Re: CLAUDINE GAY RESIGNATION

I’ve heard enough misplaced liberal media outrage over the resignation of Claudine Gay as President of Harvard University.

On December 5, 2023, when Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked her if calling for the genocide of Jews could violate Harvard’s code of conduct, Dr. Gay replied, “It depends on the context.”

Dr. Gay and her counterpart at University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth Magill, both equivocated about the anti-Jewish hate speech on their respective Ivy campuses.

Pressed by UPenn, Dr. Magill promptly resigned. Supported by powerful Harvard constituents, Dr. Gay clung to her position.

It could be argued that Claudine Gay’s resignation was not unjust but long overdue.

That a coalition of conservative provocateurs, an irate billionaire donor, and the ADL was required to topple Dr. Gay is unfortunate. Some of these detractors had their own irrelevant agendas, which have superseded Dr. Gay’s role in her own downfall.

That Harvard viewed Dr. Gay’s mild version of plagiarism, a failure to insert quotation marks in her work, as more egregious than her inability to address and quell anti-Semitic behavior in Harvard Yard, and her demonstration of moral ambiguity toward anti-Semitic behavior at Harvard before a Congressional committee, is even more regrettable.

As a child growing up in a Jewish household, I never heard racial or ethnic slurs. More than that, I was taught that speech used to hurt or denigrate other people was abhorrent. Clearly, Dr. Gay did not learn the same moral imperative against all bigotry. In her sophisticated and sophistic relativism, anti-Semitic speech is only repugnant in certain contexts, but acceptable in others.

Claudine Gay’s evasive defense of anti-Semitic speech on Harvard’s campus has put a red letter “P” for prejudice on America’s oldest university. No one should waste their tears about her fall; they should save their sympathy for Harvard’s Jewish students, who worked so hard to get admitted to Harvard, in the belief that they would study at one of the world’s venerated institutions of higher learning, only to find out that they were part of a re-enactment of 1933 Nuremberg.