I didn’t think I’d do a piece on l’affaire Claudine Gay, but I’ve decided it’s too important to ignore. I think that because it may just turn out to be a milestone on the road to the destruction of the lunacy that is progressive wokeism. That ideology has come in for special scrutiny of late due to the Israel/Hamas war that spawned the sorry spectacle of three university presidents mumbling vagaries before a congressional committee that in turn led to Gay’s unmasking as a not-even-mediocre academic and serial plagiarist. And of course her resignation as president has, as night follows day, produced cries of “racism!” among the usual suspects. All of that so blatantly condemns campus wokeness and those whose vocabulary consists of that one, once-magic word, it’ll be hard for them to completely recover, at least I hope so.
Let’s be clear; Claudine Gay was probably appointed to be Harvard’s president because she’s a black woman, not because of her academic credentials which are few and lightweight. I’m no authority on her “scholarship,” but I’d bet money that there are hundreds of assistant professors around the country and world whose work far outshines hers. And that likely would be true even if Gay’s work weren’t riddled with plagiarism. Many of those ivory tower toilers would probably love a job at Harvard.
Frankly, she looks like a shining example of affirmative action, start to finish. My guess is that, without it, she’d never have been hired by Harvard in the first place. And, with her track record of lying in print, of claiming authorship of work done by others, she should have been removed from the presidency and fired from the faculty. As many have noted, any freshman would have been kicked out of school for committing a fraction of Gay’s academic wrongdoing. But not her. No, she glides seamlessly back to her $900,000/year professorship.
But the usual grievance committee members are now crying their usual – “racism!” At the Times, it’s Charles Blow and of course Ibram X. Kendi (“racist mob”), Cornell West (her resignation is like the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians) and Al Sharpton (“scapegoat”) will shout at anyone within earshot. In the process, they demonstrate too obviously not to notice just how bankrupt their ideas are. These people just aren’t interesting.
To the less doctrinaire among us, what’s plain to see is that Liz Magill, a white woman, was forced out of the presidency of Penn a matter of a few days following her disgraceful performance before Congress. No one has yet claimed, much less produced evidence to prove, that Magill has plagiarized her academic work, but she got the axe anyway. So how do the race Blow-viators figure that Gay was targeted because she’s black? They do for a single reason – it’s what they do. They’re a one-string fiddle playing the same note again and again and again. Face it, they have nothing else to say.
For that matter, how do they explain the fact that Harvard went to considerable lengths to protect Gay from scrutiny, including falsely claiming that her plagiarism consisted of only four or five minor oversights, and threatening the New York Post with civil litigation (over what?) if its reporters continued their inquiry?
How do they explain her retention of her very privileged and cushy job despite her (a) plagiarism (b) unfamiliarity with the Harvard code of conduct and (c) apparent lack of qualifications to be hired in the first place? Millions of Americans, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, etc., would love to be in Gay’s shoes, but the woke shouters neither know nor care.
Of course they don’t. They don’t because they can’t; good sense just isn’t part of their narrative, but a $900k/year victim is a prize.
But what’s becoming more and more a problem for them is the fact that the word “racism!” repeated ad nauseum in response to every issue has lost both its meaning and its punch. With facts as obvious as these, only the truest of true woke believers are buying their snake oil.
Claudine Gay is now and will continue to be the poster child for everything wrong with academia in the U.S. where merit, basic honesty, respect for the truth and open discourse, reliance on facts and reason are considered a white plot against POCs, where scrupulous debate has been replaced by name-calling, where the highest achievement isn’t the Nobel Prize, but First Place in the Victimization Sweepstakes. At Harvard, telling the truth (Larry Summers, Carole Hooven) gets you fired, while lying buys you support verging on reverence.
People are beginning to notice. Major donors have finally seen what they should have decades ago – that their money was supporting the least academically-sound “scholarship” imaginable, that college campuses have become among the most hateful and conformist places in the country, that affirmative action degrades both institutions and the students in attendance, that a college degree risks becoming a joke. As Chris Rufo, the driving wheel behind the outing of Gay’s plagiarism, said, “The funniest outcome of the Claudine Gay saga is all of the academics coming out in defense of plagiarism and all of the journalists coming out against journalism.”
Bingo. As long as these people could maintain a façade of seriousness, there was a chance we’d listen to them. But, a bit like the Wizard of Oz, when they show themselves to be buffoons, unserious, unsmart, and with no legitimate hold on our respect or attention, we sweep them toward the dustbin of history where they belong.
May it continue.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
