Claudine Gay has exposed the rot at the heart of the woke establishment

Jan 4, 2024 by Jill

by Douglas Murray, Telegraph:

The former Harvard president failed to stand up against racism. The BBC and the Left are bizarrely treating her as the victim.

Last month’s Congressional hearings on anti-Semitism on US campuses will go down as one of the biggest disasters in modern academic history. The presidents of three major US universities all proved unable to answer the question of whether calling for the genocide of Jews would be considered beyond the pale on their campuses. The president of the University of Pennsylvania – Liz Magill – managed to ride out the backlash for a few days. Harvard’s president held on rather longer. But this week she, too, finally resigned.

Claudine Gay might have weathered the storm because she had the protective cover of being Harvard’s first black female president, and in an age of identity politics that puts her very close to the top of the oppression Olympics that now dominate everything in American public life. You can be rich, privileged and the president of Harvard. But it transpires that you can still claim to be a victim if you are Claudine Gay.

That is what she tried to claim in her resignation statement on Tuesday. She said that there had been “racial animus” in the attacks on her. In fact, the attacks started because of her glaring inability to stand up to racism, followed by allegations that Gay’s distinctly meagre academic work, included a significant amount of plagiarism. The plagiarism story had been around for a while, but after her Congressional embarrassment, a larger number of people – including Leftist media – started to look into these serious allegations.

At first, Harvard tried to ignore them. Its board embarrassed itself by repeatedly expressing its full support for her. Ordinarily, basic academic failings like seeming to lift whole chunks of work – including acknowledgements – from the works of others would have seen a student censured. But not the Harvard president, apparently.

Finally it became too much. Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday could have confessed to her failings and apologised. But it did no such thing. She went out the same way she had got in: on a blizzard of victimhood.

Read here (£)

Read also: “I Came, I Saw, I Copied”: Why DEI Must DIE by Konstantin Kisin

The fall of Claudine Gay is a blow to the cult of DEI by Jenny Holland, spiked