Why Harvard Shouldn't Fire Claudine Gay
We should be sophisticated enough to recognize a political hit job when we see one.
I have what you would call a pretty long-standing and foolproof method of choosing the right side of a particular political or cultural issue. The rule is this: If Christopher F. Rufo supports it, I support the exact opposite.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Rufo isn’t just a conservative operative, pushing a conservative agenda. That’s something you would expect from any conservative: from William F. Buckley to Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh. What distinguishes Rufo is his blatantly open (at times even celebrated) willful dishonesty and deliberately misleading tactics to smear progressive ideas and policy prescriptions.
His rank dishonesty can be traced back during the racial reckoning of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. A legal set of precepts most commonly taught in the theoretical classrooms of law schools, known as Critical Race Theory, became a household phrase in no small part because of Rufo and his cohorts. At the center of Critical Race Theory is the presupposition that our legal system has both directly and indirectly impacted blacks and other racial minorities in a negative way. To be fair, many activists in 2020 learned the foundations of CRT and used it to connect other dots at various intersections: policing, workforce relations, standardized testing, real estate, etc. But CRT always was and remains a theory used to analyze the social impact of laws on marginalized communities.
However, Rufo and his ilk saw an opportunity to use CRT as a quick label to smear anything in the progressive movement that they didn’t like: Black Lives Matter, The 1619 Project, discussions around reparations, movements to remove offensive and intimidating Confederates statues, and any an all discussion of our racial history of injustice in the public school systems. It all went into the bucket of “Critical Race Theory,” and its actual scholars and practitioners at the collegiate level were made out as bogeymen, indoctrinating our children to “hate America,” “see all conflict through the lens of social power,” and “seek to dismantle all of America’s institutions, cultural and political infrastructure.”
His most famous Tweet about this came in March of 2021.
“We have successfully frozen their brand—‘Critical Race Theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category. The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘Critical Race Theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Nothing in this Tweet addresses whether or not his “definition” of CRT is accurate or truthful. Here he is, in black and white, admitting that he deliberately muddied the waters of CRT so that the average American can be misinformed about its features and purposes, to score political advantage in the culture war. Accuracy or honesty didn’t factor into the picture.
And now he wants to pretend that he gives a hoot about accuracy and honesty?
His newest bogeyman is Dr. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University. Dr. Gay came under fire from most conservatives in America after her appearance before the House Education and Workforce Committee, which is currently a Republican-controlled committee holding hearings to essentially address the “campus craziness” panic.
Dr. Gay appeared before the panel along with the presidents of M.I.T and the University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth and Liz McGill, respectively. Gay, McGill and Kornbluth were eviscerated by the national media for refusing to provide a Yes or No answer to what is not a Yes or No question, despite the questioner, Elise Stefanik’s assertion that it was.
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [the university's] rules regarding bullying and harassment? Yes or No?” she repeatedly grilled all three academics.
It’s not a yes or no question because there are so many variables to consider. Stefanik offered nothing specific about what “calling for genocide” looked like on any college campus. And as we’ve all seen in recent years, motivated activists can take any comment and turn it into racism, sexism, ableism, islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and yes, even antisemitism. The fact that Gay, McGill and Kornbluth couldn’t provide a definitive answer on the question shows at least a desire on their part to recognize that there are nuances to speech that should be protected on college campuses. Not to mention the fact that in most cases “harassment” is specifically pointed at an individual who is made to feel targeted. A crowd of pro-Palestinian activists chanting “From the river to the sea!” does not directly target anyone and has been contested in many circles as to its intent. Is this what Stefanik meant by “calling for genocide of Jews?” We don’t know. She never offered specific instances even in the hypothetical. Instead she insisted on the answer being yes or no, and harangued all three presidents whenever they attempted to parse out the question.
As for her call for all three to resign, McGill tendered her resignation shortly after the hearing. Dr. Gay, at the time of this publication, is holding strong against a rising tide. Op-Eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post have called for her ouster.
Leading the charge for her to resign is (surprise, surprise) Christopher Rufo, who has been gunning for Dr. Gay since before her December 5 Congressional appearance. Rufo has been on a campaign to prove that Dr. Gay has plagiarized several of her academic papers and therefore is not fit to lead Harvard because of this academic dishonesty. Again, Chris Rufo, who is hailed as a public relations genius because of his dishonesty, is insisting that academic dishonesty is just beyond the pale. Rufo, by the way, also sits on the board of trustees for New College of Florida, a small liberal-arts college that Rufo deliberately targeted for takeover because of its majority progressive staff and student body. In his role as trustee, Rufo already has shut down a handful of student majors, closed its diversity office and basically pushed faculty members to tender their resignation because of their staunch left political stances. Basically, he created a hostile work environment within weeks of taking the job as trustee, and then went on Gad Saad’s podcast to brag about it.
Is that harassment, Chis? Yes or no?
Rufo isn’t the only operative circling around Dr. Gay to get her job. One of Dr. Gay’s plagiarism “victims” is Carol Swain, who FoxNews was all too glad to interview. Swain clutched her pearls and asserted that Dr. Gay is unfit to be president of Harvard and should resign. Little mention from FoxNews, however, is that Swain is a conservative operative like Rufo. She’s been outspoken against the BLM movement, reparations, and has called on the media to focus its coverage of black-on-white crime. She’s not a grieved victim of someone’s academic dishonesty; she’s feigning grievance to see Dr. Gay removed from her position, presumably, so a conservative or libertarian president can take her place.
Does any of this mean that Claudine Gay is innocent? Does any of this imply that Dr. Gay didn’t commit academic dishonesty? Of course not. And under most circumstances I would never stick my neck out to protect a prominent leader of a prominent, elite university who committed academic dishonesty. Of course a university president should set an example when it comes to rigorous scholarship. If this was any other college president, and this information became public under any other circumstances I would have no objection to calling for their firing.
But these aren’t the circumstances. Dr. Gay (in fact Harvard University in general!) is under siege by dishonest political operatives who are using the plagiarism cases as pretext to overturn the apple cart and maybe even take control of the campus culture, similar to what Rufo did at New College of Florida. That’s his endgame, and we shouldn’t endorse it.
Dr. Gad Saad often talks about deontological principles: the ethical theory that a person should err on the side of what is morally right no matter the consequences. Free speech is a deontological principle that should be adhered to even if the speech can be used abusively or if the speech can lead to physical violence. No doubt Dr. Saad believes the deontological principle at play in this case is that we should not commit academic dishonesty and university leaders should be above reproach in that regard. But I would submit we should adhere to a different deontological principle at play: We should not allow dishonest activists to play gotcha against a perceived political enemy regardless of that enemy’s admitted misgivings.
This is the deontological stance I take against the College of Psychologists Ontario (CPO), who are currently trying to revoke Jordan Peterson’s license to practice therapy. (To read my thoughts on this, click here.) They want to insist that Peterson is “merely” being investigated because he violated the governing body’s code of conduct on social media. But we all know what they are doing. Playing gotcha against a perceived political enemy.
Christopher Rufo doesn’t care a flying fig about academic honesty. Neither did Bill O’Reilly in 2005, when he successfully spearheaded the removal of Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado, Boulder professor who said some rather nasty things about the victims of September 11. O’Reilly first went after Churchill’s self-proclaimed identity as an American Indian, and when that failed, he dug up instances of academic dishonesty in his previous publications. Churchill was fired in 2007.
This is just more of the same. In Peterson’s case it’s a matter of left-wing operatives going after who they perceive as a right-wing provocateur. In Ward Churchill’s case, a right-wing operative took out a left-wing college professor. And with Claudine Gay, a right-wing agitator is seeking to find a way to topple institutions like Harvard because he perceives they are indoctrinating young people into left-wing ideologies. I’m sticking to my deontological principles here and calling this what it is: a political hit job. Good on Harvard (so far) for not giving into it.