Harvard’s Claudine Gay isn’t a victim of racism

A month ago, Claudine Gay of Harvard University was obsessed with putting things into context. Asked at that now infamous Congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism whether calling for a genocide of the Jews is a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct, Gay said it would depend on the context. Her remarks raised eyebrows worldwide. The idea that there are some contexts in which it might not be a violation of Harvard’s code of conduct to say ‘Kill all Jews’ made many wonder what the hell is going on at that university.

Fast forward four weeks and now Gay seems content to do away with context completely. Consider her resignation letter following Harvard’s belated decision to give her the heave-ho. Gay said it is regrettable she has been subjected to so many attacks ‘fuelled by racial animus’. The BBC likewise ran with this sad tale about Gay being hounded from Harvard by bigots. She is a ‘casualty of [the] campus culture wars’, it cried.

I hate to be that guy, but it strikes me that there’s a lot of missing context here. It wasn’t the mythical racist mob that ended Gay’s tenure as president of Harvard: it was her own apparent academic and moral failings. She has been accused of academia’s cardinal sin – plagiarism. Beady-eyed reporters have uncovered numerous instances in which Gay appears to have cribbed lines from other writers. Having an alleged plagiarist in charge of a university is like having a burglar at the helm of the Metropolitan Police. She had to go.

Then there was her stark failure of moral leadership at the Congressional hearing in December. How must Harvard’s Jewish students have felt when they heard their president say that agitating for the death of every Jew on Earth is not necessarily an act of bullying? I’m not sure I would want to study under someone who is uncertain about whether calls for another Holocaust are a breach of Harvard’s code of conduct.

Most popular

Katy Balls

How much trouble is Rachel Reeves in?

Some say Gay was only defending free speech. Come off it. Harvard under Gay was a hotbed of PC censorship. In fact it came last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual free-speech rankings. It was marked as ‘abysmal’.

What horrified many about that Congressional hearing – which also featured Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (who also resigned) and Sally Kornbluth of MIT – was the staggering double standards of the American academy. We all know you can be cancelled for the merest thoughtcrime on these campuses that are overrun by rich kids possessed of the thinnest of skins.

Diss BLM, wear an ‘offensive’ Halloween costume, give voice to the gender-critical heresy, and you’ll be rounded on savagely by the blue-haired protectors of contemporary orthodoxy, often with the blind-eye connivance of the university administration itself. That it’s risky on the 21st-century campus to say ‘trans women are men’ but seemingly okay – in certain contexts – to say ‘exterminate the Jews’ feels alarming. Biological facts are out, biological racism is in.

So again, Gay had to go. She presided over a moral wasteland of a university where some have more free speech than others. Where the only ‘context’ that really mattered was whether your views correspond to the groupthink of the new elites. If they do, you’re fine; if they don’t, watch out. That isn’t academic freedom – it’s a system of hyper-politicised patronage in which moral conformism is rewarded and critical thinking is punished. And in which the Jews, as is so often the case in liberal circles these days, come off worst.

And yet now Gay’s fall is depicted as the handiwork of racist lowlifes. Apparently she’s the real victim, not Harvard’s Jews. ‘Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence’, thunders African-American writer Ibram X Kendi.

Stop it. It isn’t racist to judge a woman of colour by the same standards by which we judge everyone else – it’s equality. In fact it would have been racist if Gay had managed to stay on as president despite the allegations of plagiarism and her very public failings on anti-Semitism, because Harvard would clearly be keeping her because she’s a black woman. There is more racial paternalism in the flattery of Gay despite her shortcomings than there is in the demand that she be held to account the same as everyone else.

I get the feeling that ‘the race card’ isn’t working anymore. Many can see through the thin claim that Gay is a ‘casualty’ of racism. Is this a turning point? Perhaps 2024 will be the year when weaponising accusations of racism to defend yourself from criticism just won’t cut it anymore.