Racism and the Harvard Resignation
An Issue Demanding Consideration in "Context"
Apologists for Claudine Gay, the recently resigned president of Harvard University, have developed the destructive habit of portraying her as a blameless victim of racism. According to their logic, if Dr. Gay had been a white woman of privilege, rather than the Black daughter of Haitian immigrants, she never would have faced intense public pressure to step down.
As it happens, the situation that triggered her departure offers a foolproof means for the honest evaluation of these charges and for testing the potential role of racism. To use one of Dr. Gay’s favorite words, frequently deployed during her recent (and disastrous) Congressional testimony, the circumstances of her resignation offer valuable and definitive “context” for understanding the current confusion at some of the nation’s most prestigious educational institutions.
When the House Education and Workforce Committee convened hearings in early December to investigate the upsurge in campus antisemitism, three university presidents appeared before them – Dr. Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Sally Kornbluth of MIT.
Though each of them drew scathing criticism for their shared reluctance to characterize calls for genocide of the Jewish people as a form of unacceptable bullying or harassment, only one of them – Dr. Liz Magill of Penn – found herself dumped from her job within days. Ironically, the first victim of the public outcry against the panel turned out to be the one member of the trio with no personal claim as a persecuted minority. Dr. Magill, who resigned on December 9, is the daughter of a respected judge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and her brother is a District Judge in Minnesota. Dr. Kornbluth of MIT identifies as Jewish, making her less vulnerable than the others to condemnations for antisemitism. But if any one of the three university presidents had benefited from “white privilege” in this episode, then Liz Magill would have been the last of them to receive serious blowback for her performance, not the first.
In fact, Magill found herself forced from her post more than three weeks before the exit of Claudine Gay, without any charges of plagiarism to compound her problems on the issue of confronting antisemitism. If race, rather than incompetence and poor judgment, were the major factor in Gay’s career-crash, how could her defenders possibly explain the dramatically harsher treatment received by her incontestably white colleague—a blonde, with an elite judicial background, no less?
The outcome at Harvard doesn’t suggest that Claudine Gay received uniquely hostile, discriminatory treatment because of her race but rather that she received greater sympathy, support and indulgence because of it, especially in comparison with her white, non-Jewish colleague. One need not reach the conclusion that “Gay got her job because of her race,” as the writer Heather Mac
Donald recently proclaimed in a column and on my radio show. But the opposite extreme, claiming that she lost her job because of her race, makes no sense at all when considered in the sober, realistic context that this explosive issue requires.