When Liz Magill, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, was forced out after she hemmed and hawed during congressional testimony about antisemitism on her campus, the battle cry from critics was “one down, two to go.”
The point was that the other two presidents who gave muddled and evasive answers that day should also walk the plank.
But three weeks later, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of MIT have kept their jobs.
But in Gay’s case, not for long.
If my reading of the tea leaves is right, she is nearing the end of her brief and tumultuous tenure.
Her departure will come the moment Harvard’s governing board wakes up to the realization that protecting her at all costs is doing enormous damage to the university and its students.
Never in memory has the reputation of a top college fallen so far and so fast.
Donors, large and small, are abandoning Harvard in droves, and early admittance applications are down by 17%.
And that’s just the immediate reaction.
When it’s not being used as a punchline, Harvard is held up as an example of all that’s wrong with American higher education.
Gay and the board that hired her are both the cause and effect of that dramatic decline.
Her indifferent response to the Jew-hatred that erupted on campus following the Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel could have been grounds enough for dismissal.
But when that was followed by her legalistic congressional testimony and then the revelations showing she repeatedly plagiarized other researchers, there is no longer any doubt she has to go.
What’s the argument for keeping her?
She’s not fit for the job, and, as the world now knows, never was.
Moreover, The Post’s Saturday report showing that Harvard’s board covered up the plagiarism scandal and threatened the newspaper with defamation if it published what now stand as unchallenged facts implicates the entire board.
Clearly it, too, must hit the road.
Governing board’s blunder
Even before the final cleansing act takes place, however, the debacle offers a cautionary tale about the destructive power of slavish adherence to the progressive agenda.
Its immoral reduction of people to the color of their skin is racism, and inevitably deepens social divisions without offering any possible remedy other than opposition or surrender to a new kind of tyranny.
Gay, it is now certain, was hired largely because she is black, with part of the evidence being her small body of scholarship work, none of it distinguished.
Some educational experts have said her inconsequential production would rank her near the bottom of national peers.
But that was good enough for Harvard because she checked all the right diversity boxes.
Despite the scandalous plagiarism findings, the same people who picked her continue to protect her — and themselves.
Because they did such a shoddy job of vetting her, the board members are refusing to honestly evaluate her history and performance because it would make them look bad for hiring her in the first place.
They are willing to let the ship sink rather than throw her overboard.
As Jason Riley observed in The Wall Street Journal, the sequence shows a major downside of racial-preference policies.
“Once you lower standards for hiring administrators or admitting students, you are forced to lower standards for evaluating their conduct and performance,” he wrote.
It is, of course, an odd series of circumstances that has thrust Harvard into a test case for the way colleges operate.
Recall that before Gay took center stage, Harvard was rebuked by the Supreme Court for how it uses race in deciding which students to accept.
Its faculty and students have long been notoriously unrepresentative of America, and many are hostile to the nation’s values.
That reality led the late William F. Buckley to memorably declare, “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
Yet it is precisely because of Harvard’s unique stature atop the educational pyramid that the current situation has taken on a larger-than-life significance in the nation’s culture and political war.
Whether we like it or not, the fate of Gay and the board will tell us if the far-left’s agenda has reached its zenith or is impervious to failure.
The news that former President Barack Obama counseled Harvard’s governing board to keep Gay is not surprising.
That, too, is a reflection of the stakes as well as Obama’s agenda.
On the other hand, a friend notes that the mere fact that there is an open debate about the large role race played in Gay’s hiring is a major sign of progress.
For the most part, such conversations have been held quietly.
A campus of ‘tenured radicals’
Another indication of the stakes is the desperation with which some on the left are dealing with the plagiarism findings and calls for Gay’s resignation.
A Harvard Law School professor, Charles Fried, actually said the findings are “part of this extreme right-wing attack on elite institutions.”
A former Reagan administration official, Fried added that if the revelations “came from some other quarter, I might be granting it some credence. But not from these people.”
So facts are not facts unless they come from an approved source.
That’s quite a lesson, professor.
Sadly, his attitude perfectly captures the radical mindset that has polluted Harvard and many other institutions.
Professors, or “tenured radicals” in the immortal words of author Roger Kimball, have substituted their politics for facts, reasoning and analysis.
When nothing matters except which side you join, indoctrination has replaced education.
For the control of young minds to be complete, counterarguments and criticism of the ruling orthodoxy must be banished.
Hence the rise of cancel culture on campuses, where only politically approved speech is permitted.
The fact that so many young people claim to be traumatized or “triggered” by the prospect of having to hear something they disagree with reflects a generational brainwashing that comes with serious social consequences.
The rise of antisemitism on campuses and the double standard imposed on Israel by faculty and students is one such result.
Worse, the inability of so many young people to see a difference between the Hamas terrorists’ slaughter of civilians and Israel’s right to defend itself demonstrates something more profound than a mere misunderstanding of facts.
It shows that the curriculums on many colleges don’t include a moral compass.
When did teaching right from wrong become prohibited?
Like Harvard and the other Ivies, many colleges nowadays justify their outrageous tuitions by boasting that they are training America’s future leaders.
Heaven help us.
Too many of those leaders already are taking America backwards and another generation or two could be more than the nation can bear.
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