News of Harvard President Claudine Gay’s resignation on Tuesday prompted understandable celebration on the right and much-deserved praise for journalists Christopher Rufo, Christopher Brunet, and Aaron Sibarium, who exposed Gay as a serial plagiarist.
No doubt, celebration is in order. Gay was of course not only a plagiarist but a Hamas apologist who shrugged off rampant antisemitism on Harvard’s campus in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli civilians. In a shocking congressional hearing last month about the spread of antisemitism on college campuses, Gay, along with MIT President Sally Kornbluth and former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill (who was forced to resign shortly after the hearing), insisted that calling for the genocide of Jews doesn’t necessarily constitute harassment, and instead depends on the “context.”
So, yes, Gay is a toxic, racist, left-wing ideologue who was deservedly hounded out of her post as Harvard president. But let’s be sober about what’s happened here and what hasn’t. Gay’s resignation is a scalp, but it’s not quite the victory some on the right seem to think it is.
For one thing, Gay was forced out not for the appalling moral insanity she displayed before Congress about antisemitism on campus, but because that notoriety exposed her academic work to closer scrutiny — and it turns out she’s an academic fraud.
In her resignation letter, however, Gay admitted no wrongdoing and instead blamed her ouster on “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” What’s more, she appears to have resigned as president
