Harvard President Steps Down Amid Allegations of Antisemitism and Plagiarism, University Faces Leadership Crisis
Why It Matters
I was watching NewsNation on Tuesday talk about resignation (more likely to be a firing) of Harvard University President, Claudine Gay.
Why do I say it was a “firing”? Because in her resignation letter, she says resigning was difficult beyond words, “But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”
Gay is the one who put those words in bold, not me.
Gay’s antisemitism was exposed during a December 6th congressional hearing when New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik asked her and two other university leaders, M.I.T. President Sally Kornbluth and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, if they thought the antisemitism on their campuses was acceptable. Stefanik asked the women (yes, all women) a yes/no question on whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” on campus violated the schools’ code of conduct.
The three university leaders all pretty much said it depended on the context (I’m sure they wouldn’t have answered the same way if white students in KKK hoods were calling for the genocide of Blacks). Or if Jewish students were calling for the genocide of Muslims.
Gay had said when answering Stefanik that it depended on the context, adding that when “speech crosses into conduct, that violates our policies.”
Gay’s response drew backlash from many including donors to the university. It also led to journalists scrutinizing her career and finding a plethora of plagiarism incidents. Harvard had defended Gay in the beginning of the controversy, saying they had been aware of plagiarism allegations against her back in October and after an independent review said it revealed “a few instances of inadequate citation.”
Inadequate citation? That’s malinformation for you.
Gay was only on the job a little more than six months and was hailed as the first black president of the university and the second woman leader there. Hiring her was “historic” said the New York Times and others. But don’t worry your pretty little head about her future because she’s not completely gone from the university. Harvard is keeping her on staff and she’s still earning her $900,000-a-year salary.
The spotlight on May after her defense of antisemitic students led to the conservative advocacy group The Washington Free Beacon to do a deep dive into Gay’s career. It didn’t take long for them to come up with a flood of plagiarism charges that appear to be legit including a 30-page complaint with over 50 allegations of plagiarism that was filed by the Free Beacon the day before Gay resigned.
For now, MIT President Sally Kornbluth is the last woman standing after the congressional hearing with University of Pennsylvania’s president, Magill, resigning just days after the congressional testimony. Gay makes number two.
So why does this matter? It’s an elitist Ivy League university where most of us didn’t go to school. And their world is far-removed from our mundane regular daily lives. NewsNation had asked the same question while I was watching their news coverage and the talking heads laughed as if to say that the goings-on at Harvard aren’t important to us little people.
But it IS important and it DOES matter.
It matters for several reasons. First, there appears to be an indoctrination of leftist attitudes at schools and universities, creating a disease inside of both the staff and students. This anti-American, anti- Constitution and anti-Israel disease is pretty prevalent in America as we have seen by the ignorant results of students marching in the streets supporting the terrorist groups Black Lives Matter and Hamas – and chanting the anti-Jewish chant “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”
It also matters because CONGRESS IS FULL OF ELITISTS and IVY-LEAGE idiots. Yes, the people running our country seem to be mostly attorneys – and many are from these crappy anti-American and anti-Israel universities – Harvard, Yale and all the rest.
A February 2023 Pew Research report shows that some universities are pretty well represented in Congress – with about three dozen members of the House that have at least one degree from Harvard University and 13% of the senators do as well. Other universities they attend and graduate from at a higher percentage rate include Yale University and Georgetown.
And these universities (and the Democrats in general) don’t seem to mind plagiarists at all as long as they are Democrat plagiarists. Our current president is a professional one and it didn’t stop him from becoming our Commander-in-Chief.
Now that Gay is gone, Rep. Stefanik is quite proud of taking out two of the three university presidents with her questions. “Two down,” she said on social media. And in a statement she released, Stefanik said, “I will always deliver results. Claudine Gay’s morally bankrupt answers to my questions made history as the most viewed congressional testimony in the history of the U.S. Congress.”
Stefanik added another little tidbit, saying, “This is just the beginning of what will be the greatest scandal of any college or university in history.” When doing an interview with Fox News, she promised an ongoing congressional investigation of the country’s universities that will uncover “institutional rot.”
That’s a rot that’s destroying not just the students of the country but the country itself.
Will Harvard and the other universities in the country change after being exposed and having their leftist ideology put on display? It’s doubtful. American billionaire, hedge fund manager and former Harvard donor Bill Ackman said on the social media platform X about Harvard, “I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge. I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the ‘canary in the coal mine’ – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus. I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.”
Ackman goes on to blame DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) for the problem that has “pervaded” the Harvard and the education system at large. He describes DEI as “not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.”
And the Democrat voters always seem to be the ones who are oppressed – according to the Democrats, of course.
Ackman continues to discuss the problems with DEI in the education system and the entire country – which completely explains the leftist media and their Democrat supporters, many of whom have come out and called Gay’s resignation “racist.”
No, it’s not about Gay’s horrible ideology or bad contact. It’s about being targeted because she’s Black. Novelist Celeste Ng summed it up on X by saying: “So what we’ve learned is this: Bad-faith bigots pretending they’re concerned about antisemitism will happily use women of colour – especially black women – as a scapegoat and lightning rod for large systemic issues. And that people invested in maintaining those systemic issues will comply.”
It’s just an excuse for bad behavior and incompetent people to be put in charge of things – and to be immune from criticism.
The Democrat Party doesn’t want equal opportunity, they want equal outcomes – no matter what. Or else. And as long as they are leading the universities and the country, there isn’t any actual competent leadership.
BY STEVE GRUBER
Originally posted on Steve Gruber.com ➜
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