole were banking on her testimony finally validating their beliefs. What happened isn’t exactly her fault. Hell, her ouster as president wasn’t because of her blundered testimony it was because of accusations of plagiarism that, under closer scrutiny, didn’t even amount to actual plagiarism. Dr. Gay is gone because the board deemed it so after intensely biased members like Bill Ackman citing avowed actual racist Christopher Rufo decided she represented too much of a DEI agenda for their liking. If you are internally conflicted as to whether or not any of this was racially motivated, we can put that to rest. The appropriate answer is no. Claudine Gay lost her fancy job because she demonstrated in a public forum that she is incapable of articulating a pretty important answer to a sober question coupled with the accusation that her dissertation may or may not have possibly maybe contained content she failed to attribute to its original author. The right answer is yes. The strongest pusher for her to be gone has cited DEI as being his primary concern, that she was not qualified to be president, that there were inclusive (read, affirmative action) elements involved in her being appointed to the position. The merits of her actual scholarship, performance in office, or whether or not she is a credible academic have not come up once.

Anti-intellectualism presents itself in many ways. We are in a period now where these sentiments are super fueled by already extant racism, sexism, and homophobia. Claudine Gay losing her position is at the long line of libraries under siege, crackdowns on college protests, book bans, theatre bans, and the ever tightening grip the right has on free speech. The conservative lack of intelligent rigor doesn’t leave room for nuance or alternative argument. Their logic has not changed. Much like during the Bush era Iraq war, to not support American troops or the war effort was tantamount to not supporting Americans. They conflate being a part of with just being. Much like now, criticism of the government of the nation of Israel is somehow conflated with being antisemitic. Much like these people think criticism of the American government is equal to being critical of America or Americans. It’s flawed reasoning and it is setting us on a dangerous path.

This is what happens when your politics become sports.

What we should learn from all of this is that the conservative demand for the blood of the liberal will never be sated. These people cannot, on their best day and under the best conditions, devise and present policy. They cannot govern. They cannot set a popular agenda and deliver for tangible results. So, they focus on the president of Harvard. If it feels as though democracy is backsliding, rest assured it isn’t. It just feels that way because these morons spend all of their time attacking the fruits borne of the tree of progress.

Your office, no matter how high you ascend into an institution will not save you. You can be recalled just as quickly as you were placed there and the institution will lose nothing. Especially if you are a Black woman in a predominantly White institution. Luckily, Claudine Gay’s gaffs and allegations of plagiarism were severe enough to warrant her removal as president of Harvard but not revoke her tenure as faculty.