January 3, 2024 - 7:00am
Following what is now the shortest presidency in Harvard University’s history, Claudine Gay’s resignation still felt long overdue.
Ever since Gay testified before the US Congress alongside two fellow university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT and Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania — her days were numbered. The purpose of their appearance was to discuss campus responses to antisemitism and free speech issues in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel. Yet, ill-prepared and faltering in their responses, all three presidents were widely criticised for lacking clarity, depth, and moral leadership.
Magill quickly resigned; Gay, despite clinging on into the new year, was never able to recover from that botched testimony, in which she claimed that whether calls for genocide violated university policy would “depend on the context”.
Perhaps Gay’s downfall was entirely foreseeable. Clearly, the university did not perform its due diligence: story after story has now confirmed that much of the now ex-president’s scholarship was plagiarised. For a long time, faculty members and students at Harvard made no public comment about Gay’s lack of scholarly merit. All the while, along with the likes of activist Christopher Rufo and the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium, I wrote numerous articles over the last two years about the dozens of examples of plagiarism attributed to her academic record. Still, our work was largely ignored by the University.
In fact, our efforts were at first roundly mocked by America’s establishment press — yet following last month’s congressional hearings, even liberal outlets were calling for Harvard’s President to resign. A dumbfounded New York Times asked last week: “How did a small group of conservative activists seem to know more about Gay’s scholarship than the governing body responsible for vetting her selection?”
It should have been obvious that a career total of 11 published papers (all on the topic of racial grievances) was not only insufficient to become president of Ivy League Harvard, but not even enough to become a department chair at a top 100-ranked university. When she was granted tenure in 2005, she had only published four papers. Harvard ignored these facts while rapidly promoting her, and the result is one of the most significant embarrassments in the institution’s 388-year history.
Harvard was once a shining beacon for other American, indeed global, universities to aspire to; now it is a cautionary tale. If other institutions wish to avoid becoming a punchline (and losing swathes of donor funding), they would do well to operate purely based on merit, and end their reliance on the DEI industry.
When institutions abandon academic standards and elevate individuals based on identity characteristics rather than accomplishments, they compromise their integrity and undermine their credibility. Billionaire activist and Harvard donor Bill Ackman has alleged of Gay, who is the black daughter of Haitian immigrant parents, that “I learned from someone with first person knowledge of the Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.”
The national spotlight now turns to MIT president Kornbluth, the last of the three presidents to testify in front of Congress who still has her job. In the hour following Gay’s resignation, the gambling market for “Will Sally Kornbluth be ousted before 2025?” rose from 11% to 20%. University administrators across the country will now be scrambling to make sure that donor concerns are listened to, so that they might avoid a similar fate.
Christopher Brunet is a contributing editor at the American Conservative and writes an online newsletter at karlstack.substack.com
realChrisBrunet
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SubscribeThis lady’s key qualifications are her race and gender. And that is what got her the appointment. This practice is widespread in America and it will be around for a while. Unfortunately.
..and don’t forget she’s also Gay.
Not a fan of Gay at all. But she is married to a white man.
…so he’s a Gay as well?
Sometimes I think DEI is the academic version of OnlyFans.
appreciate the comic relief!!!
Her race and gender were undoubtedly useful but the vital ingredient is support for the racist ideology of DEI. Those who question any of its tenets even if they are themselves black will be ruthlessly attacked.
Contrast her treatment with that of Professor Roland Fryer of Harvard (who is black) who was suspended from teaching for 2 years for mildly flirtatious messages to academic assistants where the investigating panel recommended he go on a course to make him more aware of social boundaries but Claudine Gay and other senior administrators decided to suspend him. Indeed it is suggested Claudine Gay was in favour of the unprecedented step of depriving him of tenure and dismissing him.
The reason for his harsh treatment lay in the fact that his work questioned some of the racist shibboleths of the DEI such as the idea that blacks are disproportionately killed by the police. His careful research established that while unresisting blacks were more likely than whites to be harassed and manhandled blacks are no more likely to be shot and killed than whites. He also showed that with suitable educational reforms and teaching methods involving removing unperforming teachers blacks who routinely lag whites in the public education system could perform as well as white peers. Not a popular view for those that ascribe underperformance to racism.
Her malign influence at Harvard is likely to continue protected as she is by the advocates of the DEI race industry.
Hear! Hear!
Kudos to the author for honest journalism that contributed to the ousting of a charlatan. It will be interesting to see where Harvard’s former president lands in a year or so when the furor has quieted down. I doubt we’ve heard the last of her.
I’m not so sure, however, this is a watershed moment in the fight against DEI. The three, female university presidents got into trouble because of their stance on Israel which holds a special place in the American consciousness. If their collective response on that one issue had been a little more savvy, they’d still be in place.
Institutional racism at universities will continue to be practiced against whites and “white adjacent” groups, notably Asians. The major donors don’t care about them, and the universities seem entirely unconcerned by the overturning of race-based admission preferences by the US Supreme Court.
The only real threat to the universities, imo, are the falling number of young people, hence greater competition for students, and the reputational damage of blatant, illogical DEI policies.
The student number problem will likely affect second-tier universities most. The Ivies will still attract many applicants, and poor students will likely gravitate to their state colleges, for reduced tuition, and to trade schools of one sort or another.
The reputational damage is harder to assess: woke students will not be deterred from attending woke colleges, and most large employers buy into the woke agenda and don’t seem to question the intellectual competence of students with woke degrees.
Perhaps the day is approaching when even the children of major donors can’t get into top universities because of anti-white discrimination. Maybe that will turn the tide.
Great post.
Put the courses and the top professors on line and shut them down. They’re obsolete.
Maybe she will be the Democrat VP candidate? Amply qualified compared to the existing one.
I think this turn of events has been a real eye opener on DEI for many Liberals that may be sympathetic to Israel. Look at Bill Ackman’s Twitter feed. He’s pointing out chapter and verse of the DEI agenda for his counterparts to see. I think it will shine a light on some of the more left wing Socialist ideas inherent in DEI
But they all seemed happy with the state of affairs until things took an anti-Israel turn and they cannot claim to have been ignorant of what DEI stood for
Where will she end up? We already know: she is staying exactly where she is, at Harvard, as a professor, and keeping her 900,000 USD annual salary. And remaining positioned to continue eroding the brains of our next generation, presumably now with the added cachet of martyrdom.
It is written into the process that there are always places for the sons and daughters of the elites, otherwise they would never have supported this stuff in the first place
The likes of Ackman were happy enough when it was affecting the goys and the Asians but the instant it impinges (marginally) on his own group, suddenly it’s racism. Some might say that was a bit racially supremacist
Some might… most would acknowledge that people are generally more sensitive about the group/s they identify with, without the implied slur.
Except if your white because that would be racist
‘Goys’? What’s that?
Goyim. Gentiles.
I have to agree with Paul here. I appreciate what Ackman is doing but where was he 5-10 years ago? He was fine enough with all of it when it didn’t affect him.
This also should draw analysis of who the DEI industry is aimed at. 2/3 of Harvard black undergrads are from biracial, African, and/or Caribbean backgrounds. How many from what we used to call ghettoes, rundown rural hamlets, or “disadvantaged” families, those presumably the rationale for the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and all the affirmative action programs in the first place? Why should the daughter of a wealthy Haitian family qualify? How do African-American applicants fare vs. her ilk?
Well, as some wag put it recently:
‘First they came for the white men, and I didn’t speak up, because I don’t consider myself white.
Then they came for the Asian Americans, and I didn’t speak up, because they are not an underrepresented minority on campus.
Then they came for me, so I threatened to pull their funding.’
‘the children of major donors can’t get into top universities because of anti-white discrimination.‘ doubtful. They are ‘the good ones’ full of self loathing.
Such is Keir Starmer’s confidence in his party’s current and putative MPs that he openly intends to create 100 Peers in order to staff his Government. None of them will now be Paula Vennells, but all of them will be just like her, many of them will know her, and none of them will think that she had done anything wrong.
Nor will any of them see the problem in what had officially caused the mere demotion of Claudine Gay, although of course they would scream blue murder if someone other than a liberal did the same thing. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that Cornel West turned out to be a plagiarist. Singularly improbable, I know, but they have already thrown everything else at him. Yet Rachel Reeves is a proven plagiarist who will no doubt progress from her political career to join her sycophantic reviewers in an academic sinecure.
Gay’s union-busting interim successor from Big Pharma has a Labour peerage and ministerial portfolio written all over him. His British equivalents very much exist.
Not so sure on Starmer. Remember he’s evicted the previous leader and culled his supporters in fairly rapid time and because of anti-semitism. Whatever we might think of him that’s a transformation nobody would have predicted when he took over.
Are you kidding? Corbyn et al were ejected because they were losers on a spectacular scale. Starmer has happily shared platforms with anti-semites and did his level best to get Jez elected in the full knowledge that he’s a Jew hater. The man is even more shallow and unprincipled than his mentor Blair.
If Keir Starmer had not unilaterally announced a policy of a second referendum, for which Jeremy Corbyn should have sacked him, then there would have been no General Election in 2019. It would have been in early 2022, and it would have resulted in a hung Parliament with Corbyn’s Labour as the largest party. Heaven knows what would have happened then, but that would have been the result. Having found a more lucrative way to be a callous, lazy, corrupt, priapic and drunken cokehead, then Boris Johnson would have left Parliament either at that Election or earlier. Everyone in politics and the media knew that that was what he was, yet they made him Prime Minister rather than risk a bit of mild social democracy at home or a bit of peace abroad.
It’s an old Lefty trick watson. The moderate front is simply a ruse to get the party into power. Once safely in office the social engineering will begin with a vengeance (and I do mean vengeance). It will seem as though the governance of the nation has fallen under the control of a bureaucracy of Harriet Harman clones. Anti-semitism isn’t the only political vice afflicting the Left.
“The moderate front is simply a ruse to get the party into power”? Compared to what? The Tories?
Compared to the Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’s disastrous leadership.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission found precisely two cases in its entire report, neither of them involved Jeremy Corbyn or indeed anyone who was still a member of the Labour Party, and even in relation to those, it was found in court that it was, “arguable that the Defendant [the EHRC] made an error of law in relation to Article 10 ECHR.” Rather than defend that at judicial review, the EHRC settled with Ken Livingstone, whom it had continued to pursue despite knowing that he had Alzheimer’s disease, and with Pam Bromley. As a matter of record, “Labour anti-Semitism” never existed.
One difference between Kornbluth and Gay is that the former is an accomplished scientist with (according to a quick search at google scholar – https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Hna7X28AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao ) over a hundred published paper and also an eight year track record at Duke as administrator, that seems to have been generally considered a success.
Kornbluth simply doesn’t have the “diversity hire” CV that Gay has
MIT should have a Nobel Prize winner or similar calibre person running it such as William Penney. MIT needs a person who has created major developments in technology, not just written papers.
William Penney, Baron Penney – Wikipedia
Perhaps the reason she held on so long was that she was merely upholding Harvard’s proud traditions. In the 1920s Harvard excluded students merely for having Jewish-sounding names and even “looking” Jewish. In last two years Penn and Harvard received $19 million from Qatar. That may go some way to explaining why Gay found it so problematic to condemn the calling of genocide of Jews.
Harvard’s endowment is $49,000,000,000. A contribution of $19,000,000 is about 1/300 of that. Certainly that is substantial, but hardly mission-changing.
A bigot exposed by her own testimony.
This changes nothing, things will remain the same. She was merely a symptom of a disease, a small part of a greater rot. This episode is indicative of the moral and ethical rot that is eating away at our foundations of our societies. The powers that be seem content with the state of things, either because they benefit from the nonsense or they believe it, which is worse.
Is this really so surprising? A wealthy and well respected institution turns out to be corrupt to its core? Are people legitimately shocked that an institution that takes in vast sums from the richest people in the country and the world would ignore scholarship to pander to whatever the prevailing ideology of the day is? The capacity of humanity to sustain ridiculous logic defying notions never ceases to amaze me. With as much money as Harvard and other blue blood universities have, it’s basically impossible for them to not be corrupt. This isn’t news, its a reaffirmation of basic human nature, but I suppose that humanity has an intrinsic nature is news to some folks.
Universities have their origins in feudal Europe and were always aristocratic institutions which favored familial connections and bloodlines. They were created by the nobility to educate their kids, particularly the ones that wouldn’t inherit the barony, and they’ve been catering to the nobility ever since. How else could they sustain themselves? As a result, they pick up on whatever the fad of the moment is in tea party circles and hammer that button mercilessly until the next big thing comes along. The fad of the moment is, of course, DEI. They aren’t worried about losing donors because of scandals related to DEI. The whole reason they embraced the thing in the first place was to get money from wealthy donors, most especially the naive idealistic ones who want to use their money to fund a ‘good cause’ and feel better about themselves but are too lazy to do the actual work, or too incompetent to know how, or both. Let’s not kid ourselves. DEI wasn’t always the rage. Harvard had a eugenics phase and a racial superiority phase and a socialist phase when those things were hip, trendy, and got them donations from rich fools.
It’s all about conveying status and elite social signaling and always has been. Frankly, having a black woman, even if they had to grab someone off the street (and it seems like this is not far from what actually happened), is more qualified as a university president because the function of a university president is to get rich idiots to make donations, and any middle aged black woman will find that easier to do these days than an old white man regardless of qualifications. In that sense, Harvard’s decision was both rational and logical. The only problem is their minority mascot had to go before Congress and made a fool of herself then a bunch of internet trolls who may or may not have been ‘right wing’ did the legwork to expose a minor fraud. In another era, before the Internet, before everything was recorded, before televised Congressional hearings, this probably would have gone completely unnoticed, but now, well everything is on the Internet to be browsed, searched, documented, and weaponized by everyone and anyone with an axe to grind.
Stories like this tell me what I already knew. Wealth and power are corrupting forces and nothing they touch will stay clean or noble for long. I will continue to hold Harvard, Yale, and all their ilk as continuing monuments to privilege, wealth, and elitism. I expect bad behavior from these people, and I’m rarely disappointed.
A man cannot serve two masters, for he will either hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
If the European ionstitutions were as exclusive as you claim, it is remarkable the number of Nobel prizes awarded to students at individual Cambridge colleges and the breadth and scale of scholarship at the oldest British Universities. Does this imply genetic excellence among the old UK families or, more likely, you have over stated the exclusivity.
What it implies is that people given more advantages in life tend to accomplish more, all else being equal. The level of success in adopted children correlates to their adoptive parents, not their birth parents. Give any kid the resources of a wealthy family, and on average you’ll produce more Nobel Prize winners or CEO’s or whatever else. You’ll also get a fair number of idiots who also happen to have money and power they didn’t earn and don’t have the talent or character to use responsibly. Where you end up usually depends on where you start.
Hasn’t the whole Nobel Prize mythology long been exposed as politically biased and corrupted giving war criminals like Henry Kissinger the Peace Prize despite being responsible for the deaths of millions of Asians an also giving it to Obama before he ever did anything to achieve world peace. Then there’s the fact that so many women writers and scientists were ignored and excluded despite there enormous accomplishments. Why are all three University Presidents hauled over the coals women? No men. Are the guys a little harder to drag into the ditch. Four days to dispose of McGill, a month to ditch Gay, but Sally Kornbluth is still standing. Is she a friend of Epstein and Wexner who formerly courted MIT?
You neither understand universities, nor do you understand history. While venality is part of all institutions, universities serve Truth. Harvard’s motto is “Veritas” – truth. That is what the “coin of the university realm” is – truth. Cynical ignorance aside, the failure to pursue this ideal is what, finally, got Gay.
But surely she was elected by due process? So those that voted for her knew ?
In my world if a club member is chucked out those who proposed and seconded them also resign.
There has been a push to erect an “alternative credentially system” centered on the Woke intersectionality categories of female sex, queer sexuality, immigration, interracial marriage, and so forth. She checks several of these “alternate credentials”. Hopefully this dreadful trend will be stopped, but it’s active here as in many other places. Having been on many faculties in many universities, it’s very clear that black males in particular get a cushy, easy ride to the verdant pastures of tenure. Black females who take the DEI route have a similarly lowered bar to perma-employment.
Universities were set up to educate senior churchmen. The RC Church selected very bright children from parishes and bright younger members of the aristocracy. In Britain landowners often used to sponsor bright children from their lands and send them to schools and universities. Senior churchmen usually ran European countries for the monarch as they were literate and had no legitimate children . William of Wykeham being an English example and Cardinal Richelieu a French example.
William of Wykeham – Wikipedia
Cardinal Richelieu – Wikipedia
The church was an elite institution, and going back far enough it was an inherently political institution as well, very much involved with the governance of Europe. This is why it was so commonplace for the nobility to send their lesser sons into careers in the church. It increased the influence and status of the family. The overlap between the feudal nobility and the church is comparable to the overlap between political and corporate leadership today, and it serves the same purpose.
Sorry, that’s not the history of European universities, the most ancient of which were founded by the Christian church. The aim was to provide a scholarly education for those who would be the leaders of the future.
The church was a political institution tightly intertwined with the feudal nobility. They were not separate mostly apolitical institutions as modern churches tend to be.
Yes, the church, temple or mosque did most of the “educating.” The presence of half the human race was left out – the same as in the commenters here. Quite a handicap for the cast-outs, but appears something you boys probably enthusiastically justify as there’s nary a comment on it. Discuss among yourselves.
Yet here you are commenting as am I.
And yet some people are incorruptible. Humanity is a funny thing.
Brilliant comment!
You might find the resignation of Larry Summers from the Harvard Presidency to be prescient: https://www.thefire.org/news/larry-summers-announces-his-resignation-harvard
Allegedly Barack Obama argued for Gay’s retention. Some might consider that an additional reason for her ‘resignation’.
Actually the Summers case was completely different. He was EMINENTLY QUALIFIED. He committed the sin of saying that men and women are different. This statement is true.
Gay committed the sin of saying that some kinds of statements are relative (anti-Jew statements). In fact, some anti-Jew statements (“kill all the Jews”, which is the real meaning of “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free”). Calling for the “final solution of the Jewish problem”, which is the pro-Palestinian demand, is never acceptable.
I await the inevitable self-pitying memoir from Gay, the book tours, the fawning reviewers, the “anti-Zionist” media, the DEI industry, Coded as “racial animus” as in her mealy-mouthed resignation letter, as blaming it on the Jews…and the “vast right-wing” Chris Rufo-DeSantis-white supremacy conspiracy.
Wonder if she will get a ghost-writer to help her out.
So a diversity hire doesn’t do such a good job?
Well done to Mr. Brunet, both for this excellent article, which has lifted my spirits this morning, and for his earlier work in exposing this nonsense. Let’s hope the impact of this gives pause for thought to all those cowards throughout the West who would take the easy option and appoint the wrong candidate to avoid “trouble”.
Actually, her publication count at tenure was 3. 1 paper was not countable, as it was a report, not a refereed publication.
I went to the Stanford Political Science Department website. I looked at CVs of other persons who started there as Assistant, and were promoted to Associate (thus gaining tenure). I looked at 5 of them, starting at the end of the alphabet. The counts of papers published in refereed journals of the 5 were 7, 12, 14, 10, and 5. Not only is her count of publications low, but it is unusually low for Stanford.
She benefited from being black in a mostly white profession. She should never have been President of Harvard.
How does one assess quality ? Newton published few papers yet changed our understanding of the universe. It could be said the same of of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, G Mendel, Einstein, Darwin, Rutherford, J J Thompson, Chadwick , Frank Whittle, Alan Turing, as well ?
Point taken, but by today’s “metrics,” that’s the criterion for hiring. Well, one of ’em. Look at the criticisms by her peers, if speaking anonymously, in links from the fourth paragraph of the article, to Karlstack, who was investigating this in the spring of 2022, well before her promotion to president. Her data were flawed, fundamentally and not tangentially…
Point taken. As the communists say ” quantity has a sort of quality “.
Quality is not important. Quantity is the metric. The proxy for quality is “publication in a top-tier journal”.
Or anywhere else.
Congratulations for your rigour in pursuit of the truth about Gay.
However, isn’t it appalling that without the outrage of the October 7th attacks she would have undoubtedly remained in place doing great harm for a decade or more as no one at Harvard will ever admit a mistake.
Am I missing something ?
If an undergraduate is found guilty of Plagiarism they are quite likely to be chucked out without a degree.
But it’s OK in Harvard for Faculty members to do it ?
And at Gay’s Harvard, multiple students were chucked out for doing exactly what she did. But the rules don’t apply to people like her unless there comes a reason to put them under a harsh light for all to see. Had she resisted the urge to be too-clever-by-half and even said “we allow all speech up the point of incitement” (which is not true, but let’s go with it), none of what followed that testimony would have occurred.
If those who matter can overlook the plagiarism of the president of the USA, why would they worry about the plagiarism of the president of Harvard. Biden is to plagiarism what Clinton was to sexual ethics.
Perhaps Gay’s downfall was entirely foreseeable.
No, it wasn’t. Before her appearance before Congress, no one cared about her lack of academic production. She was black. And a woman. And this was Harvard. That’s all anyone there and among the broader left needed to know. As it is, Gay isn’t gone; she’s basically being reassigned, staying on the faculty and (for now) continuing to collect her inflated salary.
IKR? Surely they could have hired one of the 1000s of really good black women academics. It shows that the racist trope “they all look the same to me” is alive and well in the left wing bubble.
The dangers of diversity hires could not be better illustrated than this incompetent woman reaching the top of U.S academia.
I beg to differ; the danger will be when a plane goes down because of the incompetency of the pilot or air traffic controllers. Yes even this profession has been infiltrated.
Perhaps in honour of Claudine Gay Harvard could launch a course in Context Studies (or if you like (Not In A) Vacuum Studies) teaching that all progressive prejudices are sound.
Institutional racism at universities will continue to be practiced against whites
And seemingly also in the British insurance industry, most notably at Aviva
I realise claudine gay was hired because she is “black” but IMO the colour of double Gloucester and beer cheese. Most of our Spanish farmer neighbours are way darker than this POS so by leftist logic they should be heading up Mobil or General Motors! If you want a good laugh search for guardian articles on the theme of “how black is black enough” and “is it better to be the colour of Harriet Tubman or Beyonce?” These drivelings are produced by rich white ppl, mainly women, and i expect similar discourse went on between their ancestors when they traded African slaves, as it does today in KSA and the UAE where bonded labour is still bought in bulk from Africa.
‘ i expect similar discourse went on between their ancestors when they traded African slaves, …’ oh nonsense, that is cheesy television stuff.
“Most of our Spanish farmer neighbours are way darker than this POS”
Total and absolute nonsense. You obviously don’t know Spanish people or Spanish farmers for that matter. Many are actually as light eyed and haired as any Briton. The tan is merely a sub-product of their activity…
Until someone gets enough BDE to start suing them into the ground instead to meekly walking away.
I think this speaks volumes about the quality of people at many modern institutions. As i said to a colleague who’d read the claudine gay story on another news site: “can’t even get a good thieving plagiarising n*zi scumbag these days…bit like today’s electricians – semi skilled fitters would be a better description”
I think this speaks volumes about the quality of people at many modern institutions. As i said to a colleague who’d read the claudine gay story on another news site: “can’t even get a good thieving plagiarising moron these days…bit like today’s electricians – semi skilled fitters would be a better description”
Chris Brunet in UnHerd today:
“All the while, along with the likes of activist Christopher Rufo and the Washington Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium, I wrote numerous articles over the last two years about the dozens of examples of plagiarism attributed to her academic record. Still, our work was largely ignored by the University.
“In fact, our efforts were at first roundly mocked by America’s
establishment press — yet following last month’s congressional hearings, even liberal outlets were
calling for Harvard’s President to resign.”
All of a sudden, for some strange reason, his work got traction and seemingly overnight was worthy of being printed in the same liberal corporate media which had been, before Gay’s failure to be sufficiently anti-anti-Semitic and “sensitive” to Jewish concerns, studiously ignoring and mocking it.
How did that happen?
What highly organized, influential, moneyed and well-connected group with a grudge against Claudine Gay that they could never forget could have gotten the powers that be of the American media to suddenly accept articles they had previously rejected?
You do know that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the ZOG are conspiracy theories, don’t you?
Gay was admirably qualified to get the top job at Harvard – black and woman. The small matter of a very modest, plagiarised, narrow (i.e. racial grievances) academic publication output was evidently not sufficient to dissuade Harvard’s Woke governing body from elevating her to the pinnacle of its management structure. If that’s the sort of example being held up to students at such institutions their degrees will ultimately be disrespected and distrusted.
Good riddance!
“The national spotlight now turns to MIT president Kornbluth”
I should think the spotlight will remain upon Harvard as they conduct a search for the next president…. will DEI triumph again?
I wager that it will be a white woman. Can anyone here offer betting odds for the race, gender, disability status of the next Prezz?
I agree, it will be a white woman with a p***s and a scree of peer-reviewed (viz log-rolled) incomprehensible Gender-Studies papers.
> much of the now ex-president’s scholarship was plagiarised.
And why was this not discovered earlier? Simply because most of this grievance ‘scholarship’ is never read. Having plagiarized dozens of people, it is rather obvious than none of those people read Gay’s ‘work’ so as to notice the plagiarism. Or if they did notice it they didn’t even care — the ‘Grievance Studies’ people protect each other, least the whole show be revealed to be the sham that it is.
It was obvious what a low calibre individual she is from the way she handled the testimony. The expectation that whatever she said would be accepted illustrates the strength of the echo chamber they’re all in. If that’s the best the far left have got and they have the influence they appear to then we’re screwed if we dont start making more noise.
Gay was hired without being properly qualified for the job. Her main qualifications seemingly consist of
1. being black; 2. being female; and 3. being the daughter of immigrants. In other words, she ticks all the important boxes of the current DEI ideology.
It’s a form of discrimination through low expectations; a practice which holds minorities to a lower standard, because we cannot expect them to perform at the same level. If I were black, I would be utterly appalled at being thought of as “less than” as—let’s put it bluntly—inferior and not as capable. I want to be evaluated and chosen for a position because the hiring team think that I am the best candidate, not because I fit some random criterion.
You know nothing about how or why Gay was hired.
The woke are in a death spiral. Across the world common sense, meritocracy and critical thinking skills are coming back. Finally.
This is highly amusing coming from the people who think that Donald Trump reflects those qualities!
Let me first join in and thank Christopher Brunet, Christopher Rufo and Elise Stefanik for their roles in bringing the inadequacy of Dr. Gay’s qualification into the sunlight, where they properly melted.
At least now DEI can be a topic of debate in academia and in business when race (and at times gender) is used as the primary criteria in selections. This should make for some interesting training sessions.
Then let DEI play out in the upcoming elections and force candidates to take a stand on its use and see how their voters react.
Gay may have had her flaws but the attacks on her from American far right have been a disgrace and driven purely by the bitterness of one rich man and the racist scum who he works with.
Bill Ackman has earned the scorn of the civilized world.
“Bill Ackman has earned the scorn of the civilised world.”
Oh, just give it up, you pathetic, little, deluded Socialist. Get out of your Woke bubble…
Something to ponder
Harvard Business Review Article December 1 2022 : Diversity and Inclusion: ‘The Failure of the DEI-Industrial Complex’ : Lily Zheng
“There’s a big, poorly kept secret in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) industry: the actual efficacy of an uncomfortably large proportion of our “flagship” services, talking points, and interventions — unconscious bias training, racial sensitivity workshops, the “business case for diversity,” resume anonymization, and the like — is lower than many practitioners make it out to be.”
Billionaire activist and Harvard donor Bill Ackman: “I learned from someone with first person knowledge of the Harvard president search that the committee would not consider a candidate who did not meet the DEI office’s criteria.”
While Mr. Brunet, in normal times, would be up for a Pulitzer Prize–along with the other investigators into Dr. Gay’s credentials–this one instance does not a change in direction make. I’m not holding my breath on the Pulitzer nominations either.
The entrenched hierarchy at Harvard, and most other institutions like it, is so vast as to ensure any losses to the truth will be replaced with clones who carry on this despicable work.
It’s going to take more than a few first tier university leaders resigning to get everyone to understand we have permitted ALL of our schools at every level to hijack education in pursuit of a fantasy revolution in the way our children obtain knowledge, and how they view their places in the world.
We’re well past mucking about with why we ended up here. It’s time for everyone, in every election down to the community level, to hold officials accountable, and create a sea change toward imbuing our children with genuine liberal democratic ideals.