Claudine Gay is gone - but Harvard’s radical clerisy remain

In the end, Barack Obama, Penny Pritzker, 700-some members of the faculty, the mighty voice of the Harvard Crimson and the entire nomenclature of the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion movement could not save her from herself. Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University after a month of relentless criticism.

In principle, her feckless performance on 5 December before the House of Representatives’ committee on education and the workforce should have been sufficient to persuade Harvard’s board (which aristocratically calls itself the Harvard Corporation) to cut her loose. But it took wave after wave of revelations about alleged Gay’s plagiarism to break the hauteur of Ms. Pritzker and the ten other members of that Corporation. Pritzker, who served in the Obama administration and remains close to the former president, was said to be Gay’s staunchest supporter. And Obama, it has been said, strongly urged her to stay the course.